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Comment by sudden_dystopia | Hacker News Reader

I rode my bike all over town as a 8-12 year old in the 80’s and 90’s. My parents would send me to the grocery store and hardware store a mile or two away on my bike for random things they forgot during their main shopping trips.

But it just goes back to the same question: has the world gotten more dangerous or are we just more aware of dangers that were always there?

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Neither: the world has gotten safer, and for whatever reason that has made us more concerned about the dangers that remain.

Safer in which way ? I was playing football on the street as a kid with a lot of kids from my neighborhoud. Now you see rarely kids on the streets because they risk being hit by cars or kidnapped.

There is something to said about the risks of being run over especially given the popularity of SUVs which are so high up, but kidnapping is and has always been an incredibly rare crime for at least the past century. People are freaked out these days because of "Amber alerts" but these are nearly always cases of disputed custody between divorced/separated partners taking the kid against the wishes of the other parent, not strangers.

Safer in a statistical way, not an emotional / subjective / how does the news make us feel kind of way.

Or in other words, safer in a 'real' way as compared to an 'imaginary' way.

Look at crime rates since the 2000s, or the 90s, or the medieval period.

This is the safest period in human history, more so if you live in a high income country.

Well, probably not, no. There's about 286 thousand years of anatomically modern humans running around pre-historically (unless you're meaning very literal history), and numerous illiterate societies which left us mundane archaeological records. Your conclusion is invariably cherry picked. Not to mention the goalposts for the concept of criminal have shifted drastically as has the means to enforce law.

Much of that 286 thousand years (or whatever) was spent in band-level hunter-gather societies. These societies have a number of nice features: People tend to be healthy, and in good times they may only work 20 hours per week.

But according to my anthropology professors, these societies tend to have very high death rates. For men, the lifetime risk of being murdered or killed in intergroup fighting runs about 10 to 20%.

So there's a real possibility that the modern era is very safe by historical standards.

>For men, the lifetime risk of being murdered or killed in intergroup fighting runs about 10 to 20%.

That makes being born in western Russia in 1905 look like a peaceful life

Your anthropology professors are ignoring the fact that they're inferring their rates from displaced populations.

Crimes of passion should also be exempted from the general murder rates.

Why should crimes of passion be exempted from the general murder rates? A society where it's more acceptable or common to kill someone who upsets you is a more dangerous society.

Because they're decontextualized. I'd posit that in the context of small organizations most of those murders are a product of deliberate and known risk. Given that, one could liken it to mutual combat at the ethical and social levels. That isn't the whole scope of the matter but the aggregate data would, I suspect, reflect a considerably different picture if it was investigated at such a resolution. Of particular interest would be infidelity and how that fits into the context of a given social order.

Conflating two wildly different things seems like it should be a formal fallacy. “I don’t go out without an umbrella because of the risk of it raining or an asteroid wiping out my town.” for example.

Car drivers kill thousands of people walking on the street every year. Kidnappers don’t.

> Now you see rarely kids on the streets because they risk being hit by cars or kidnapped.

"Stranger" kidnappings are exceedingly rare. The majority of Amber Alerts occur due to custodial disputes between divorced parents when one parent takes the kid when they are not supposed to[1].

> Children (and parents) are often conditioned to be wary of strangers. However, in reality, only a small fraction of child abduction cases – around 0.1 percent – involve kidnappings by strangers or slight acquaintances.

[1] https://www.protection1.com/amber-alerts/

They’re less rare in certain communities. Something like 20% of abductions in the US are hispanic girls despite that demo being roughly 10% of the US population of children.

How many of those abductions are by strangers?

The idea of stranger danger is largely a myth, as most almost all crimes committed towards children are by those closest to them: parent, relatives and people in positions of trust.

Devils advocate: The reason statistics is down is that people are taking less risk. If you were to live like before the risk would be the same or higher.

Don't know if it's actually true, but it's worth examining.

I suspect the reduced number of malicious acts by adults has been more than balanced out by the increased rate of children killing themselves as we cripple their development more and more over time.

AFAIK at least the stranger danger phenomenon was always blown up by the media. Sexual abuse of children for example typically happens by people who know the children. It's extremely rare for a stranger to do that.

So did I, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s, when the murder rate was 1,000/year. Things have gotten less dangerous but people have gotten more fearful.

Ppl have gotten more fearful because things have gotten MORE dengerous, not less..:

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2021/11/3/hld-surge-in-us...

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/murd...

The homicide rate in 2021 was almost half of the homicide rate in the early 1990s.

Even if we stipulate that this article from Quatar state media is accurate, it does not imply that conditions are more dangerous now than in the time frame I was describing. You do understand that, I hope.

As the chance of all-cause premature death goes down, (war, famine, vehicle accident, disease), there is more value in reducing the avoidable risks.

Like sending your kid to the shop. There's also the fact that we don't need to do that anymore. Very often there's a late (or all) night shop open not too far away. So the urgency is just not there.

The world has gotten physically safer for kids, but socially and politically much more dangerous for adults.

In the summers of my childhood I would leave the house around 10am with a packed lunch and walk alone everywhere until 8pm or so (before cell phone era). As an adult I’ve driven on some of the sidewalkless rural roads I used to walk and thought “it’s an absolute miracle that I didn’t get hit by a car.” I was a dumb kid with no sense of risk, and it’s sheer luck that I got through it unscathed, tbh.

That's only two options. "Awareness" is important, but so is "assessment". A third option may be that we now regularly over- or under-estimate the risks of things whose actual prevalence hasn't changed much, if at all.

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