Everybody look at your pants

[cincinnatus_c]

Here's a feature of practical reasoning that I think about a lot, which is somewhere in the neighbourhood of the lottery paradox but has nothing in particular to do with it (though every time I think about it much I have to go look at that lottery paradox article again): suppose, say, there's an activity, like riding in the back of a pick-up truck, that will kill, say, over the course of an average century, one out of a hundred thousand people--or, to turn the emotional screw, children--who engage in it. Supposing this, in a town of a thousand people, most likely no one will die engaging in it in anyone's lifetime, while in a city of three million people a bunch of people will. If you live in the city you will periodically hear about people in your city being killed by it, while in the town you will never hear about people in your town being killed by it. Given this, in the city, you might tend to perceive that this is a very dangerous activity; in the town, you might tend to perceive that it is completely safe.

I think where this comes up, practically, most often (apart from things much like riding in the backs of pick-up trucks), is rural vs. urban expectations of being victimized by crime. In the country you leave your doors unlocked because nobody around you ever gets burgled. But no one around you ever gets burgled because, relative to the city, there's hardly anyone around you. (But if you read the crime reports in the regional papers, you see that people in the wider region you live in, as opposed to your neighbourhood or town, get burgled a lot.)

I also think of a conversation I once had with an older person about canning--I said something about home canning of certain vegetables, like tomatoes or something, being unsafe; she was surprised and said she'd never had any problem with it. If you're getting your information on canning from your mother (etc.) and/or your own experience, certain things will appear safe to you because the odds of something going (catastrophically) wrong are such that nothing is likely to ever go wrong for you or even for your whole family. But if you're getting your information from someone on the internet, they might have to tell you that those things are unsafe and advise you not to do them, because their audience is big enough that something will go catastrophically wrong for at least one person and possibly many people who try them (even following directions perfectly).

Put in lottery terms: suppose there's a standard 6/49 lottery, such that any ticket's odds of winning are one in nearly 14 million, and it sells a hundred tickets a week. This lottery would produce a winner, on average, once every nearly 2700 years. Obviously no one except the most magical of thinkers would play such a lottery; no one would win in most people's lifetimes. But the odds of winning would be exactly the same as they are for the 6/49 lotteries we actually have.

So, given this, you could say that the bigger your community (the definition of "community" here has to be specified in some way I'm not sure of offhand) is, the more things will seem unsafe to you. And if you are determined to prevent "just one x", how much you have to do to prevent just one x will depend on how many people under the potential influence of your preventative measures are susceptible to x. In the city, you have to ban riding in the back of pick-up trucks; in the town, maybe not--except that once the isolation of the town as a community breaks down, maybe you do, too, because now you have to be part of the wider effort to prevent "just one x" across that wider community.

--
Currently at Belmont Lake: 5.2. High there today: 7.4. Currently under my porch: 4.2.

Comments

[meanwright]

I see two things here:

(1) The lottery _remains_ a bad idea, despite the fact that, with enough people, you now have the ability to advertise the bad idea so that it seems good.

(2) Canning* may _become_ a bad idea, although I'd expect that it becomes, on average, a bad idea because of technology - for food storage in general, not just canning. But that technology requires a large number of people.

The value of canning as a personal activity changes as you increase the population size, not so with the lottery - or with the pickup trucks.

The question I'd have, here, is how does the perceived value or risk changing line up with the availability heuristic: do you see something more to it, or not?

I should say that I think leaving doors unlocked where I am, right now, is perfectly fine - despite Y's misgivings. My Aunt M didn't lock her doors in a similar place in DC and doesn't in a more rural one in PA.*3 This was not true for NOLA, where I'd hear people trying my door every couple of months. So, I always locked my door.*4 I think people's subjective assessments are actually pretty good, before they are terrorized by headlines.

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* I remember that the USDA had a list of these kinds of "Don't Believe Your Grandmother" kinds of things. Some of them may be true in general - you risk e coli poisoning if you marinade your steak overnight. But they may have to do with changing standards - despite eating and drinking the same things, I tend to get e coli poisoning** when traveling while Y., coming from somewhere with lower food standards than the US, does not.

** Montezuma's Revenge, Deli Belly, etc. Now, to be culturally sensitive, traveler's diarrhea - blaming the victim is better than offending other people.

*3 But, paraphrasing John Le Carre, no thief in history's idea of the ideal haul is a shitload of books.

*4 And, if I forgot to lock my car door, it would smell like cigarettes when I started it up in the morning.

[kest]

The canonical risk of canning is botulism, which is fairly rare but bad enough that anyone who cans should be aware of how to prevent it, and everyone should know about not eating from things with swollen lids etc. Also we now have an antitoxin - that's relatively recent. (Still not great for you if you get it though.)

I think the thing with doors unlocked is it really only takes one burglary for one to decide that locked doors are a great idea. And rural areas mean there's less people around to do the burgling but also maybe less people around to see someone acting shady. We do have definite evidence that the more crime you hear about, the more crime you think there is, and this is why a lot of people think things are awful right now even though crime has been trending down for decades.

