Schneier: Rare Risks Breed Irrational Responses

Bruce Schneier’s latest wired.com commentar is excellent.

People tend to base risk analysis more on personal story than on data, despite the old joke that “the plural of anecdote is not data.”

While there is plenty of philosophical wiggle room in this statement, most of us base decisions and estimations and opinions on personal experience, with anecdotal experience a close second. It is such an amazingly successful strategy that it completely dominates the thought processes of individuals unwilling to concede to the superior experience of others. Most of us start to grow out of it some time in young adulthood.

This isn’t a strong field of experience to me, so I’m generalizing based on what I’ve gleaned from coursework and experience even in surmising that oh god I’ve recursed, I’m going fractal.

Starting over:

Citing examples of others being irrational is easy by the nature of the statement, but it is more insightful to pinpoint personal irrationality. Insight is nice but it’s really really hard. Surround oneself with people that can help is the trick. If your friends and associates aren’t providing insights of this sort, you are either enlightened or wasting time.

But that’s not the way we think. Psychologist Scott Plous said it well in The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making: “In very general terms: (1) The more available an event is, the more frequent or probable it will seem; (2) the more vivid a piece of information is, the more easily recalled and convincing it will be; and (3) the more salient something is, the more likely it will be to appear causal.”

On a lighter note, this process also impacts opinions on fashion, entertainment, visual art, music, education, gun control, social welfare, the death penalty, and so on and so forth.