You can't escape how you feel toward heart wrenching stories, but you always have a choice to exert some mental energy and figure out their frequency. If you do, you may find your perspective changes. Specifically, when you choose numeracy over passion you're less likely to say, "the world sure it terrible", and more likely to say, "the world sure is big."
Consider a few examples:
Consider a few examples:
I read someone ringing the hysteria alarm because 172 American children died from influenza this season, and most of them didn't get a flu shot! However, this is out of 74 million American children, making the odds of any child dying of influenza about 1 in a million! This is not the national emergency some make it out to be.
Example two: someone bang the freak-out drum because 37 kids die a year in hot cars. It's tragic. It's morbid. It's also extraordinarily rare. Thank God. Your child may be at greater risk walking through the parking lot than staying in the car, but because we don't hear about it as often, we decry the parent who leaves their child in the car while they run into the post office to mail a letter.
Someone hire a punk band, make sure they practice 3 times a week, and fire the lead singer if need be because we need someone to play the panic song over "stranger danger". Yet, these kinds of child abduction cases are an extremely small portion of all missing children. The total number? 115 cases.
Example two: someone bang the freak-out drum because 37 kids die a year in hot cars. It's tragic. It's morbid. It's also extraordinarily rare. Thank God. Your child may be at greater risk walking through the parking lot than staying in the car, but because we don't hear about it as often, we decry the parent who leaves their child in the car while they run into the post office to mail a letter.
Someone hire a punk band, make sure they practice 3 times a week, and fire the lead singer if need be because we need someone to play the panic song over "stranger danger". Yet, these kinds of child abduction cases are an extremely small portion of all missing children. The total number? 115 cases.
Finally we have the mother of all examples; school shootings. 40 children have died in school shootings so far this year. News outlets like to frame school shootings as an epidemic that keeps getting worse and worse, neglecting clear-cut statistics that show a long term decrease in school shootings and violent crime more generally. Regardless, school shootings could increase tenfold and would still not warrant a blip on our risk radar. There are 50 million school age kids and about 100 thousand public schools in the United States. It's not an exaggeration to say that the risk of your child being caught up in a school shooting is vanishingly small.
All these examples of mathematical illiteracy can be avoided by simply noticing the relevant denominator. Stories should not inform our assessment of danger, data should. In a country with 340 million people there will always be enough tragic stories to fill the news, but that doesn't tell you how common they are.
By the way, I frequently agree with the causes these fear tactics are designed to promote. I'm just trying to make the point that when our tears cloud our vision, our attempts to improve the world are likely to misfire/backfire.
All these examples of mathematical illiteracy can be avoided by simply noticing the relevant denominator. Stories should not inform our assessment of danger, data should. In a country with 340 million people there will always be enough tragic stories to fill the news, but that doesn't tell you how common they are.
By the way, I frequently agree with the causes these fear tactics are designed to promote. I'm just trying to make the point that when our tears cloud our vision, our attempts to improve the world are likely to misfire/backfire.
If we ignore mathematical realities, we'll also tend to make poor risk/quality of life tradeoffs. While admitting any sort of risk trade-off for your children is taboo, anyone who has taken their child on an unnecessary car trip has done it. Maybe buying your child body armor for school makes them a tad safer, but at a certain point you have to admit maybe you're being a bit extreme. The safest possible life isn't the best life.
Perhaps most importantly, we spend too much time worrying. Anxiety crushes well-being. I'd go insane if I went through life worrying about every statistically trivial risk that pops up on the news.
When we place "school shooting" closer to "car accident" and further from "getting struck by lightning" in our risk spectrum, something is wrong. We're not only mismanaging our lives, we're forming political opinions based on radical exceptions. Policy that effects hundreds of millions of people can't improve the world if they're founded on stories about someone somewhere doing something.
Some people feel uncomfortable with what I'm saying. Like I'm putting my head above my heart. But the fact is I'm using both. Your moral compass is a piece of junk if your mental map doesn't accurately describe the world. We need to take a cold dispassionate look at the numbers before we thrust ourselves into moral outrage. Then, if the situation warrants, outrage away.
I'd predict that if we really did follow the head first heart second rule, we'd spend less time in a state of angry confusion, and more time in mental peace.
