Thursday, October 22, 2009

What Not to Fear (SuperFreakonomics)

SuperFreakonomics What Should You Worry About?
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (Parade.com),10/18/09)

Killer sharks? Disease? We're bad at assessing risk — we panic about the wrong things.

Humans are good at many things — typing, inventing stuff — but we're quite bad at assessing risk. Day after day, we get bent out of shape over things we shouldn’t worry about so much, like airplane crashes and lightning strikes, instead of things we should, like heart disease and the [government's newest] flu. So how can we find out what's truly dangerous? Economics. More>>