Totally Human Emdash User

It is worth noting that this paper was submitted in October of 2024, so it predates the current administration.

I had already made essentially this point earlier in another comment the day before in this post. The only way in which I have changed my position since then is that I now take the thought experiment a little more seriously as a thought experiment, rather than it merely being a useful vehicle for women to express how unsafe men make them collectively feel.

Perhaps you might consider that you yourself should put a little more thought into your posts, rather than making poor assumptions about other people.

It turns out that modern software supports something called “Copy and Paste” that makes it easy to insert an em-dash whenever—and wherever—you want.

I think that you are reading way too much into my whimsical injection of polar bears into the picture. 😆

Having said that, there was an element of my position that was sincere, which was that it should technically matter what bear you run into. However, MagicShel has changed my mind on this with the following comment above:

Without wading into all the technicalities, could we perhaps agree that if you have to say, “what kind of bear tho’,” that we are already in troubling territory?

Of course, all of this to some extent is beside the point because the important thing is not whether the thought experiment is technically valid or not but why women respond to it the way that they do, because if they feel that a random man is likely to be dangerous enough that they would prefer a random bear—and unfortunately violence against women is prevalent enough that this is not such an unreasonable reaction—then that reveals a societal problem that needs to be addressed.

Oh, wow, that is actually a really good point!

Me bringing polar bears into the thought experiment was intended as a (really stupid) joke, but I had nonetheless taking seriously that technically it should matter what kind of bear we are talking about. You’ve demolished that angle with your comment, though!

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!)