Re: Why We Worry About The Things We Shouldn't... ...And Ignore The

[Guest guest]

I meant that to be uplifting now re reading it, another bummer.... going

back to bed... sorry again yall, sally

--- nmilover <nmilover@...> wrote:

> I did not mean to be gruff or scare anyone....... I am sorry if I did

> that........Thank you Pam for this article...... merry merry happy happy

> and don't stress, again I apologize if I caused Kitty or any of you any

> undo worry. hugs, sally

>

> Why We Worry About The Things We Shouldn't... ...And Ignore The

> Things

> > We Should

> > By JEFFREY KLUGER

> >

> > Posted Sunday, Nov. 26, 2006

> > Correction Appended: November 27, 2006

> >

> > It would be a lot easier to enjoy your life if there weren't so many

> > things trying to kill you every day. The problems start even before

> > you're fully awake. There's the fall out of bed that kills 600

> Americans

> > each year. There's the early-morning heart attack, which is 40% more

> > common than those that strike later in the day. There's the fatal

> plunge

> > down the stairs, the bite of sausage that gets lodged in your throat,

> > the tumble on the slippery sidewalk as you leave the house, the

> > high-speed automotive pinball game that is your daily commute.

> >

> > Other dangers stalk you all day long. Will a cabbie's brakes fail

> when

> > you're in the crosswalk? Will you have a violent reaction to bad

> food?

> > And what about the risks you carry with you all your life? The father

> > and grandfather who died of coronaries in their 50s probably passed

> the

> > same cardiac weakness on to you. The tendency to take chances on the

> > highway that has twice landed you in traffic court could just as

> easily

> > land you in the morgue.

> >

> > Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we'd get pretty good at

> > distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are

> > statistical long shots. But you would be wrong. We agonize over avian

> > flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the U.S., but have

> to

> > be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which

> contributes

> > to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year. We wring our hands over

> the

> > mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn't) in our

> > hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes

> to

> > the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually.

> >

> > We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the

> > concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about

> mere

> > possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades

> against

> > perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones. Six

> > Muslims traveling from a religious conference were thrown off a plane

> > last week in Minneapolis, Minn., even as unscreened cargo continues

> to

> > stream into ports on both coasts. Shoppers still look askance at a

> bag

> > of spinach for fear of E. coli bacteria while filling their carts

> with

> > fat-sodden French fries and salt-crusted nachos. We put filters on

> > faucets, install air ionizers in our homes and lather ourselves with

> > antibacterial soap. " We used to measure contaminants down to the

> parts

> > per million, " says Dan McGinn, a former Capitol Hill staff member and

> > now a private risk consultant. " Now it's parts per billion. "

> >

> > At the same time, 20% of all adults still smoke; nearly 20% of

> drivers

> > and more than 30% of backseat passengers don't use seat belts;

> > two-thirds of us are overweight or obese. We dash across the street

> > against the light and build our homes in hurricane-prone areas--and

> when

> > they're demolished by a storm, we rebuild in the same spot. Sensible

> > calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem

> that

> > sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that

> it's

> > something we'll never do exceptionally well, it's almost certainly

> > something we can learn to do better.

> >

> > AN OLD BRAIN IN A NEW WORLD

> >

> > Part of the problem we have with evaluating risk, scientists say, is

> > that we're moving through the modern world with what is, in many

> > respects, a prehistoric brain. We may think we've grown accustomed to

> > living in a predator-free environment in which most of the dangers of

> > the wild have been driven away or fenced off, but our central nervous

> > system--evolving at a glacial pace--hasn't got the message.

> >

> > To probe the risk-assessment mechanisms of the human mind, ph

> > LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University and the

> > author of The Emotional Brain, studies fear pathways in laboratory

> > animals. He explains that the jumpiest part of the brain--of mouse

> and

> > man--is the amygdala, a primitive, almond-shaped clump of tissue that

> > sits just above the brainstem. When you spot potential danger--a

> stick

> > in the grass that may be a snake, a shadow around a corner that could

> be

> > a mugger--it's the amygdala that reacts the most dramatically,

> > triggering the fight-or-flight reaction that pumps adrenaline and

> other

> > hormones into your bloodstream.

> >

> > It's not until a fraction of a second later that the higher regions

> of

> > the brain get the signal and begin to sort out whether the danger is

> > real. But that fraction of a second causes us to experience the fear

> far

> > more vividly than we do the rational response--an advantage that

> doesn't

> > disappear with time. The brain is wired in such a way that nerve

> signals

> > travel more readily from the amygdala to the upper regions than from

> the

> > upper regions back down. Setting off your internal alarm is quite

> easy,

> > but shutting it down takes some doing.

