4 ms·

> Lightning is one of the leading causes of weather-related fatalities. But the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are only around 1 in 500,000.

> Lightning is one of the leading causes of weather-related fatalities. But the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are only around 1 in 500,000. https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html You're also a few orders of magnitude more likely to die from choking on food, yet eating is generally considered safe. At odds these low, I don't think it generally matters whether you did something to precipitate it or not. Whether or not [social] media is hyping and fear mongering a scenario seems to be the foremost factor (see in particular: fear of terrorism.) In the case of fear-of-vaccines, it seems to have much more to do with Oprah than anything else.

sandworm101 6y ago
Such numbers, absent context, are meaningless. To say I have a 1:1,000,000,000 chance of being eaten by a shark is ridiculous if I never go near an ocean. And that number conversely means nothing to someone floating in the water looking at a shark. Go for an ocean swim every morning? Your shark-attack risk is several orders of magnitude greater than average. I think your chance of being killed by lightning while golfing in summer, in florida, with a pacemaker installed, using metal clubs, during a rainstorm ... then it gets a little more dangerous than weather-death statistics would suggest.
- catalogia 6y ago
  You do eat though, right? You may not surf with sharks but I wager you eat every day. Do you slice hotdogs into tiny pieces or do you chomp into them like a normal person, apathetic to the small risk of choking? You can split hairs if you like, but I think if you're honest about it you'll find that many activities in your daily routine have greater than three in a million odds of killing you. That really is my point, that the average human tolerance for danger is much higher than a few in a million. People who fear things with odds that low are being irrational. Shark attacks is actually a great example of media induced hysteria. Even if you swim in the ocean every day and therefore have orders of magnitude more risk, that elevated level of risk is still small. Fear of sharks was largely induced by the sensational horror movie Jaws and is occasionally reinforced by profit-motivated newspapers signal-boosting rare attacks; it's not a rational reaction to the actual level of risk involved. 20% of Australians supporting senseless shark culls seems very comparable to the antivaxxerism. The other 80% have a more appropriate attitude towards risk.
  - cgriswald 6y ago
    We've already established their irrationality. They're more afraid of a 3-in-a-million chance of something versus a 5000-in-a-million chance of the same thing via a passive path. The question is why. I do agree that social media can amplify the effect, but so can two people who share the same fear sitting in the same room. How did those two people get that fear in the first place?

sandworm101 6y ago

Such numbers, absent context, are meaningless. To say I have a 1:1,000,000,000 chance of being eaten by a shark is ridiculous if I never go near an ocean. And that number conversely means nothing to someone floating in the water looking at a shark. Go for an ocean swim every morning? Your shark-attack risk is several orders of magnitude greater than average. I think your chance of being killed by lightning while golfing in summer, in florida, with a pacemaker installed, using metal clubs, during a rainstorm ... then it gets a little more dangerous than weather-death statistics would suggest.

catalogia 6y ago
You do eat though, right? You may not surf with sharks but I wager you eat every day. Do you slice hotdogs into tiny pieces or do you chomp into them like a normal person, apathetic to the small risk of choking? You can split hairs if you like, but I think if you're honest about it you'll find that many activities in your daily routine have greater than three in a million odds of killing you. That really is my point, that the average human tolerance for danger is much higher than a few in a million. People who fear things with odds that low are being irrational. Shark attacks is actually a great example of media induced hysteria. Even if you swim in the ocean every day and therefore have orders of magnitude more risk, that elevated level of risk is still small. Fear of sharks was largely induced by the sensational horror movie Jaws and is occasionally reinforced by profit-motivated newspapers signal-boosting rare attacks; it's not a rational reaction to the actual level of risk involved. 20% of Australians supporting senseless shark culls seems very comparable to the antivaxxerism. The other 80% have a more appropriate attitude towards risk.
- cgriswald 6y ago
  We've already established their irrationality. They're more afraid of a 3-in-a-million chance of something versus a 5000-in-a-million chance of the same thing via a passive path. The question is why. I do agree that social media can amplify the effect, but so can two people who share the same fear sitting in the same room. How did those two people get that fear in the first place?