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> Trust that bridges are built correctly, The interesting thing about trust in bridges is that it works even after people witness spectacular bridge collapses

> Trust that bridges are built correctly, The interesting thing about trust in bridges is that it works even after people witness spectacular bridge collapses in their country/area. For example in 2018 a bridge collapsed in Genova, Italy, killing 49 people. At least another two smaller incidents involving collapsed bridges near where I live. And yet people keep crossing bridges every day. You just couldn't function in a modern society if you got paralyzed by fear of bridges; there always were bridges since you were a child and long before; thus you reach the conclusion that such catastrophic events are outliers. I don't think it's because you trust in engineers or society or something like that; you trust yourself and your past experience that you and your friends and family crossed bridges thousands of times and you're still alive

donw 5y ago
Two factors are at play. The total percentage of bridges which have their collapsed, as well the the frequency of collapse, plays a role. A bridge collapsing every week for two months would likely have an impact. And there's also a sort of mental inertia: this has been fine for a long time, so everything is still fine now. The latter is why people have died in airplane fires, sitting calmly in their seats, insisting that everything was fine and that they didn't need to evacuate.
- ithkuil 5y ago
  I think the mental inertia factor is dominant here. Generally speaking people are very bad ad judging objective likelihood of events. Most people don't know often bridges collapse. The wrong estimation goes both ways: a few years in italy there was an outcry for deaths of babies forgotten in the cars by parents (a parent was meant to drive the baby to the nursery but instead drove to work and forgot the baby in the car for hours). It happened a few times over a few years, and as with every random event following the poisson distribution, it also happened that a few such events were clustered in rapid succession such that people thought there was a "baby forgotten in the car" epidemics going on that required some action to be taken; some politician took it on them to push through a law that required every single citizen driving a child up to 4yo to install a device in their backseats that would ring if it detects a weight on the seat and you walk away (and people have been fined for not having bought one). The emotional resonance of the problem was big, but the frequency of the event was blown out of proportion: since 1998 there were 8 cases in a country with 60M people.

donw 5y ago

Two factors are at play. The total percentage of bridges which have their collapsed, as well the the frequency of collapse, plays a role. A bridge collapsing every week for two months would likely have an impact. And there's also a sort of mental inertia: this has been fine for a long time, so everything is still fine now. The latter is why people have died in airplane fires, sitting calmly in their seats, insisting that everything was fine and that they didn't need to evacuate.

ithkuil 5y ago
I think the mental inertia factor is dominant here. Generally speaking people are very bad ad judging objective likelihood of events. Most people don't know often bridges collapse. The wrong estimation goes both ways: a few years in italy there was an outcry for deaths of babies forgotten in the cars by parents (a parent was meant to drive the baby to the nursery but instead drove to work and forgot the baby in the car for hours). It happened a few times over a few years, and as with every random event following the poisson distribution, it also happened that a few such events were clustered in rapid succession such that people thought there was a "baby forgotten in the car" epidemics going on that required some action to be taken; some politician took it on them to push through a law that required every single citizen driving a child up to 4yo to install a device in their backseats that would ring if it detects a weight on the seat and you walk away (and people have been fined for not having bought one). The emotional resonance of the problem was big, but the frequency of the event was blown out of proportion: since 1998 there were 8 cases in a country with 60M people.