Our Mr. Doctorow has an article in today’s Guardian. It is all about the difficulty that we humans have in understanding statistics. I think he’s rather brave to try to make any point by talking about pedophiles, but he is right, and he does show very clearly why anti-terrorist efforts end up fingering so many innocent people.

Of course I’m not by any means the target of his article. My reaction on entering Las Vegas airport (you don’t need to leave it, Cory, there are plenty of slots inside the terminal) was to think, “oh my, look at all these poor sods pouring away their life’s savings.” The best way to learn that gambling is a poor investment is to work in the business (in my case working in a bookmaker’s during college vacations). I’m also one of those odd people who generally feel safer on public transit than in a car.

And that actually brings me to a useful point, because actually it isn’t so much lack of education that makes us bad at understanding risk, it is the way things are presented, and the way we react to them. People think that traveling on trains is horribly dangerous because every time there is a train crash it is headline news. If every car crash was headline news as well, then people might start getting the point that they miss from the raw statistics. But even then I suspect they’d dismiss the danger of road travel on the grounds that they are good drivers and it is only bad drivers who have accidents, whereas on a train you don’t get to drive. We are hard-wired to be much more fearful of things we think we cannot control than of things we think we can. Which is why gambling addicts spend so much time convincing themselves that they have “a system.”