Quote Originally Posted by illabelle View Post
I'm not a statistician, though I do have a degree in Math Education (high school algebra and geometry). I haven't tried to understand all the points made above. I just wanted to point out what I think might be a hole in the considerations:

Where are the criminals? Given that nearly all hikers I've met (day, section, or thru) appear to be decent law-abiding people, there would appear to be very few individuals on the trail who have murderous inclinations. Criminals tend to stay in cities. Yes, I know small towns have criminals also. If the people who wish to kill aren't on the trail [very much], what difference does it make how many miles, or hiker-hours, or person-years, or whether I sleep at home or on the trail? If the bad people aren't there, I'm safe from bad people.

So shouldn't the calculations take into account the distribution of bad people among the population?
I agree that most people I see on the trail are decent. However, I don't see why we would need to consider the distribution of bad people when we know incontrovertibly that people have been murdered while hiking.

If we look at shark attacks along US coast, I find a website that says there have been 30 so far this year. This could be 1 million nice sharks and 30 bad sharks along our coasts. It could be 1 single bad shark that really gets around. It is absolutely unnecessary to know how many actual sharks are involved, we can measure the rate at which attacks are happening use that information to predict future year's attacks.