Risk assessment, reality and how fear and irrationality kills.

[NNadir]

"...Let's be blunt. This irrational response kills people. In a world of finite resources, we can only protect ourselves from so many things. If we overspend on risks such as pesticides or asbestos, which are real but of relatively low magnitude, we have less to spend on greater threats such as bacterial food poisoning or fossil fuel emissions. As a result, thousands of the people exposed to those higher risks will die.

The usual suspects blamed for bad policy are politics, greed, the media, even the open, manipulable nature of democracy itself. True, these are all factors in a process that often becomes a battle between competing private agendas rather than an informed search for policies that will serve the greatest common good. But the principal underlying cause of wasteful choices that seek protection from the wrong bogeymen is fear...

...IMMEDIATE/CATASTROPHIC VS. CHRONIC We tend to be more afraid of what can kill a lot of us suddenly and violently, like a plane crash, than, say, lung cancer, which causes hundreds of thousands more deaths, but one at a time, over time.

NATURAL VS. HUMAN-MADE We're less afraid of radiation from the sun than of the radiation from power lines and cell phone towers. The risk from the sun is immensely greater, but no matter. Those power lines and cell phones are human-made. This one helps explain widespread fear of new technology and chemicals..."

From the Washington Post, "Let's get real about risk."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A41017-2000Aug5¬Found=true

This article is more sympathetic to the fearful than I am. I simply think of irrational fear as being "stupid." According to this article, irrationality is hard wired into humanity.

It's a tough call...stupidity or hard wiring...stupidity or hard wiring...stupidity or hard wiring...

How about hard wired stupidity?

[ThoughtCriminal]

1. IN general I think we have a greater fear of risks

that we cannot control even if the likelyhood of injury and death are much lower. Driving vs. flying is a good example.

[glaucon]

2. Excellent point

...IMMEDIATE/CATASTROPHIC VS. CHRONIC We tend to be more afraid of what can kill a lot of us suddenly and violently, like a plane crash, than, say, lung cancer, which causes hundreds of thousands more deaths, but one at a time, over time.

This makes sense, and I think people DO tend to fear the chatastrophic over the chronic.

One good example is nuclear power. The catastrophic failure of a nuclear power plant could potentially kill hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people in a single stroke.

But few realize the enormous amounts of energy it takes to enrich uranium, energy bought by burning coal. The chronic effects of this are well documented. There are also millions of curies of unregulated radiation escaping from nuclear power plants world-wide in the form of noble gases and tritium. These pose enormous chronic dangers to the population from exposure to them.

We need to concentrate much more on these issues than the more "sexy" issues of a meltdown or waste disposal problems.

Thanks for bringing this up Nadir!

:)