I was 19, a college sophomore. It was Spring, 1970, and the anti-Vietnam movement was bringing the progressive 60s to a crescendo. Four college students had been shot to […]

            The New York Times reports that an MIT statistics professor has found that flying on a commercial jet has never been safer. Not that it was ever that much […]

         Americans have always disagreed, about a lot. Somehow though, we’ve managed to get along with each other while we do. Why, then, has disagreeing become so nasty, so fierce, […]

            You and I make risk judgments for ourselves all the time, based on a few facts and a lot of subjective, instinctive emotional factors. As a result we sometimes […]

Getting risk wrong leads to dangers all by itself, and we will remain vulnerable to these mistakes until we let go of our naïve post-Enlightenment faith in reason and accept that risk perception is inescapably an affective system, not just a matter of rationally figuring out the facts. 

        Humans are blessed, and cursed, with a risk perception system that mostly gets things right, but sometimes creates what I call a Risk Perception Gap, when we worry more […]

          Have you read the 2008 Supreme Court decision that gives all Americans the right to own guns? Probably not. I hadn’t, until the other day, when I was stunned […]