The Irrational Risk of Thinking We Can Be Rational About Risk | Risk: Reason and Realit... - 0 views
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in the most precise sense of the word, facts are meaningless…just disconnected ones and zeroes in the computer until we run them through the software of how those facts feel
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Of all the building evidence about human cognition that suggests we ought to be a little more humble about our ability to reason, no other finding has more significance, because Elliott teaches us that no matter how smart we like to think we are, our perceptions are inescapably a blend of reason and gut reaction, intellect and instinct, facts and feelings.
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Because our perceptions rely as much as or more on feelings than simply on the facts, we sometimes get risk wrong. We’re more afraid of some risks than we need to be (child abduction, vaccines), and not as afraid of some as we ought to be (climate change, particulate air pollution), and that “Perception Gap” can be a risk in and of itself
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There are more than a dozen of these risk perception factors, (see Ch. 3 of “How Risky Is It, Really? Why Our Fears Don’t Match the Facts", available online free at)
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many people, particularly intellectuals and academics and policy makers, maintain a stubborn post-Enlightenment confidence in the supreme power of rationality. They continue to believe that we can make the ‘right’ choices about risk based on the facts, that with enough ‘sound science’ evidence from toxicology and epidemiology and cost-benefit analysis, the facts will reveal THE TRUTH. At best this confidence is hopeful naivete. At worst, it is intellectual arrogance that denies all we’ve learned about the realities of human cognition. In either case, it’s dangerous
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We must understand that instinct and intellect are interwoven components of a single system that helps us perceive the world and make our judgments and choices, a system that worked fine when the risks we faced were simpler but which can make dangerous mistakes as we try to figure out some of the more complex dangers posed in our modern world.
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What we can do to avoid the dangers that arise when our fears don’t match the facts—the most rational thing to do—is, first, to recognize that our risk perceptions can never be purely objectively perfectly 'rational', and that our subjective perceptions are prone to potentially dangerous mistakes.
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Then we can begin to apply all the details we've discovered of how our risk perception system works, and use that knowledge and self-awareness to make wiser, more informed, healthier choices