domain:felipec.substack.com
There is a recent trend on TikTok and social media where people are asked if they would rather be stuck in a forest with a bear or a man. Surprisingly, (or perhaps unsurprisingly to some of you), many people, especially women, are saying they would rather be stuck with a bear than a man. When men are asked this question and the script is flipped to "would you rather your daughter be stuck in a forest with a bear or a man", a lot of men seem to respond with bear rather than a man as well.
Here is a link to a Today.com article about this topic: https://www.today.com/news/bear-or-man-woods-tiktok-trend-rcna149611
It has a live poll, and at the moment the split is 28% with a man, 65% with a bear, and 7% in between.
That's 68% of respondents that would be more comfortable being stuck with a bear than a man. 68%! Unfortunately, there is no breakdown of who the respondents are, the best I could do is look at the average demographics for people who go to Today.com, which is 61.39% female and 38.61% male. Assuming the readers of this article has a similar demographic breakdown as the average person going to the website, and that all female readers chose a bear, that means that a solid chunk of men also are more comfortable being stuck with a bear than another man in the forest.
I found another poll on a women's forum asking the same question - the split there is 15% male, 85% bear at the moment.
So all the evidence seems to point that your average woman would rather be stuck with a bear than a man.
Here are some general arguments for why women are choosing bear over men, trying to not strawman to the best of my ability:
- If a bear attacks you, people will believe you, if a man attacks you, people will not believe you.
- Many women get attacked/assaulted by men every year, bear attacks on humans are extremely rare.
- You don't know if the man will attack you or not, but a bear is predictable.
- Men are scary.
- Bears might not attack you. Bears are more afraid of you than you are of them!
- Men have said negative things to me or about me. A bear won't do that.
The way news and social media are spinning this is that this reveals just how dangerous the world is for women, that women live their day-to-day lives in constant fear of the men around them because of how dangerous the world is to them. Frankly, I cannot relate to this view, perhaps because I am a man, but I also think this view can only develop when society, social media, entertainment, and the news are constantly bombarding you with all these negative notions about men. Your average woman is safer, far more liberated, has more rights, and meets more people than at any point in history (and especially compared to the entire scope of human history), and yet fear and hatred of men are more prevalent than ever before.
If anything, what this question reveals is just how warped women's views of men are and how negatively men are depicted in society.
It also reveals how people poorly use statistics to rationalize their stances. They will look at the raw number of bear attacks to the number of assaults/rape/sexual on women and then assume the two can be directly compared without any adjustment. Oh, only 1 person dies to a black bear each year in the US but but 5000 women are murdered each year, that means I'm 5000 times more likely to be killed if I were in a forest with a man than with a bear. Nearly everyone encounters at least several if not hundreds of men per day, and most people won't even encounter a bear in their lifetime. If women encountered the same number of bears as the same number of random men they encountered in their day-to-day lives, those numbers would be very different.
In reality, women encounter hundreds of men every day and not a single one of them rapes or assaults them. I'm not saying their fears have no basis in reality, or that they don't take actions that increase their safety, but do they have any idea what percentage of men would actually attack them?
The average man is far more likely to be of help if you're stuck in a forest because they would likely help you get out of the forest. No doubt women have received plenty of help for free throughout their lives on the basis of being a woman, and yet they still fear the idea of a man more than a bear. I'm going to try to put some estimates on the likely outcome for each scenario:
- Man helps you: 50% | Bear helps you 0%
- Man attacks/rapes/assaults you: 0.1 - 5% | Bear attacks you: 25%
- If the man chooses to assault you, you die: 10-50% | If the bear chooses to assault you, you die: 95%
You may disagree on the percentage, but even if you were extremely generous to both ends for the other perspective it would be extremely difficult to justify the percent chance of the negative outcome being better for the bear instead of the man. So in all situations, you are far more likely to get a better result with a man than a bear.
It would be interesting to see how people would respond if you asked them would you rather be stuck in a forest with a bear or a black man. Would the fear of being thought of as a racist overcome the fear of men?
