Danger

Have you ever leaned toward the plate glass window of a tall building, leaning to that point you can see the street so far below you? If you have, as I have, you have probably felt that breath catch in your throat, as you push back the images of broken glass preceding a fatal, terrifying free fall. Perhaps it is not heights, perhaps it is not even you, maybe you are someone who watches those chariot style baby cages rolling behind a spandex clad biker and think to yourself, one latch failure is all it would take; or worse, the judgmental, I would never risk my child that way. We have this lizard part of our brain, each a little different, but not that different, which reacts to perceived danger. The problem is, this part of our brain is not a mathematician, it has no concept of statistics or actual risk.

We stink at fighting that part of ourselves and we also stink at reacting when that part of ourselves is not firing. At a gut level we react to what we think of as danger, but often we have no concept of where real danger is, or what the level of that danger is. Humans will make arguments to remove their own personal danger items, while completely ignoring how those rules would be applied to other elements of their life.

The sound of thunder strikes fear in not just my dog, but also in my children. When the thunder rolls across the sky and you can smell the ozone in the air, children are ushered off the soccer field and told to get out of the pool. We recognize this at a gut level as a clear and present danger. In fact, between 1959 and 1994 in the United States, 3239 people we killed by lightening, so this danger is real, our gut is not wrong. The math works out to about 90 per year in the US or, given an average population of 219 million during those years, 0.4 deaths per million. Very rare. To give you a quick visual understanding if you made a stack of pennies two and a half miles high and each penny represented one person, one penny would be lost per year.

Lightening is not the only thing which causes people to react negatively, causes people to shield their children and react with the gut. For many people guns fill this same place. They react to people who are openly carrying. They decry the carriers as ignorant. Everything inside of them twists with fear at the presence of these weapons. Just as we know lightening kills, we know that guns can kill as well; but that lizard part of our brain doesn’t really know any of the math. In 2010 in the United States there were 11,078 homicides by firearms, which is obviously much greater than your risk of being killed by lightening. If we call 0.4 deaths per million per year a Lightening Risk (LR) than we can understand that increase to be 89LR, or you are 89 times as likely to suffer a firearm homicide as a lightning strike. This might have you quaking, but I am not sure it should. If I convert our penny example from before, it would be a stack of pennies fourteen and a half stories high and we would lose 1 of those pennies a year. Exponentially more common, but still very rare.

As a quick note, the rates of firearm homicide and lightning strikes, while already rare, also seem to be on the decline.

So, what things kill us, but we don’t seem to have much fear of?

Here is a fun one, remember the pools we make all those kids get out of when it starts to thunder? Drowning in pools is also something which happens to some of us every year. Ok, this only happen to a single person once, but as a group pools do kill us. For the most part, outside of toddling children, our lizard brain is off when it comes to pools. Should it be? Let’s look. Between 2005 and 2009 there was an annual average of 3533 unintentional, non boat related, drowning. How does that compare? Well, that works out to 11.7 per million people, or 29LR. So, about a third as dangerous as guns, but 29 times as dangerous as lightening.

How about one we know intellectually to fear, a danger we face every day with little or no quaking in that lizard brain. Automobile accidents. In 2011 we had the lowest traffic fatalities in 62 years, bottoming out at 32,479 traffic fatalities. That is a staggering 104 per million or 261LR. That is 3 times as dangerous as firearms, perhaps the first of these examples which we might say are not rare. We all seem to be touched by this one, but our brains haven’t caught up. We don’t respond, recoil, react. Or perhaps it is because we shouldn’t do any of these things, that the rate of accidents is rare enough that we have that one right. If that is true, then why are we responding, reacting and recoiling to a bunch of things that, if my math is right, we shouldn’t.