This used to be an article that tried to pretend “man vs bear” was a serious statistical inference question, after admitting that of course it isn’t and instead should be interpreted as making a statement about reasonable or unreasonable levels of risk in our society.
However, the bottom line was not satisfying: although I was able to demonstrate that a few other attempts were really poorly grounded, I wasn’t able to narrow the range of possibilities enough to be satisfying. It therefore wasn’t a good way to talk about decision theory, shed little to no light on the social controversy, and was way too long.
It didn’t work.
Therefore, I’ve removed the article content and turned off comments. But along the way, I had AI generate a picture of a really cute quokka. (Real quokkas are super-cute also.) More of life should feel like that! So I’m leaving it here as inspiration.