"Yeah, but what if you're THE ONE!?"

[Silent3]

Human beings are absolutely miserable at assessing risks and probabilities.

We pour trillions of dollars into fighting THE TERRORISTS!!! while ignoring all of the lives, the many, many more lives, that could be saved spending the same money on health care and food. We fear flying on airplanes while thinking little or nothing of riding around in far riskier personal automobiles. We worry about H1N1 while facing greater risks from fatty foods and lack of exercise. We worry about former "sex offenders" living anywhere in our neighborhoods, when the most likely abusers are friends and family members, not random strangers leaping out from behind the bushes.

You can try to put things in perspective with statistics, but most people don't seem to respond to statistics. They either don't trust them, don't understand them, or think that their inner sense of fear must somehow be a better guide to what's risky and what isn't.

You tell someone they shouldn't worry so much about terrorists, for instance, tell them that the odds of being a victim of a terrorist attack are, say, one in million. Rather than accept that sense perspective, accept that their own car or their own diet of Cheetos and beer is a far more immediate and dangerous risk, many people will respond with a line that screams "I don't understand probabilities, I don't want to!" -- "Yeah, but what if you're THE ONE!?"

Somehow that thought, picturing yourself as that one person out of a million, personalizing the terror, is supposed to shock or shame you into being just as stupidly overwhelmed by irrational fear as the person who asks that rhetorical question, asked as if it's you who are at fault for not vividly imagining some particular horror, for not doing the only acceptably human thing, which apparently is letting imagined horrors displace all reason or sense of proportion.

[Richard Steele]

1. K&R

[hfojvt]

2. then I'd be this guy?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJFyz73MRcg

MIZ!!

[Blecht]

3. I choose to feel this way once in a while

But only when I buy that occasional Powerball ticket. :-)

Math is our friend -- you are absolutely correct -- lose some weight, get some exercise, put on sunscreen, and forget about the goddam terrorists.

[Silent3]

4. It's the tax on people who are bad at math. :)

Which is funny considering that I got A's in calculus, but still pay a little bit of that tax now and again myself. :)

At least the money goes to a semi-useful cause, and it's only (for me) a very small and occasional tax, and it's motivated by hope rather than fear.