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by Jyaif 305 days ago
Your testimony is quite literally survivor bias.

What would not be survivor bias is you telling us what happened to the kids around you.

5 comments

Literally nothing ? because statistically speaking they virtually all survived. And of the ones that did not survive the extreme vast majority didn't die because they were "playing outside"
I completely agree. That said when I was a kid there was always a kid in class with a cast or a sling for their collar bone, and these days you hardly ever see it.
Sure, now half of the class is obese by the time they're 13, I guess it makes it harder for kidnappers too so at least there is some logic
And just what percentage of kids who played outside in the late '80s/early '90s do you think were seriously injured or abducted?

Because whatever you think it is, that's probably much too high. Because it almost never happened. There were a very few highly-publicized cases of children disappearing (eg, JonBenet Ramsey, or in my area Sarah Ann Wood), but a) those were always incredibly rare, and b) such occurrences have been getting steadily rarer for many decades.

> What would not be survivor bias is you telling us what happened to the kids around you.

Oh they all died because adults weren't around.

No but seriously, everyone was fine. Kids died drunk driving in high school, but not playing soccer at the local park.

Edit: I misremembered. The kid I'm thinking of who died drunk driving got into that accident our sophomore year of college. So he would have been around 19 or 20 at the time.

Guessing you were not a 10-ish year old kid in the early 90s. I had the same experience as the OP and it was very common. I've talked to numerous parents my age who have lamented that we can't let our kids have the same childhood we enjoyed.
> Guessing you were not a 10-ish year old kid in the early 90s

As a matter a fact I was. It's not because I pointed out GP's (lack of) logic that I disagree with the conclusion.

I grew up the the 60s and 70s, and all the kids lived like this. Stranger danger hadn't been invented yet.
It had. In the 1970s my grandmother warned me not to talk to strangers.

More importantly, it didn't stop her sending me shopping when I was four years old.