Quote:
Originally Posted by paddy
So RV fires, CO poisoning are not remote possibilities and happen every day.
So you consider violence towards people a remote possibility?
I will agree that violence is a remote possibility at a campground but you still have to drive to get there.
Guess the constant reports of violence is fake news and is really just a remote possibility that we don't need to worry about.
I guess I will have been safe to boondock on the south side of Chicago next time I head west.
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Well, a proper analysis of the situation is a bit more subtle than that.
It is not the likelihood of a risk that is relevant to decision making, it is the likelihood&severity divided by the cost of the mitigation. The name for this statistic is "cost effectiveness". All useful decision making is based of cost-effectiveness estimates. The cost of a propane detector as a ratio of the risks involved is so vanishingly low that its cost-effectiveness cannot be in doubt. Some of the mitigations people consider out of fear of a highly-unlikely violent crime--perhaps not so much.
News doesn't have to be "fake" in order to be misleading. It is not that "the constant reports of violence" aren't true. It is just that without a valid statistical context, we have no way to judge how relevant they are to our lives. As reported earlier in this thread, the simple fact is that
America is the safest that it has ever been. Averaged over more than a few years, violent crime is at an all-time low. This is not the impression one gets from watching the news, but it is fact. Now, as has also been pointed out earlier, these very low risks are not distributed uniformly across the population. For example, the risk of violent crime is, sadly, far greater for black make urbanites than for the population as a whole. So, nuances matter.
A single isolated incident, such as the one being discussed here, can be extremely valuable in telling us the available methods for mitigating them (which, as I understand it is exactly what Interblog is doing). But it tells us exactly NOTHING about our individual risks, and therefore is inadequate for judging the cost-effectiveness of a proposed mitigation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RossWilliams
Yep. That's about the size of it. We boondocked in South Minneapolis just last month. Like almost all violent crime, the crime in those areas is mostly between people who know one another. Is it as safe as boondocking on a remote road outside a resort town in New Zealand? Probably not.
Neither one is as dangerous as driving. Its the folks that are talking on their phone while driving that are the real threat.
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This is exactly right. Humans are simply awful and risk-assessment. This fact causes all kinds of irrational behavior.
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