The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

by Daniel Gardner

Clearly, today’s fully independent thinker will have to have a thorough knowledge of biology, physics, medicine, chemistry, geology, and statistics. He or she will also require an enormous amount of free time. Someone who wants to independently decide how risky it is to suntan on a beach, for example, will find there are thousands of relevant studies. It would take months of reading and consideration in order to draw a conclusion about this one simple risk. 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. Most people would find that somewhat impractical. For them, the only way to tap the vast pools of scientific knowledge is to rely on the advice of experts—people who are capable of synthesizing information from at least one field and making it comprehensible to a lay audience. This is preferable to getting your opinions from people who know as little as you do, naturally, but it too has limitations. For one thing, experts often disagree. Even when there’s widespread agreement, there will still be dissenters who make their case with impressive statistics and bewildering scientific jargon.