Yes, they are all interacting with strangers! To make the metric more precise, you’d want to weight by something like the closeness of the interaction. But yes, similarly, you have a heightened guard around these people, for a good reason. How many of those strangers do you enter a room alone with or lend your things to?

(Before you make the point about the coat check, ask how much prefiltering you do before you give someone your coat.)

Your model, by contrast, doesn’t seem to represent why that dark alley is dangerous. Because you only care about the raw crime count rather than the crime count per time interacted with. It would equally imply that the stranger in the alley is no risk to you, because “if a crime happens at all, it will be from a family member”. That is not good statistical reasoning.

When we see that most crime comes from acquaintances, that’s after applying significantly more countermeasures to strangers and after getting into more conflicts with acquaintances after we’ve focused our interactions on them.

If strangers really are safer per unit of interaction, then start saving your seat by leaving your wallet.

That’s precisely the point. Having a fear of people who you haven’t heavily interacted with, when wandering about in public in highly trafficked spaces, is irrational, because the risks are vanishingly small. I’ve e.g. personally watched a middle aged lady cross to the other side of the street in the middle of the day to avoid walking closely past some normal looking brown-skinned high school kids wearing hoodies and baggy pants, and then cross back to the original side after they were past. On several occasions I’ve seen men switch sides with their female companions so that as they walk along the man is between the woman and some unassuming homeless person sitting on the sidewalk minding their own business. Again, on a well-trafficked street in the middle of the day. These reactions are not based on reasonable fears.

Lots of people won’t let their 10- or 12-year-old kids walk around town by themselves, because the parents are afraid they will be abducted or assaulted or something. But such tragedies are extremely rare. If anything, if they are really worried about child abuse the parents should be carefully examining their priest, sports coaches, teachers, family members, friends’ relatives, etc.

Obviously if you take the random strangers off the street and invite them to your home, have a deep personal conversation, lend them money, ask them to take care of your kids, start kissing them, or whatever your definition is for a “close interaction”, they sort of stop being strangers at that point, and you are more likely to get into some altercation.

>Obviously if you take the random strangers off the street and invite them to your home, have a deep personal conversation, lend them money, ask them to take care of your kids, start kissing them, or whatever your definition is for a “close interaction”, they sort of stop being strangers at that point, and you are more likely to get into some altercation

In other words, you agree that you shouldn't lower your defenses for a random stranger, you only disagree about where the stranger/acquaintance boundary exists.

As for the other point: do you actually know that the risk is lower conditional on you not using standard countermeasures (that probably exist because of the legit risk)? Have you stopped locking your car, and started leaving your wallet out where it's easy to get to? Walked home alone through dangerous neighborhoods? If not, why not?

Don't equate the post-countermeasure crime rate with safety.

> Your model, by contrast, doesn’t seem to represent why that dark alley is dangerous. Because you only care about the raw crime count rather than the crime count per time interacted with. It would equally imply that the stranger in the alley is no risk to you, because “if a crime happens at all, it will be from a family member

Actually that's not my model; I'm not the OP. I was just pointing out what I saw as a flaw in your presentation. Y

You keep talking about things like "unit of interaction" - which is a handy thing to talk about in the abstract, but gives the impression that you've actually quantified human interaction - a concept I am highly skeptical of.

I can see that there is a reasoning flaw in looking at crime that has happened and seeing that it mostly happens between people who know each other and concluding that the greatest risk to yourself is from people you know.

One possible explanation that has nothing to do with "interaction time" is simply the fact that you apply more countermeasures to strangers than you do to people you know. Perhaps the real cause is a matter of trust, not time.

>You keep talking about things like "unit of interaction" - which is a handy thing to talk about in the abstract, but gives the impression that you've actually quantified human interaction - a concept I am highly skeptical of.

A precise quantification is not necessary to recognize the core point, that however you define interaction, you are in fact interacting with acquaintances much more than strangers. You don't need to put numbers on eye contact or anything like that. It's enough to go by e.g. physical unbarriered proximity.

>One possible explanation that has nothing to do with "interaction time" is simply the fact that you apply more countermeasures to strangers than you do to people you know. Perhaps the real cause is a matter of trust, not time.

That's saying the same thing: people apply more countermeasures to strangers because they (correctly!) recognize them as being more dangerous in the practically-relevant sense. After that filter is applied, and after swamping your interactions with acquaintances, the end result is a relatively low proportion of crimes from stranger-in-the-bushes. That doesn't mean predators in bushes aren't dangerous!

And, once someone has become trusted, they're no longer a stranger and likewise are less dangerous because they have more to lose from hurting you. Either way, by the appropriate metric, acquaintances/friends/family are less dangerous. The greater incidence comes from being around them more and from not using the same countermeasures.

Either way, it simply doesn't follow (as the OP suggested) that the rational thing to do is to be less wary of strangers!