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whpearson comments on Typical Mind and Politics - Less Wrong
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Thieves are livable with. People who steal your livelihood and women less so. Think pick pockets vs tribal warfare. Even burglary is minor compared to that.
This doesn't happen in cities?
(When I wrote "thieves etc", the "etc" was specifically intended to avoid limiting the scope of reference to pickpockets, and instead to indicate the general problem of "other humans wanting what you have".)
Ever heard of gang violence?
But let's leave the specific examples of bad things aside, and focus on the general claim you have made. You have said that human threats are more of a problem where there are fewer humans than where there are more humans. Surely you have to concede that that is implausible, or at least counterintuitive, on its face.
Cities mean a higher density of criminals and targets, in equal proportion, so all else equal the probability of being targeted should remain about the same; but it also means authorities and witnesses are closer. In a city, you can scream for help and expect people to come; in a rural setting, you can't.
The more people you come across, the more likely you are to run into someone bad; and this doesn't even take into account what can happen when people -- thus in particular bad people -- get together in groups.
It's possible that the nice-ifying effects of large populations on human behavior could cancel out the bad effects. But it's not obvious that they do -- and it's certainly not obvious that the former exceed the latter. The default presumption would be that people who live in ancestral-type environments face a variety of threats, both human and natural; and that as people move into larger population centers, the threats they face become less natural and more human.