Term for flawed risk assessment and preparation for unlikely events?

[Lumpy]

@wguy123

I once broke down on I-25 in downtown Denver on a motorcycle. It was at an area with about a 5 foot shoulder from the white line to a concrete wall. It was terrifying but I had no place to go. I knew what was wrong and had the tools to fix (it was a loose ground connection), but the few minutes it took scared the fucking shit out of me. I knew I was at risk of death and would do anything to get to safety.

Speaking of preparedness, a road flare would be useful in that situation.

[Lumpy]

@Broomstick

Someone spending hundreds of dollars on, say, radiation detecting equipment,

I concluded that in terms of prepping, a geiger counter was dead-last on my priority list.

[griffin1977]

@wguy123

I once broke down on I-25 in downtown Denver on a motorcycle. It was at an area with about a 5 foot shoulder from the white line to a concrete wall. It was terrifying but I had no place to go. I knew what was wrong and had the tools to fix (it was a loose ground connection), but the few minutes it took scared the fucking shit out of me. I knew I was at risk of death and would do anything to get to safety.

Yeah, all the people I’ve spoken to about this (and have chosen to stay in the vehicle in the hypothetical) are car drivers.

I think there is a another factor at play here, as well the fear-vs-risk being attacked by a random stranger, there is an over reliance in the security provided by a metal cocoon.

Particularly at freeway speeds that isn’t that much practical protection (if you are stationary and hit by someone going 70+ mph) but it seems safer to stay in your car.

[bump]

@Lumpy

Yet the truth is far more banal: depending on varying definitions used and incomplete statistics, somewhere between 38 and 513 people died in mass shootings in the USA in 2020.

Indeed, that’s the number of people who are still dying from COVID daily, but nobody considers that much of a risk anymore.

Granted mass shootings are a lot more random, but society in general doesn’t really register 400 deaths daily as being a big deal, while 513 over the course of 2020 is a huge deal because every instance was on the news with lurid coverage, breathless analysis, etc… while the mentions of COVID deaths are always as a sort of afterthought or aside in a larger story about some aspect of the ongoing fight against COVID.

The same thing happened re: child-snatchings in the 1980s vs. wearing bike helmets. Nobody wore bike helmets because it was considered effete among children, and parents didn’t see the need, but by God, if people didn’t get their kids fingerprinted and start locking them down more and more because a handful of kids were abducted and murdered. Meanwhile, I’ll almost guarantee that more kids died or were severely disabled of brain trauma on bicycles during the same period.

The news is absolutely complicit, and these days so is social media. People have shaky risk assessment skills at the best of times, and when all of a sudden everyone on your Facebook feed is freaking out about some lurid, but extremely unlikely event, you feel like that must be a big deal so you should prepare against it too, while ignoring much more mundane threats that are more likely to happen.

[smithsb]

@Lumpy

@LSLGuy

I’m reminded of some advice for lottery playing I once read & analyzed for accuracy. To wit:

If over age 50, never buy your Powerball tickets more than 10 minutes before ticket sales close shortly before the drawing. Because if you buy them any earlier, the odds of you dropping dead before the draw exceed your odds of winning. Do not tempt Fate that way, for she art a Certified Bitch.
Do I follow this advice? No. Should I? Yes. Apparently I too suck at risk analysis.

Technically, you should buy a lottery ticket exactly once in your life, just so your odds of winning aren’t exactly zero. Every subsequent ticket will statistically be a loss.

From the Jokes thread: I once pointed out to my wife that she was more likely to die in a traffic accident driving to and from the lottery store to buy the tickets than actually win the lottery…Now she makes me drive to the store for the tickets.

[peccavi]

Here’s a great analysis of flawed risk assessment in airport security.

Tsa