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Why our fears don’t match the facts
The most revealing and important line in Angelina Jolie’s OpEd in the New York Times today is not the one in which she reveals she has had her breasts removed to reduce the likelihood she will develop breast cancer. It’s this one; “Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts ...
The Dow Jones Average is about to break 15,000. Any day now the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will break 400 parts per million. Think there’s a connection? A couple other numbers might make things clearer. When Charles Keeling started measuring CO2 concentrations in the air above Mauna Kea ...
The idea of Big Brother government snooping on us, listening in on our phone calls, intercepting our e mails, watching us with all kinds of surveillance devices, offends most people...until we’re afraid, and we need government to protect us from what we can’t protect ourselves from as ...
Last week taught us some important lessons about fear. One is that fear is neither good nor bad. What matters is how we let fear affect us. It spurred racism and suspicion and stress and shut down a major American city for a day. But it also created incredible unity, as often happens when people ...
What a revealing real-time lesson we are living through right now in how humans respond to risk. More than a million people in Boston and several large surrounding cities have been told by authorities to stay indoors and not open the door to anyone but uniformed police. Businesses are ...
So how terrorized will we be this time? Maybe terrorized is too strong a word. But how much more worried will we be, how much more uneasy, how much more unsettled will we feel as we go about our normal lives, now that the bombing attack at the Boston Marathon has again reminded us that we are ...
You know how sometimes when you put your foot in your mouth and say something really stupid, you try to recover but only stammer out something even dumber and you wind up making it worse? That’s schlimmbesserung. You know how scientists replaced flammable and poisonous ...
Dan Fagin’s new book “Toms River, A Story of Science and Salvation”, about a classic type of environmental story back in the 80s and 90s, the ‘cancer cluster’, is a well-written history about the extensive chemical pollution in the Toms River New Jersey area decades ago, rich in detail about the ...
My career as a reporter spanned a remarkable time in local TV news, of both incredible journalistic creativity and commitment, and a profit-driven abandonment of journalism’s civic responsibility to keep the public reasonably well-informed. In the past couple decades, even as the ...
Update: A couple hours ago, a judge struck down the New York City ban on large-sized sodas as arbitrary and capricious, in part because the ban did not also include other heavily sugared drinks, including juice. By coincidence, I had posted the essay below a few hours earlier, about where the ...
Over at "Mind Matters", my fellow blogger David Berreby offers an intriguing post Is Individual Liberty Over-Rated about some some new discussion of an old theme that I also dance around here; we've learned a lot about the limits of human reason, and how those limits cause us to sometimes make ...
I was 19, a college sophomore. It was Spring, 1970, and the anti-Vietnam movement was bringing the progressive 60s to a crescendo. Four college students had been shot to death at Kent State in an anti-war rally. My long hair flowing, my freak flag flying, if there was ever a time to ...
The New York Times reports that an MIT statistics professor has found that flying on a commercial jet has never been safer. Not that it was ever that much of a risk, the occasional tragedy notwithstanding. But with no crashes in the last four years, the story reports: In the last ...
Americans have always disagreed, about a lot. Somehow though, we’ve managed to get along with each other while we do. Why, then, has disagreeing become so nasty, so fierce, not just a battle about ideas but an expression of personal enmity? What are the historic roots of our particularly ...
You and I make risk judgments for ourselves all the time, based on a few facts and a lot of subjective, instinctive emotional factors. As a result we sometimes worry more than the evidence says we need to, or less that the evidence says we should, and that Risk Perception Gap, as I call ...