Folamh3
36m ago
I saw a woman explaining why she chose bear over man, and almost all of her answers were variants on "bears can't speak, men can" (e.g. no bear ever catcalled me, no bear ever accused me of being a lesbian because I didn't want to have sex with him, no Vietcong ever called me a nigger etc.).
In case anyone is reading this far down. You said: "SGOV dividends are largely federal tax exempt since it's 90%+ treasuries."
Now you posted a link that said the opposite.
I'll concede that states might not tax the dividends of SGOV. CA appears not to. https://old.reddit.com/r/tax/comments/1194lbk/treatment_of_treasury_income_in_etf_for_state/
Other states might. ChatGPT-4 thinks they do, but could be hallucinating.
In any case, in order of tax advantage, for high earnings, it's pretty clearly:
BOXX > SGOV > Bank interest
ChestertonsMeme
14m ago
I doubt most respondents are taking the question at face value. Social desirability bias is very strong, especially when the question is just hypothetical. Put the respondents in a real situation and they will choose very differently.
Tenaz
2m ago
Framing the man and bear as "strange" unfairly slants the question. A strange bear is perhaps slightly more likely to attack you, while a strange man is much more likely to attack you. A typical bear has a good chance of attacking you and a typical man does not.
gattsuru
4m ago
I'm not sure whether it's better to respond with a furry fandom joke, a Baldur's Gate joke, or with a Vintage Story joke.
Namely I thought it was a little weird how focused Hanania was on making sure workplaces be more conducive to finding sexual partners...
While I expect the answer for Hanania specifically is that he's reaching for whatever weapons are available, there are some very serious problems, here:
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Full-time workers are spending about a third of their waking lives at their workplaces, a sizable portion of their Dunbar-sphere will be made of coworkers, and under current law employers can be liable even for after-hours and off-campus behavior by employees. In many career fields, it's common to spend months with little chance for a social life outside of the office at all. Maybe the 20% of couples just meet up right outside of work, but I'd expect that we're not so lucky, and at least some aren't getting BATNAs.
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Worse, the modern rule isn't just 'don't fuck your employees/coworkers', but against wide breadths of discussion and behavior adjacent to sex or gender stuff. Enforcement is hilariously inconsistent even in places where employers care (and the number of bullshit lawsuits are Known enough that normal people are often hesitant to bring genuine ones), so people can act as though a lot of this stuff is still allowed, but once you get above a certain size of company you start getting insurers/lawyers/politicians peering in and insisting that your workplace complies so that enforcement Won't Be Necessary. As a result, a lot of spaces for vertical transmission of knowledge about matters of sex and romance no longer exist, or have been thoroughly commandeered into a state-favored presentation.
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Avoiding the appearance -- or possibility -- of impropriety has serious and significant costs. I'm not sure how much I trust the specific numbers for 'MeToo made men afraid to mentor women', but the end result of that policy ends up meaning I've got a Fun Ethics Question when my workplace has me share a hotel room with a (afaik straight, not my type) guy. This isn't taking all the fun out of workplace socialization, but it's a big and vast set of constraints, often ones heavily dependent on local social norms.
The end result of a sexless public space for men... well, we have examples from other spheres that had to move sex to fully private spaces, and the alternatives that they've developed kinda work, but they come at tremendous cost. Online dating started out rough, and it's since vanished up its own backside in a mix of borderline fraud and unrealistic standards. Bars and mixers have come coincidentally along with a hefty incidence of alcoholism and other abuses.
For Scott:
When I think of wokeness, I think of the great cultural turn around 2010 - 2015... Hanania has no explanation for this. He talks about civil rights laws that have been in place since 1964 (he does say that maybe the new civil rights bill signed in 1991 inspired that decade’s interest in “political correctness”, but The Closing Of The American Mind, generally considered the opening shot in that debate, was published in 1987). Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015? Hanania has no answer.
