Do the odds you're citing here for being killed by a bear attack refer
to everybody generally?

In other words, the odds that any one of the U.S.'s 200 million people
would be killed by a bear attack would be much much lower than if the
odds were being calculated for a person going into the Alaskan
backcountry in August.

The former calculation is kind of irrelevant. People who are walking
around on the streets of New York City don't worry about being attacked
by bears. But people who are going into the backcountry of Alaska in
August do worry. The odds for these two groups obviously are quite
different.

The same is true for a lot of these other risks (earthquakes, dogs,
tornados, breast cancer): they vary greatly across different groups of
people.

It doesn't seem very meaningful to me to talk about the generalized risk
to a large heterogeneous population. The people who are most concerned
about a given danger tend to be those who have a heightened risk from it
because of their particular circumstances. For statistics to mean
anything to them, the statistics must be based on *their* risk.

Jane Hadley
jhadle at halcyon.com
Seattle, WA
Andrew & Rebecca Sorensen wrote:

> Don Baccus wrote:
>

> >...indeed Herrero pretty much suggests you concentrate on the fact that
> >you're > more likely to die driving to wherever you're going :)
>
> Also a good point. From the statistics I've seen concerning black bear
> attacks and death, you have about the same number of odds of dying by
> spider bite, more than double the chance of dying by dog attack, six times
> more likely to die from a tornado, about the same odds for bees and
> hornets, and over 14 times more likely to die by lightning strike. For
> every death by black bear, there are roughly 90,000 homicides.
>
> That should help us put bear attacks in a little better perspective.
>