Everybody look at your pants
Dec. 29th, 2022 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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Currently at Belmont Lake: 5.2. High there today: 7.4. Currently under my porch: 4.2.
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.
