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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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I don't feel like I have a good enough baseline intuition about how dangerous bears are to answer with confidence. How likely is the average bear to attack you? Is it possible to outrun a bear? This is far outside my domain of expertise.

If you found yourself in the same, say, square kilometer as a bear, it is extremely unlikely to attack you. But you are also unlikely to see the bear; it will very much want to avoid you as much as he/she can. If the terrain is open maybe you'll see it at a distance, it's not likely to care unless you get close. But if you do find yourself face-to-face with the bear, the probabilities of attack are very different to the baseline. You might have wandered in proximity to its cubs. The bear might be habituated to human presence, associating them with food. The bear might be starving. These are all bad things.

A human is not gonna outrun a bear. Especially not in uneven terrain and in the forest. You can't climb a tree to evade it. And it has excellent sense of smell so you're unlikely to be able to hide from it.