Publications

Cory Doctorow, guardian.co.uk, May 20 2008

The single most pernicious threat to liberty today is humanity's natural tendency to misunderstand the statistics of rare events. We're just not wired to have good intuition about things that happen with extreme infrequency.

I'll prove it. If we were good at understanding statistics, then here's what would happen when you flew to Las Vegas. You'd step out of McCarran airport, stare down the Strip at all those glittering, palatial casinos and say to yourself, "Holy crap -- think of all the suckers who must have lost everything to finance this place!" Instead, our foolish minds are filled with thoughts like, "Man, look at all the money in this town -- I'm going to win big!" And another casino is built.

The rare -- and the lurid -- loom large in our imagination, and it's to our great detriment when it comes to our safety and security. ...

You don't get to understand the statistics of rare events by intuition. It's something that has to be learned, through formal and informal instruction. If there's one thing the government and our educational institutions could do to keep us safer, it's this: teach us how statistics works. They should drill it into us with the same vigor with which they approached convincing us that property values would rise forever, make it the subject of reality TV shows and infuse every corner of our news and politics with it. Without an adequate grasp of these concepts, no one can ever tell for sure if he or she is safe.

Read more.