[cincinnatus_c]

> The canonical risk of canning is botulism, which is fairly rare but bad
> enough that anyone who cans should be aware of how to prevent it

As I recall the thing is that it's easier to prevent with some vegetables than others, and with some it's hard enough that you'd probably best not bother canning them. I feel like tomatoes were the specific example in my conversation but I'm second-guessing that because tomatoes are generally acidic and you get bacterial issues in canning when you don't get things acidic enough. But maybe it's something to do with porosity or something, I dunno. (I could look this up, of course, but then one rabbit hole would lead to another and I'd never find my way back here.)

> this is why a lot of people think things are awful right now even
> though crime has been trending down for decades

Yeah, that's partly what I'm getting at. The other part is, when you hear about it, do you identify where it's happening and who it's happening to as being places like where you are and people like you (as opposed to somewhere else / other people)? I suspect that as news becomes less and less local all the time, there's less of a sense of crime, or anything, happening somewhere else, to other people. But I don't know, and it would be an interesting thing to test somehow. It's possible that the politically charged polarization of rural and urban identities yields an opposite effect, too.

[kest]

I think the thing with tomatoes is that people might expect that they are acidic enough but that is not necessarily true. (I have already rabbit holed on the botulism stuff to the point I was sending my bestie botulism facts (from the 70s-late 90s, botulism antitoxin was produced in a single horse) and she was like, why are you researching botulism at 2am?)

There's an element of, how are you setting your risk perception in all of this. If you think a thing is more risky than it is, then you are perhaps anxious when you don't need to be, 'living in fear', unnecessarily locking your door, carrying a gun around in public, checking the back seat of your car every time, wearing a mask at home alone, avoiding all home canned foods forever.... But if you think everything is fine and it's NOT, then that's an even bigger problem, because now you're robbed or murdered or have botulism or whatever. And people are really bad, as it turns out, at this grey area of 'this thing has a one in a hundred chance of happening' or one in a million. We want safe/not safe. Bad neighborhood, good neighborhood. Could win the lottery/will never get hit by lightning.

[cincinnatus_c]

> (1) The lottery _remains_ a bad idea

No doubt the lottery is always a bad idea*, and thought-experimentally reducing the number of tickets sold to 100 per week ought to convince people of that. But no doubt it wouldn't convince them of it, any more than pointing out that 1-2-3-4-5-6 has as good a chance as any other number of winning ever does. I guess with 1-2-3-4-5-6 the thing is that a lot of people just won't believe it anyway, and some of them won't believe it because they don't believe that the lottery, or anything, is truly random (e.g., either God will have you win the lottery or he won't, and c'mon, God is not gonna have you win the lottery if you play a stupid number like 1-2-3-4-5-6. In other words, "the most magical of thinkers" is maybe a lot of people.)

*more precisely it's a bad investment, given that the average return is guaranteed to be negative, but if all you really want out of life is to have fifty million dollars and whatever that gets you, and the lottery is the only way you could possibly get it, then playing the lottery is a good idea (the funny thing about this is I first realized this long ago when I was motivated to think about it by someone I didn't like mocking the stupidity of people playing lotteries).

Anyway, as to the contrast between the examples... yeah, the canning example gets distracting in that once mass canning technology exists it's not really worth it from a dispassionately rational point of view for anyone to do any home canning of anything... anyone's motives for doing or consuming it will have something to do with personal / family / local connections, or ideology, or something like that (or else some kind of probably irrational belief that home-canned products are better for you and/or actually less likely to poison you). As I like to say about growing my own vegetables, after a pretty good sample of years of trying: growing your own may be a lot more expensive and time-consuming than buying them from the grocery store, but at least they're not as good! (This is not true of everything... but it's true of a lot.)

But anyway, controlling the mass-production technological alternatives out of the canning example, it occurs to me that you can actually resolve it into an actual lottery paradox: families A, B, C, D, E, ... Z all can their own tomatoes; the members of each family are justified in believing that no one in their own family will ever get botulism from their canned tomatoes; but anyone would be justified in believing that someone in at least one of those families will get botulism.

And anyway what I'm getting at is that while the members of the families will all be justified in believing that no one in their families will get botulism, someone like me, who doesn't come from a canning family, has no set of people to identify with for whom they can believe with justification that no one of them will ever get botulism from their home-canned tomatoes. That old lady believes with justification that "none of us (including me) will ever get botulism"; I believe with justification that "one of us (maybe me) will get botulism"--because my "us" is much bigger than hers.

> how does the perceived value or risk changing line up with the availability
> heuristic: do you see something more to it, or not?

I always have to look up things like "availability heuristic"... but I guess the thing here is, like I was just saying to kest, it's one thing to hear examples of things happening, it's another thing to hear examples of things happening and identify with them in such a way that you take them as evidence that those things might happen to you. The thing I keep thinking of in connection to this (although it's such a messy example that I keep not bringing it up) is a grocery store cashier I overheard sometime around 2005 in Kitchener, Ontario--at that time a city in the 100K population range, in a metropolitan area of maybe 250K--saying she didn't want to go to Toronto because she was afraid of terrorist attacks. So, she hears about 9/11 happening, and (for at least that many years after) she identifies Toronto but not Kitchener as a place where similar things might happen.

> This was not true for NOLA

Yeah, the fact that crime rates do actually differ a lot by city, not to mention neighbourhood, also messes up my crude examples.