BookTalk.org

Please use this thread to discuss the above referenced chapter of How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going by Vaclav Smil.

Smil has some interesting takes on attitudes toward risk. He goes to considerable trouble to try to make risk of dying from various causes into comparable numbers, and frankly I found a lot of that to be tedious, but I think he successfully makes his main points:

1. People overestimate risks of unfamiliar events and of "dreadful" events (plane crashes, earthquakes, terrorist attacks), and

2. People underestimate riskiness of voluntary (especially if familiar) causes like driving, smoking and (my addition) going swimming.

The discussion is often surprising and surprisingly interesting, as when he goes into the likelihood of a solar flare causing stupendous disruption by knocking out electricity. (A 1989 event in Quebec knocked out power for 6 million people for 9 hours, and was much smaller than the 1859 "Carrington Event" that would arrive with relatively little warning and might cause destruction that would take years to repair).

He has some good perspective on disease and mortality. For example he is honest in admitting that a major cause of death is our success at keeping people alive longer: the dangers of, to use one of his examples, seasonal flu, go up dramatically after age 70.

I would complain about his sloppy use of life expectancy. Most life expectancy statistics are "at birth" and therefore driven mainly by infant and child mortality. Yet he tosses around "extra years" (in Japan relative to Spain, for example) as if they revealed something about risks. The main application was in comparing diets and trying to figure out if, say, a miso breakfast is worth more than eating a lot of pasta and fresh fruit. The numbers might be readily accessible, but they tell you nothing about the subject. Still, as usual his writing was nicely spiced with interesting questions and anecdotes.

In all, an entertaining (except for some of the numerical passages) and thought-provoking treatment that ranges over the psychological and quantitative terrain of risk assessment and risk mitigation. You will have to draw your own conclusions as to whether it is wise to pay more attention to people's attitudes or to hard numbers.

Harry Marks wrote: ↑Fri Mar 31, 2023 11:03 pm 2. People underestimate riskiness of voluntary (especially if familiar) causes like driving, smoking and (my addition) going swimming.

Shark attacks are reported to be protective for overall death risk. Poor swimmers are less likely to go into the ocean after a shark attack, so drowning rates, which far exceed shark deaths, fall during that period.

(Fact check, Freeman Dyson says this is an urban legend) But the principle still holds that intuition of risk is unreliable.