> >

> > " There are two systems for analyzing risk: an automatic, intuitive

> > system and a more thoughtful analysis, " says Slovic, professor

> of

> > psychology at the University of Oregon. " Our perception of risk lives

> > largely in our feelings, so most of the time we're operating on

> system

> > No. 1. "

> >

> > There's clearly an evolutionary advantage to this natural

> timorousness.

> > If we're mindful of real dangers and flee when they arise, we're more

> > likely to live long enough to pass on our genes. But evolutionary

> > rewards also come to those who stand and fight, those willing to take

> > risks--and even suffer injury--in pursuit of prey or a mate. Our

> > ancestors hunted mastodons and stampeded buffalo, risking getting

> > trampled for the possible payoff of meat and pelt. Males advertised

> > their reproductive fitness by fighting other males, willingly

> engaging

> > in a contest that could mean death for one and offspring for the

> other.

> >

> > These two impulses--to engage danger or run from it--are constantly

> at

> > war and have left us with a well-tuned ability to evaluate the costs

> and

> > payoffs of short-term risk, say Slovic and others. That, however, is

> not

> > the kind we tend to face in contemporary society, where threats don't

> > necessarily spring from behind a bush. They're much more likely to

> come

> > to us in the form of rumors or news broadcasts or an escalation of

> the

> > federal terrorism-threat level from orange to red. It's when the risk

> > and the consequences of our response unfold more slowly, experts say,

> > that our analytic system kicks in. This gives us plenty of

> opportunity

> > to overthink--or underthink--the problem, and this is where we start

> to

> > bollix things up.

> >

> > WHY WE GUESS WRONG

> >

> > Which risks get excessive attention and which get overlooked depends

> on

> > a hierarchy of factors. Perhaps the most important is dread. For most

> > creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you're

> eaten

> > by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over.

> > That's not the way humans see things. The more pain or suffering

> > something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at

> least

> > quicker the death, the less it troubles us. " We dread anything that

> > poses a greater risk for cancer more than the things that injure us

> in a

> > traditional way, like an auto crash, " says Slovic. " That's the dread

> > factor. " In other words, the more we dread, the more anxious we get,

> and

> > the more anxious we get, the less precisely we calculate the odds of

> the

> > thing actually happening. " It's called probability neglect, " says

> Cass

> > Sunstein, a University of Chicago professor of law specializing in

> risk

> > regulation.

> >

> > The same is true for, say, AIDS, which takes you slowly, compared

> with a

> > heart attack, which can kill you in seconds, despite the fact that

> heart

> > disease claims nearly 50 times as many Americans than AIDS each year.

> We

> > also dread catastrophic risks, those that cause the deaths of a lot

> of

> > people in a single stroke, as opposed to those that kill in a

> chronic,

> > distributed way. " Terrorism lends itself to excessive reactions

> because

> > it's vivid and there's an available incident, " says Sunstein.

> " Compare

> > that to climate change, which is gradual and abstract. "

> >

> > Unfamiliar threats are similarly scarier than familiar ones. The next

> E.

> > coli outbreak is unlikely to shake you up as much as the previous

> one,

> > and any that follow will trouble you even less. In some respects,

> this

> > is a good thing, particularly if the initial reaction was excessive.

> But

> > it's also unavoidable given our tendency to habituate to any

> unpleasant

> > stimulus, from pain and sorrow to a persistent car alarm.

> >

> > The problem with habituation is that it can also lead us to go to the

> > other extreme, worrying not too much but too little. Sept. 11 and

> > Hurricane Katrina brought calls to build impregnable walls against

> such

> > tragedies ever occurring again. But despite the vows, both New Orleans

> > and the nation's security apparatus remain dangerously leaky. " People

> > call these crises wake-up calls, " says Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate

> > dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University

> and

> > director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness. " But

> they're

> > more like snooze alarms. We get agitated for a while, and then we

> don't

> > follow through. "

> >

> > THE COMFORT OF CONTROL

> >

> > We similarly misjudge risk if we feel we have some control over it,

> even

> > if it's an illusory sense. The decision to drive instead of fly is

> the

> > most commonly cited example, probably because it's such a good one.

