Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

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most people have a better grasp of probability than you suggest. What they're scared of is not so much the remote possibility of being a bombing victim, but the complete lack of control they would have in such a situation. there's a much higher chance of being in a car accident than in a bombing, but you can mitigate your risk of a car accidnet by paying attention to your own and others' driving, and in most cases you'd have the opportunity to take some evasive action. Likewise you can mitigate your risk of getting mugged by not going into dangerous neighborhoods or suchlike. And so on.

If you're the victim of a bombing, on the other hand, you probably won't have any warning or any time to do anything about it. By the time you figure out what's happened, you're already maimed/ dying/ dead, or one of your loved ones is, or whatever. Remote though the risk is, the randomness and immediacy of it are a lot scarier. I've been in close proximity to a car bomb; it's shocking because it's a lot bigger than you are, and whether you are a victim or not has absolutely nothing to do with your skills or reaction time, it's purely a matter of luck.

It's like getting killed by a falling tree or a sinkhole opening up under you or something. The risk of that actually happening is tiny, but what's scary is how helpless you would be if it did. Unlike car accidents or confrontations with wild animals or people, you probably won't get the opportunity to think/talk/fight your way out of danger in the former situation.If you think about movies, TV etc., people are always getting in jeopardy but worming their way out of it somehow or another. We find it much more shocking when we see someone get killed without having any time to react to the danger they're in.

Yes, and that's the GPs point; that paralysing fear outweighs the logic of the situation. Indeed, I'd suggest your own comment about being able to mitigate a car accident is a prime example of our difficulty with assessing the probability of risk (you may have more control of the situation; but that does not reduce the probability of you being killed by a car).

Many many things could kill us suddenly and without warning (even heart failure!). We are disproportionately scared of some things (eg flight) because they "seem" scary, and are blasé to actually risky things because they seem familiar.

And excellent book on this is "Risk; the science andpolitics of fear" which uses case studies and real data to examine this phenomenon.

If you think that, I didn't explain myself very well. What I'm suggesting is that people are (moderately) well aware of the relative probabilities, but fear a predictable lack of control. This is entirely rational; you can be scared of something without necessarily expecting it to happen.

so to take the driving example, it's very possible that you could be hit without warning, but you can also conceive of many situations in which you do have some warning and can swerve to avoid danger or suchlike. People may even underestimate the risk by being overconfident in their ability to react, but the fact is that if you drive a lot then after a while you'll have experienced a variety of close calls or even been in some minor accidents, and you can weigh the risk of many different driving situations.

On the other hand, most people have no flying experience as pilots. So if you're a passenger in a plane and it becomes apparent that the plane is going to crash, there's nothing you can do about it. No matter how remote the risk of your plane crashing, if it does fall out of the sky then you are almost certainly fucked and there's nothing you can do to improve your chances. I know that if I fly somewhere the journey to and from the airport on the ground is statistically much more risky than the journey through the air, as I will be in much greater proximity to many other vehicles on the ground, my vehicle will have to go through numerous complex maneuvers and so on, and if freeway travel is involved an accident has a much higher likelihood of being fatal due to the speed involved.

But if I had to be in a crash, I'd far rather be it be in a car than a plane; I've been in/at the scene of car crashes before and they strike me as rather more survivable. So I'm not more scared of flying than driving, but I am more scared of a plane crash than a car crash.

Plenty of people survive plane accidents; in fact if you are involved in a plane accident in the US you have a greater than 90% chance of surviving.

Which highlights the point; it is fear that drives your viewpoint (that car accidents are preferable plane crashes) rather than statistics :)

EDIT: I don't have my copy of Risk to hand, but from memory the numbers work out something like.. probability of being in an air crash and it killing you is 1 in several million. Probability of being in a car crash and it killing you is 1 in several thousand (or ten thousands, can't remember). Either way - an order of magnitude more risky :)

I m not sure people can so freely control their emotional responses - their prefrontal cortex might tell them such and such an event is pretty rare and low risk, but their lizard brain will pretty much override that. Unless you have disciplined training, i doubt you can truly get rid of that irrational fear of certain things.

Well, I mentioned the specific example of passenger airliner falling out of the sky because the odds of survival on that are so law, as opposed to takeoff/landing accidents (like the one in Bali the other day) where the odds of surviving are much higher. Also, I am perfectly aware of the disparity in the odds. you don't need to explain that to me.

You're right but that's precisely the point -- what matters to your safety is the probability, not how much control you feel you have. Yes, you can do more to mitigate the risk of being in a car accident than to mitigate the risk of being a victim of a bombing attack. But even if you do all you can, you are still more likely to be in a car accident than in a bombing (and thus, rationally, should be more concerned about the former than the latter).

Let me put it another way; if I'm facing or even in a car accident, at least I know what to do about it in general terms. I've been in a few already and on the scene to help in several others. While the probability of car accidents is high enough to be a worry, I have many options for mitigating that risk.

Now, I'm very unlikely to be in a bombing attack, thank heavens. But I have been in one already, when a car bomb went off right outside my office just as I was getting ready to leave (I wasn't a target or anything, it was a car bomb parked outside a subway station in London that I happened to work next to). What happened was that there was a huge bang and I watched the windows swell inwards like they were covered in plastic sheeting instead of glass. Lucky for me, they didn't shatter, and lucky for everyone else it was late at night and there were no people on the street, so nobody died.

But at the time of the explosion, I was keenly aware that if the windows had burst inwards, the glass would have hit me faster than I could have ducked down behind a piece of furniture. It's this lack of opportunity to alter the outcome that bothers people; it's a situation they'd understandably rather not be confronted with at all. Helplessness is unpleasant because it negates your normal defense mechanisms.

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