Risk - The Science and Politics of Fear (Book Review)

[Vendetta]

www.whatareyouafraidof.co.uk

We are, so the saying goes, all doomed. Nary a day goes by without some shocking new story of terrorism, cancer, crime, plague, war, and death. Politicians make their daily bread and win our votes by continually reminding us that only they can shield us from the horrors of modern living.

But how doomed are we?

Dan Gardner's book is an in depth assessment not only of the real extent of the risks of the modern world, but how humans actually percieve risk and decide what we should be afraid of.

The first few chapters deal with the latter subject, how we determine and evaluate risks. And the answer, of course, is spectacularly badly. As humans, our structures for evaluating risk evolved at a time when we were living in tribes of hunter gatherers, so the only input we had to assess risks were our own experience and emotions and the narratives of our tribe recounting theirs. Our risk assesment strategies are, to put it bluntly, evolved to commit every single logical fallacy. Anecdotes are our risk assesment data, and the more lurid the detail in the anecdote, the more true we are likely to hold it. The better we can imagine something, the more likely we think it is. The more we can imagine us being emotionally affected by something, the more likely we think it is. Statistics haven't got a chance.

In the modern world, we are overloaded with narrative presentations of risks, especially by the media and politicians. However, the risks that are focused on are the ones that make good emotional stories. Violent crimes, rare medical conditions, paedophiles lurking at the school gates, and so on. And these are usually the most vanishingly small actual risks. But it's not really the fault of the media for doing this, because they're just as human, with all the same bad risk assessment wiring as the rest of us.

The book moves on to deal in specific detail with the most commonly assumed risk factors of the modern world, cancer, crime, pollution, terrorism etc. Bringing hard statistical evidence to the table in each case. For instance, if terrorists hijacked a plane every week and killed the same number of people they did on 9/11, the average American would still have a higher chance of dying in a traffic accident. The "nightmare scenario" of nuclear terrorism is no different. Most estimates put the direct casualties of a terrorist nuclear attack at around 100,000 in a major city (and, as the book discusses when dealing with the only actual terrorist attacks with WMDs, those by the Aum Shinryuko cult, this is generous, it's really not easy to make this stuff work), whilst every year 75,000 americans die of diabetes. You did not see dire and ominous warnings about diabetes in Republican political scare ads.

The book is entertainingly written, Gardner is quick witted and manages to hold the reader's attention even whilst admitting that one of his key subjects, statistics, is simply not engaging to us, and that's why we're so bad at dealing with it, and backs up each of it's psychological points with reference to empirical studies and actual science, and presenting hard statistics about real risks.

I highly reccommend everyone read this book.

(The book is published in the United States as The Science of Fear)

[TheKwas]

I don't have much to add other than Dan Gardner is also a columnist and writes often for newspapers like The Ottawa Citizen. His web page is here: http://www.dangardner.ca/ and I highly recommend all his writing.