More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
An American professor calculated that even if terrorists were hijacking and crashing one passenger jet a week in the United States, a person who took one flight a month for a year would have only a 1-in-135,000 chance of being killed in a hijacking—a trivial risk compared to the annual 1-in-6,000 odds of being killed in a car crash.
fatalities on American roads soared after September 2001 and settled back to normal levels in September 2002.
the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
But he also knew that as serious as the nation’s problems were, “unreasoning fear” would make things far worse by eroding faith in liberal democracy and convincing people to embrace the mad dreams of communism and fascism. The Great Depression could hurt the United States. But fear could destroy it.
to think the potential disasters facing us today are somehow more awful than those of the past is both ignorant and arrogant.
In the United States, life expectancy was fifty-nine years in 1930.
Seven decades later, it was almost seventy-eight years.
We are the healthiest, wealthiest, and longest-lived people in history. And we are increasingly afraid. This is one of the great paradoxes of our time.
people tremble at the sight of a nuclear reactor but shrug at the thought of having an X-ray—even though X-rays expose them to the radiation they are terrified might leak from a nuclear plant.
Childhood is starting to resemble a prison sentence, with children spending almost every moment behind locked doors and alarms, their every movement scheduled, supervised, and controlled.
On average, 36,000 Americans are killed each year by the flu and related complications. Obesity may kill around 100,000 each year.
Fear sells. Fear makes money.
The more fear, the better the sales.
Psychologists call this confirmation bias. We all do it. Once a belief is in place, we screen what we see and hear in a biased way that ensures our beliefs are “proven” correct.
Gut’s simplest rules of thumb is that the easier it is to recall examples of something, the more common that something must be.
The more easily people are able to think of examples of something, the more common they judge that thing to be.
Fear is certainly the most effective way of gluing a memory in place,
we overestimate the likelihood of being killed by the things that make the evening news and underestimate those that don’t.
We see flaming wrecks every day on the news but only family and friends will hear of a life lost to diabetes.
Have a shower in the morning and you risk slipping and breaking your neck. Eat a poached egg and you could be poisoned. Drive to work and you may be crushed, mangled, or burned alive. Walk to work and carcinogenic solar radiation may rain down on you, or you may be hit by a bus or have a heart attack or be crushed by an asteroid.
reading the stories led to increased estimates for all the risks,
people were told a flu outbreak was expected to kill 600 people, people’s judgments about which program should be implemented to deal with the outbreak were heavily influenced by whether the expected program results were described in terms of lives saved (200) or lives lost (400).
passion and pain are no substitute for reason,
Anecdotes aren’t data:
“If I look at the mass, I will never act,” wrote Mother Teresa. “If I look at the one, I will.”
“The death of one man is a tragedy, the deaths of millions is a statistic,” said that expert on death, Joseph Stalin.
The more numerate people were, the less likely they were to be tripped up by Gut’s mistakes.
When a nation’s university-educated elite has such a weak grasp of the numbers that define risk, that nation is in danger of getting risk very wrong.
even when the other people involved are strangers, even when we are anonymous, even when dissenting will cost us nothing, we want to agree with the group.
Social scientists wanted to understand why nations succumbed to mass movements, and in that context it was chilling to see how easy it is to make people deny what they see with their own eyes.
Thus if an independent thinker really wishes to form entirely independent judgments about the risks we face in daily life, or even just those we hear about in the news, he or she will have to obtain multiple university degrees, quit his or her job, and do absolutely nothing but read about all the ways he or she may die until he or she actually is dead.
Where a reasonable respect for expertise is lost, people are left to search for scientific understanding on Google and in Internet chat rooms, and the sneer of the cynic may mutate into unreasoning, paralyzing fear. That end state can be seen in the anti-vaccination movements growing in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere.
scientific information and the opinions of scientists can certainly play a role in how people judge risks,
when the test was “high importance,” conformity actually went up. The researchers also found that under those conditions, people became more confident about the accuracy of their group-influenced answers. “Our data suggest,” wrote the researchers, “that so long as the judgments are difficult or ambiguous, and the influencing agents are united and confident, increasing the importance of accuracy will heighten confidence as well as conformity—a dangerous combination.”
Decades of research has proved that groups usually come to conclusions that are more extreme than the average view of the individuals who make up the group.
When like-minded people get together and talk, their existing views tend to become more extreme.
exaggerated perceptions of risk are precisely what we would expect to see given the deep hostility most people feel toward drugs. Governments not only know this, they make use of it. Drug-use prevention campaigns typically involve advertising and classroom education whose explicit goal is to increase perceived risk
Whether the perceived risks are in line with the actual risks is not a concern. Higher perceived risk is always better.
We adore alcohol, and for that reason, it’s no surprise that public health officials often complain that people see little danger in a drug whose consumption can lead to addiction, cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal disorders, liver cirrhosis, several types of cancer, fetal alcohol syndrome, and fatal overdose—a drug that has undoubtedly killed far more people than all the illicit drugs combined.
And what am I most likely to focus on and recall repeatedly? Whatever confirms my existing thoughts and feelings. And what am I least likely to focus on and recall repeatedly? Whatever contradicts my thoughts and feelings. And what is a common source of the thoughts and feelings that guide my attention and recall? Culture.
once an opinion forms, information is screened to suit.
The intuitive human mind is not a lonely Stone Age hunter wandering a city it can scarcely comprehend. It is a Stone Age hunter wandering a city it can scarcely comprehend in the company of millions of other confused Stone Age hunters. The tribe may be a little bigger these days, and there may be more taxis than lions, but the old ways of deciding what to worry about and how to stay alive haven’t changed.
We are safer and healthier than ever and yet we are more worried about injury, disease, and death than ever. Why? In part, it’s because there are few opportunities to make money from convincing people they are, in fact, safer and healthier than ever—but there are huge profits to be made by promoting fear. “Unreasoning fear,” as Roosevelt called it, may be bad for those who experience it and society at large, but it’s wonderful for shareholders.
H. L. Mencken once wrote that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Mencken penned this line in 1920, at the height of the first Red Scare.
election campaigns can quickly turn into a competition about who can most effectively frighten voters,”
The cause is worthy and the intentions honorable, McNeil seemed to be saying. Why worry about the accuracy of information used to advance a worthy cause?
there is really only one way to grab the attention of distracted editors and reporters: Dispense with earnest, thoughtful, balanced, well-researched work and turn the message into a big, scary headline.
Uncertainty is so central to the nature of science that it provides a handy way of distinguishing between a scientist talking as a scientist and a scientist who is using the prestige of his white lab coat to support political activism: Look at the language. If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist.
the decision to put the little girl at the center of a series about cancer is journalism at its worst. It was obvious that this “one-in-a-million case” was fantastically unrepresentative, but the newspaper chose story over statistics, emotion over accuracy, and in doing so it risked giving readers a very false impression about a very important issue.
The population of the United States is 300 million, the European Union 450 million, and Japan 127 million. These numbers alone ensure that rare events—even one-in-a-million events—will occur many times every day, making the wildly improbable perfectly routine.
