Totally Human Emdash User

The thought experiment already has a random element in it because the risk depends on exactly which man or bear you ran into in the woods, so it is intrinsically statistical. Thus, I am not fundamentally changing the nature of the thought experiment, only extending the distribution of bears to include polar bears.

This is, again, necessary to account for the fact that soon our forests will be invaded by polar bears due to the scourge of global warming. 🙁 Worse, although they rarely attack people now, the times when they do so are usually when they are nutritionally stressed, and that is likely to be increasingly the case as they migrate south in desperation.

I want to believe!

My point is that global warming is going to drive them down south, and I don’t think that any of us are prepared for this.

I for one am trying to do my part by correcting one thought experiment at a time!

All I am saying is that if polar bears were wandering around the forests then people might have responded differently.

But having said that, arguably the thought experiment is not meant to be taken too literally in the first place. It is really more like meme mean to be shared and responded to than a serious scientific assessment of the actual risk involved in running across a man versus a bear, especially since the risk posed by the bear depends on the region and what species live there.

But of course, all of this is besides the point, because what is important about the thought experiment is not that so many women choose the bear by that it expresses a collective sentiment of general severe distrust towards men, which came about because enough men have regularly abused their position of strength and power—which, unlike assessments of the relative risk of men versus bears, is definitely backed up by statistics—to impose themselves physically on women, and this is a big societal problem regardless of whether it actually literally makes more sense to prefer running into a bear over a man in the woods.

And just to be clear, I am not criticizing the thought experiment so much as that I love the image of polar bears wandering around in the woods.

It’s a stupid thought experiment, though, because I think that woman who chose the bear have not seriously considered the possibility that it might be a polar bear!

(Like, if it’s a regular bear then you are probably fine, but you have to think about the worst case scenario here!)