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

[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.