Our brains are wired to fear threats that cause us dread--which is an actual term of art in the risk business. Dread represents all of our evolutionary fears, hopes, lessons, prejudices, and distortions wrapped up in one dark X factor.
In my book, I tried to condense a lot of risk research into one shorthand equation for dread: Dread = Uncontrollability + Unfamiliarity + Imaginability + Suffering + Scale of Destruction + Unfairness
As I read about the Toyota story, about cars accelerating uncontrollably and Toyota executives watching it all…
Just received the Polish paperback.. I like the dangling rope! Not too Hollywood, nor too Warsaw. As for the title, my handy online Polish-English translation service tells me that it means, roughly, “Survival Instinct.”
(Translator is at a loss to explain subtitle, aside from the obvious word for “catastrophe,” but we’ll hope for the best.)
When a man was stabbed to death early one morning on a NYC subway, a nervous passenger scrambled to pull the emergency brake, immediately stopping the train. Another example of an average citizen averting a disaster?
Not exactly.
TheNew York Times reported this week that the emergency brake is not to be pulled during an emergency. Well, actually, the emergency brake should only be pulled during certain kinds of emergencies, and it’s up to you to know what constitutes an emergency and what doesn’t. In this particular instance, the immediate…
Here’s how the story line usually goes for disasters: First, in the days immediately following the hurricane or quake or other calamity, reporters warn of a generalized “fear” that desperate survivors may turn to violence and looting. Then, sure enough, reporters tell stories of violence and looting. Some are eye witness accounts by credible observers. Most are not.
The thing is, in developed nations, we can say with…
What happens if you take a horrifically poor place and shake it to pieces? I heard a survivor describe the scene in Haiti as “hell on top of hell” on CNN yesterday. We are learning all over again that disasters aren’t “natural” or inevitable. Money matters more than anything else. Which is to say, where and how we live matters more than Mother Nature.
Remember the 1994 Northridge earthquake in California? In magnitude and depth, that quake was similar to the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. The Northridge quake killed 63 people, and the Pakistan one killed about 100,000.…
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been wondering: Is this all just manufactured hysteria? Are Americans as freaked out by the failed bomb plot as much as the people on their TV screens?
CNN has a new poll out today that suggests regular people are not the ones with the problem (full results in a PDF here). Americans, it seems, don’t scare nearly as easily as their leaders and their reporters.
* Percent of Americans who say they are very or somewhat worried that they or someone in their family will become a victim…
OK, as I sit here waiting for Pres. Obama to speak (again!) on the attempted airplane bombing, I find myself perplexed by a very basic question. Perhaps I am missing something. But the indictment of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab alleges that he carried a device containing PETN and TATP, among other ingredients, onto Flight 253 in Amsterdam.
The indictment doesn’t say how much explosive material he was allegedly carrying, but news reports consistently cite 80 grams of PETN--which is just under 3 oz. (Not clear how much TATP he is charged with having carried.) In any case,…
