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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

fear is mostly irrational, as people are generally bad at perceiving risk objectively. statistics show that nearly all cities and neighborhoods are generally quite safe for casual visitors and residents alike. vehicular accidents are more likely than violent confrontation, for instance, yet no one bats an eye at getting into a car.

even in the rare occasion of some type of confrontation, most people want to resolve it without violence, and certainly not death. people have varying strategies for such confrontations--congeniality, causticity, evasiveness, etc.--and it's worth developing yours through practice, rather than living in fear. as alluded, most of the sketchy characters in the tenderloin are druggies, not thugs, and really don't care about you at all.

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Statistics often miss a huge amount of threatening behaviour, and in many countries you just outright cannot trust the stats at all. Plus, people will take more precautions in areas that are genuinely more dangerous - if they didn't, the statistics would look much worse.

In general I think people are actually quite good at perceiving the risk present to them. That doesn't mean 'always correct' but it does mean 'has a good idea of which places are at much greater risk of turning dangerous at 2am'.

Finally, don't forget survivor bias: people who were killed or whatever in a random dangerous area simply cannot go on to report how unsafe an area or activity is. Overall your chances of a bad outcome might still be low in terms of absolute risk but being in the wrong area could easily be hundreds of times more dangerous than anywhere else you've been.

no, people are mostly terrible at perceiving actual risk vs. the imagined, because evolutionarily, it was much less harmful to get it wrong one way than the other. we humans no longer live in a world of such unpredictable mortality. and even if imprecise, statistics provide relevant information, especially on relative and general magnitude. moreover, serious crimes are the ones most likely to be reported, and therefore having more accurate stats, so survivorship bias isn't a significant factor.

humans consistently overestimate the dangers of the unknown and consistently underestimate the dangers of the known, often by orders of magnitude. we're also wired to be highly overconfident in our estimations of just about anything. your conjectures include prime examples of such mis-estimation, e.g., "much greater risk" and "hundreds of times more dangerous", implying all that avoidance behavior is justified. but death by firearm, for instance, is caused 90+% of the time by the self or familiars, yet we spend all of our time and resources worrying about strangers and extremely rare scenarios (armed robbery, home invasion, mass shootings, terrorism, etc.) rather than the common (suicide, accidental shooting, crimes of passion, etc.). mostly, we worry about the wrong things most of the time.

I accidentally walked through a Rio favela one evening. Never ran into anyone and didn’t realize it until the next day when I was looking at a map. But I believe by most accounts, that was foolish and lucky. Crime, including robbery and kidnapping, is quite common in Rio. It’s common for nice buildings to have armed guards outside them.

I’m American so I’d love to hear locals tell me how wrong/right my belief of luck/foolishness was.

probably a marginal rise in risk, but not enough to warrant a complete change in behavior (i.e., actively avoiding the area). you'd need to quantify "common" and the relevant priors before you could know for sure. that's not to say it's prudent to be an idiot and flaunt your wealth or something, but that risk is relative and to act accordingly.

I've accidentally walked through a few "bad" neighborhoods while traveling and mostly found them just fine. I think the thing is that they might be fine to travel through once or twice because the odds really aren't all that high you'll get mugged, but if you travel through there every day of your life because it's where you live, you're much more likely to at some point have witnessed or experienced first-hand the violence. So it's understandable that locals might steer you away, even if it's still not especially likely that you'll have a bad experience on the one time you pass through.

That said, I often get poor advice from wealthier residents of "dangerous" cities, because they tend to sequester themselves from the poorer parts of town and think it absurd that any traveler would want to visit or pass through. I suspect in that case there is some kind of classism or other prejudice involved that as an outsider you are immune to because you didn't grow up in the environment that produced it.

Either way, although locals can provide you with some data points, I think ultimately when you're traveling you have to make your own risk assessment based on the situation. And this is true whether you are in a city or the countryside - I think it's an awareness that most frequent travelers develop over time.

As someone who lived for a few years as an expat in Brazil, you got really lucky. I spent a lot of time on the streets, with nothing but a short, a t-shirt, and havaianas, and I speak Spanish and Portuguese, and even so I would try to avoid crossing a Rio favela as much as possible.

We are talking of a city where mobs close a highway tunnel with automatic guns, stop traffic, and rob every car stuck in the tunnel. On broad daylight. Life is not worth much, neither theirs nor yours.

Maybe before heading out, memorise a few no-go zones next time?

I think you're right, but there is also the possibility that people avoiding places and situations which feel unsafe is a factor in the low number of incidents.

that's marginal though, as people might be, at the margin, shifting the places they go, rather than not going anywhere (covid lockdowns excepted). so that might induce a marginal change in incident rates, but not anywhere near at a magnitude to warrant a change of behavior.

the biggest threat in our urban walking lives is really cars[0], and even that isn't so large that we should remain in a state of constant fear.

[0]: pollution is actually the biggest (external) threat, since it's estimated to be responsible for millions of lives lost annually worldwide, but that's regardless of urban walking, so it's beyond the scope of the argument here.

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