Ten ways we get the odds wrong

[thewayne]

A summary of why we do not always properly perceive risk.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20071228-000005&print=1

Comments

[quasar273.livejournal.com]

I've seen this before. It's a reasonable short summation of some of the complexities of decision making. But it still oversimplifies. 1.4 million people changed travel plans after 9/11 -- but not simply because they were afraid of plane crashes. A lot of those people (including me) changed plans because it had suddenly become massively more inconvenient and costly and unpleasant to fly. And that, in turn, was caused by some societal misperception of risk. So sometimes it doesn't matter if the individual's perception of a risk is more or less accurate, if enough other people are misestimating it.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Absolutely agreed. When it takes six hours for us to fly to Phoenix for what would be a 7-8 hour drive, you just have to wonder.

[deborak]

They are wrong on one point about avian flu. Scientists recently went back and studied remains of those who died in the 1918 pandemic and determined that it was indeed a strain of bird flu that killed Americans.

[quasar273.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd say that's a matter of terminology. Although the 1918 pandemic was later established to have been spread by birds, it was called "swine flu" or "Spanish influenza" at the time (why Spanish? Spain was one of very few European countries not heavily censoring their press due to the war, and so a lot of the early reports were from Spain even though the early cases were much more widespread). I thought it was pretty clear the question about "bird flu" referred to H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza, which indeed has killed 0 Americans. They could have been more precise, but if they used language so fussily that article would probably have not made it into the three (!) different venues where I've read it.