> > Behind the wheel, we're in charge; in the passenger seat of a crowded

> > airline, we might as well be cargo. So white-knuckle flyers routinely

> > choose the car, heedless of the fact that at most a few hundred

> people

> > die in U.S. commercial airline crashes in a year, compared with

> 44,000

> > killed in motor-vehicle wrecks. The most white-knuckle time of all

> was

> > post--Sept. 11, when even confident flyers took to the roads. Not

> > surprisingly, from October through December 2001 there were 1,000

> more

> > highway fatalities than in the same period the year before, in part

> > because there were simply more cars around. " It was called the '9/11

> > effect.' It produced a third again as many fatalities as the

> terrorist

> > attacks, " says Ropeik, an independent risk consultant and a

> former

> > annual instructor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

> >

> > Then too there's what Ropeik and others call " optimism bias, " the

> thing

> > that makes us glower when we see someone driving erratically while

> > talking on a cell phone, even if we've done the very same thing,

> perhaps

> > on the very same day. We tell ourselves we're different, because our

> > call was shorter or our business was urgent or we were able to pay

> > attention to the road even as we talked. What optimism bias comes

> down

> > to, however, is the convenient belief that risks that apply to other

> > people don't apply to us.

> >

> > Finally, and for many of us irresistibly, there's the irrational way

> we

> > react to risky behavior that also confers some benefit. It would be a

> > lot easier to acknowledge the perils of smoking cigarettes or eating

> too

> > much ice cream if they weren't such pleasures. Drinking too much

> confers

> > certain benefits too, as do risky sex, recreational drugs and

> uncounted

> > other indulgences. This is especially true since, in most cases, the

> > gratification is immediate and the penalty, if it comes at all, comes

> > later. With enough time and enough temptation, we can talk ourselves

> > into ignoring almost any long-term costs. " These things are fun or

> hip,

> > even if they can be lethal, " says Ropeik. " And that pleasure is a

> > benefit we weigh. "

> >

> > If these reactions are true for all of us--and they are--then you

> might

> > think that all of us would react to risk in the same way. But that's

> > clearly not the case. Some people enjoy roller coasters; others won't

> go

> > near them. Some skydive; others can't imagine it. Not only are thrill

> > seekers not put off by risk, but they're drawn to it, seduced by the

> > mortal frisson that would leave many of us cold. " There's an internal

> > thermostat that seems to control this, " says risk expert

> of

> > University College London. " That set point varies from person to

> person

> > and circumstance to circumstance. "

> >

> > No one knows how such a set point gets calibrated, but evidence

> suggests

> > that it is a mix of genetic and environmental variables. In a study

> at

> > the University of Delaware in 2000, researchers used personality

> surveys

> > to evaluate the risk-taking behavior of 260 college students and

> > correlated it with existing research on the brain and blood chemistry

> of

> > people with thrill-seeking personalities or certain emotional

> disorders.

> > Their findings support the estimate that about 40% of the high-thrill

> > temperament is learned and 60% inherited, with telltale differences

> in

> > such relevant brain chemicals as serotonin, which helps inhibit

> > impulsive behavior and may be in short supply in people with

> high-wire

> > personalities.

> >

> > CAN WE DO BETTER?

> >

> > Given these idiosyncratic reactions, is it possible to have a

> rational

> > response to risk? If we can't agree on whether something is dangerous

> or

> > not or, if it is, whether it's a risk worth taking, how can we come

> up

> > with policies that keep all of us reasonably safe?

> >

> > One way to start would to be to look at the numbers. Anyone can agree

> > that a 1-in-1 million risk is better than 1 in 10, and 1 in 10 is

> better

> > than 50-50. But things are almost always more complicated than that,

> a

> > fact that corporations, politicians and other folks with agendas to

> push

> > often deftly exploit.

> >

> > Take the lure of the comforting percentage. In one study, Slovic

> found

> > that people were more likely to approve of airline safety-equipment

> > purchases if they were told that it could " potentially save 98% of

> 150

> > people " than if they were told it could " potentially save 150

> people. "

> > On its face this reaction makes no sense, since 98% of 150 people is

> > only 147. But there was something about the specificity of the number

> > that the respondents found appealing. " Experts tend to use very

> > analytic, mathematical tools to calculate risk, " Slovic says. " The

> > public tends to go more on their feelings. "

> >

> > There's also the art of the flawed comparison. Officials are fond of

> > reassuring the public that they run a greater risk from, for example,

> > drowning in the bathtub, which kills 320 Americans a year, than from

> a

> > new peril like mad cow disease, which has so far killed no one in the

> > U.S. That's pretty reassuring--and very misleading. The fact is that

> > anyone over 6 and under 80--which is to say, the overwhelming

> majority

> > of the U.S. population--faces almost no risk of perishing in the tub.

> > For most of us, the apples of drowning and the oranges of mad cow

> > disease don't line up in any useful way.