Again, Hanania might not have an answer because he doesn't care enough to think one necessary, but there's a pretty easy and obvious one.
The Civil Rights Act was intended as written under a hilariously narrow scope for all of its wide claims. That lead to hard cases, and even as late at the 1980s the courts were struggling with matters like whether it was discriminatory if an employer (allegedly) raped an employee, and into the late-90s if it would be discriminatory even if the victim was male. There weren't just hard cases in that they involved sympathetic victims and extremely bad behavior, or even whether they could be arguably within the intent or text of the Civil Rights Act, but because they were also near-universally around things that were separately violations of common state laws that had existed for quite some time, at a time where and when the public was unwilling to allow businesses to wash hands of bad acts by their employees. Government advocates and private lawyers had a pick of both clear violations of the text of this law, or arguable cases for this law that shocked the conscience.
((Scalia delivered Oncale, for example.))
But to do so, the CRA1964 had to establish an industry around fighting racism. The EEOC isn't not five commissioners at a table; it had around 350 employees in the 1960s, which grew into the thousands by the late 1990s. Nor was it alone; other offices downstream of or expanded by the CRA include the Commission on Civil Rights, the (various) Office for Civil Rights, the Office for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, DOE Civil Rights Division, so on. And then around that, built up an industry around selecting and prosecuting private lawsuits, and training people to do this, and training people to train. Now, when the law and interpretation was constrained, and overt discrimination (or bad-for-other-reasons-argued-as-discrimination) cases had the pick of both plaintiff and employer, most cases kept close to the core.
That changed. Some legislation made it easier (eg, the 1991 revision allowed some vaguely-defined set of suits with a theory of discrimination that could not identify specifically discriminatory policies or actions, or to get attorney's fees and thus cases on contingency without proving damages), but the grander problem is that you now had thousands of people who's job was to find discriminatory actors, who were trained to notice the most subtle hints of it, and in no small part who believed in the mission. An increasing number, by the close of the 1990s, had literally never known a world without an EEOC and the norms it wanted to apply across the country; many had been trained by those who worked up through the EEOC's wishcasting of policies it wanted.
That's how you get a lawsuit with an appeal's court opinion released in 2010, about a complaint first pushed in 2006, revolving around the sort of "general civility code" that Oncale specifically disavowed. It's how you get related cases that similarly emphasis a general theory of Bad Person. And it matches the timeline far closer than the standard motions around college campuses or SomethingAwful refuges.
That doesn't make Hanania right -- there's a lot of other stuff in the history, if you poke at it, and that's not to mention that just for this there's a pile of executive orders and regulatory notices and all the social junk around the 2008/2006 elections -- but there's a lot more to this stuff than just looking at the dates laws were implemented.
NullHypothesis
28m ago
I'm going to add this to the list of reasons. It's almost as bad as the "if a bear attacks you, people will believe you, if a man attacks you, people will not believe you" argument but it's a different reason.
I challenge anybody reading to name an occasion on which they met a bear they weren't actively going out of their way to meet. Zoos and national parks don't count! I'm sure there's somebody here, and I bet it makes for an interesting story.
It’s not terribly interesting. The fact that it was a black bear sans cubs and not too close in distance took away a good amount of the excitement. After I kept yelling “Go away, bear!” it ran back off, and I was surprised by just how fast that thing was; it felt like a marvel of biomechanics. Anyway, now I tell people “I got into a fight with a bear and won”, refraining from elaborating (until pressed) that the fight didn’t go beyond a shouting match, and I was the only one participating.
Regarding the actual thrust of your comment, I couldn’t be more in agreement. The point of the poll isn’t actually to rationally dissect the probability of bear attack versus assault by a human male; it’s to create the very soundbite “Women prefer to be alone in the wild with a bear than a man” being discussed by this comment chain in the first place.
SSCReader
9m ago
Ahh the horseshoe (bearshoe?) theory strikes again. Introverts, misanthropes and feminists/misandrists, all would rather be stuck with a bear than a man. They don't agree on much but on that they find common cause.
