risk
oracknows | September 3, 2014
This post, although it is about an interview with a CDC scientist named William W. Thompson that resulted from the whole “CDC whistleblower” manufactroversy that’s been flogged relentlessly for the last two weeks, since antivaccine “heros” Andrew Wakefield and Brian Hooker released a despicable race-bating video flogging Hooker’s utterly incompetent reanalysis of a ten year old study that had failed to find an association between autism diagnosis and age of first vaccination, is about a more general issue as well, an issue that can apply to discussions of just about any trumped up risk,…
edyong | November 3, 2009A friend of mine recently got onto a train and found a group of four seats that were empty except for one woman who was sitting face down. She looked asleep and he looked forward to a quiet journey. As soon as he sat down, the woman lifted her head to reveal streaming, puffy eyes and started sneezing profusely. This happened a few weeks after swine flu first began to dominate the headlines but being English, he was bound to the socially awkward choice of staying in his seat for the sake of avoiding social awkwardness.
Many of us probably have similar stories. At a time when fears of a flu…
ddobbs | March 10, 2009"How We Decide" author Jonah Lehrer, fresh from a book tour of the UK, offers what he calls a "spluttering answer" (it's really quite lucid) to a question he says he's getting a lot these days: What decision-making errors were involved in our current financial meltdown??
The short version of his answer -- well worth reading in its entirety -- is that we (and big investment outfits particularlyl) succumbed to an abhorrence of uncertainty.
We hate not knowing, and this often leads us to neglect relevant information that might undermine the certainty of our conclusions. I think some of the…