> >

> > But such statistical straw men get trotted out all the time. People

> > defending the safety of pesticides and other toxins often argue that

> you

> > stand a greater risk of being hit by a falling airplane (about 1 in

> > 250,000 over the course of your entire life) than you do of being

> harmed

> > by this or that contaminant. If you live near an airport, however,

> the

> > risk of getting beaned is about 1 in 10,000. Two very different

> > probabilities are being conflated into one flawed forecast. " My

> favorite

> > is the one that says you stand a greater risk from dying while

> skydiving

> > than you do from some pesticide, " says Egan Keane of the

> Natural

> > Resources Defense Council. " Well, I don't skydive, so my risk is

> zero. "

> >

> > Risk figures can be twisted in more disastrous ways too. Last year's

> > political best seller, The One Percent Doctrine, by journalist Ron

> > Suskind, pleased or enraged you, depending on how you felt about war

> in

> > Iraq, but it hit risk analysts where they live. The title of the book

> is

> > drawn from a White House determination that if the risk of a

> terrorist

> > attack in the U.S. was even 1%, it would be treated as if it were a

> 100%

> > certainty. Critics of Administration policy argue that that 1%

> > possibility was never properly balanced against the 100% certainty of

> > the tens of thousands of casualties that would accompany a war.

> That's a

> > position that may be easier to take in 2006, with Baghdad in flames

> and

> > the war grinding on, but it's still true that a 1% danger that

> something

> > will happen is the same as a 99% likelihood that it won't.

> >

> > REAL AND PERCEIVED RISK

> >

> > It's not impossible for us to become sharper risk handicappers. For

> one

> > thing, we can take the time to learn more about the real odds. Baruch

> > Fischhoff, professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie

> Mellon

> > University, recently asked a panel of 20 communications and finance

> > experts what they thought the likelihood of human-to-human

> transmission

> > of avian flu would be in the next three years. They put the figure at

> > 60%. He then asked a panel of 20 medical experts the same question.

> > Their answer: 10%. " There's reason to be critical of experts, "

> Fischhoff

> > says, " but not to replace their judgment with laypeople's opinions. "

> >

> > The government must also play a role in this, finding ways to frame

> > warnings so that people understand them. Graham, formerly the

> > administrator of the federal Office of Information and Regulatory

> > Affairs, says risk analysts suffer no end of headaches trying to get

> > Americans to understand that while nuclear power plants do pose

> dangers,

> > the more imminent peril to both people and the planet comes from the

> > toxins produced by coal-fired plants. Similarly, pollutants in fish

> can

> > be dangerous, but for most people--with the possible exception of

> small

> > children and women of childbearing age--the cardiac benefits of fish

> > easily outweigh the risks. " If you can get people to compare, " he

> says,

> > " then you're in a situation where you can get them to make reasoned

> > choices. "

> >

> > Just as important is to remember to pay proper mind to the dangers

> that,

> > as the risk experts put it, are hiding in plain sight. Most people no

> > longer doubt that global warming is happening, yet we live and work

> in

> > air-conditioned buildings and drive gas-guzzling cars. Most people

> would

> > be far likelier to participate in a protest at a nuclear power plant

> > than at a tobacco company, but it's smoking, not nukes, that kills an

> > average of 1,200 Americans every single day.

> >

> > We can do better, however, and leaders in government and industry can

> > help. The residual parts of our primitive brains may not give us any

> > choice beyond fighting or fleeing. But the higher reasoning we've

> > developed over millions of years gives us far greater--and far more

> > nuanced--options. Officials who provide hard, honest numbers and a

> > citizenry that takes the time to understand them would not only mean

> a

> > smarter nation, but a safer one. [This article contains a complex

> > diagram. Please see hardcopy or pdf.] TOTAL ANNUAL DEATHS 2.5 MILLION

> > Homicide 17,732 Suicide 31,484

> >

> > Terrified of bees, snakes and swimming pools? ACCIDENTS 109,277 Maybe

> > you should worry more about your heart DISEASES 2.3 million Other

> > diseases 681,150 Diabetes 74,219 Chronic lower-respiratory disease

> > 126,382 Stroke 157,689 Cancer 556,902 Heart disease 685,089 All other

> > deaths 8,364 Sources: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention;

> > National Transportation Safety Board

> >

> > Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly identified

> > Ropeik as a " former professor at the Harvard School of Public

> > Health. " In fact, Mr. Ropeik was a former annual instructor, not a

> > professor, and he was not a member of the school's faculty.

> >

> >

> > With reporting by Bjerklie/New York, Dan Cray/Los Angeles

> >

> > http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1562978,00.html

> >

> >

>

> " and the beat goes on....... " Sonny Bono

> --------------Learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your

> thoughts when theybecome anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience

> breeds anxiety,fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates

> confidence,decisiveness, and a rational outlook, which eventually leads

> tosuccess. --

>

> __________________________________________________

>