What should we fear?
“As we wrote in Freakonomics, most people are pretty terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events. A given person might fear a terrorist attack and mad cow disease more than anything in the world, whereas in fact she’d be better off fearing a heart attack (and therefore taking care of herself) or salmonella (and therefore washing her cutting board thoroughly).”
This is a quote from a column in this week’s “New York Times” by Stephen J Dubner who, together with the economist Steven D. Levitt, wrote the best-selling book “Freakonomics” [my review here].
He is so right. In my advice on “How To Make Decisions”, I caution:
“Beware of a false assessment of risk – on the one hand, some parents decide that their children should not have the MMR injection because of just one, deeply flawed, study suggesting a risk of autism, while on the other hand many smokers continue with their habit because they have convinced themselves that the health risks are not as serious as repeated, large-scale studies have shown beyond any reasonable doubt.”
January 11th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Duncan Hart has picked up on this topic for “his own blog.