My point is that humans fail to understand risk and odds. Sometimes odds are too abstract. Here was someone who lives on an earthquake fault and subject to building collapse without warning while he sleeps, telling me that I am in grave danger, even though hurricanes usually give weeks of warning and hit North Carolina and Louisiana and Texas more often than they hit Florida. He just wasn t thinking. I have a friend who smokes and rides a motorcycle, but won t fly.
Humans often fail to look at the big picture when assessing risks.
And we are programmed to think more closely about certain types of risks than about others. When a 747 goes down and hundreds die, we are appalled and disgusted. But every day, so many children die of malnutrition that it roughly equals over 100 crashing 747 s, and few think about this number. They allow their kids to bicycle without helmets, etc. Forty-three thousand people will die in auto accidents this year but nearly half million will die from tobacco.