(Not claiming you are any of these things, just that "I don't want to be disturbed by a person" pattern matches to introverts/misanthropes).
Pigeon
coo coo
10m ago
I can't name sources in a hurry, and this might be a faulty explanation, but I think a partial reason of this is due to Korea turning super-neo-Confucian during the Joseon dynasty/period. This is most evident after the Qing conquest of the Ming, which the Koreans responded to by considering Qing China as not having political legitimacy*, and doubling down on their interpretations of neo-Confucianism; but strands of this are evident even earlier, when Korean scholars rejected Ming-dynasty innovations (e.g. the Lu-Wang school) in favour of elaborating on older models, most prominently from Zhu Xi. Even today you can see a much, much more obviously hierarchical system regarding personal relations present in Korea than in Japan or China, even counting pre-PRC China.
China, on the other hand, did have such reevaluations, and the Manchu conquest prompted significant soul-searching, resulting in things like the kaozheng school of thought. Japan's kangaku, likewise, did not hunker down in the same way Korea did.
*For further reading you could go look at how many Koreans at the time considered themselves to be sojonghwa and the real inheritors of Chinese political culture and civilisation, now that actual China was overrun by "barbarians". This was to the extent that, IIRC, Joseon Korea refused to use Qing dynasty regnal years as part of its calendar, and continued counting as if the last Ming emperor (?) was still in power. Also note that this was not entirely unique to Korea; there were politicians and thinkers in Japan and Vietnam who shared this opinion.
Some element of this after the "loss of China" in the 17th century likely contributes to Korean culture today. I've been told by native Koreans about how the older generations still sometimes say outright that "since the fall of the Ming there has been no worthy Chinese (persons)"; and there's always some loony Korean nationalist scholar, never taken very seriously, insisting on how this or that aspect of Sinosphere civilisation (from festivals to Chinese characters, so on and so forth) actually originates from Korea.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
19m ago
That's why I'd choose "bear". If I'm out in the woods I don't want to hear someone yapping away, or worse playing music through speakers or overly-loud headphones.
NelsonRushton
34m ago
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
43m ago
No. SGOV dividends (as well as treasuries) are taxed as ordinary income at a rate of up to 40.8%. Add in state taxes, and you're paying nearly half of your already paltry income. It's a very bad deal.
No, you're definitely mistaken.
https://investor.vanguard.com/investor-resources-education/taxes/how-government-bonds-are-taxed
Federal bonds, including treasuries, are state tax exempt (though you still pay federal tax).
In any case, lending money to the government is a pretty awful deal. They dilute you constantly and charge you extortive taxes for the privilege. In the end you're much better off owning a shiny rock (might write a post about this later).
VTSAX right now is paying more than almost any bank account and the taxes are less than you'd pay on bank interest due to the state tax exemption. It's not bad for an asset as safe as a savings account.
Comparing zero risk assets to gold doesn't really make sense.
A "man" obviously parses to anti-feminism. A "bear" can be anything, because it doesn't exist. That's the context in which the poll exists and is shared. You can't interpret the question facially, because it was linked to you (and you, and you, and you) as a referendum on feminism. Look, men are dangerous and bad, here's proof! Nobody voting has met a bear. Nobody in this discussion has met a bear. (I challenge anybody reading to name an occasion on which they met a bear they weren't actively going out of their way to meet. Zoos and national parks don't count! I'm sure there's somebody here, and I bet it makes for an interesting story.)
This comment is not intended as bear slander. They are fun creatures, and a few of them even parse as something magnificent. They can be dangerous, but they're really not a good avatar for the abstract platonified category of dangerous things. I've met bears, what do you want? They're not especially interested in us. They like food and protecting their children. Actually, it could be fun to meet a strange bear. I'm not especially sure I want to meet a strange man, and all the social entanglements that come with returning to baseline.
How many people will give an obviously ridiculous answer to a question when they have no skin in the game? Looks like at least 85%.
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