"In his pioneering 1969 analysis of risks, [[Chauncey Starr]]—at that time the dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the [[University of California]] in [[Los Angeles]]—**stressed the major difference in risk tolerance between voluntary and involuntary activities**. "**When people think that they are in control (a perception that may be incorrect but that is based on previous experiences and hence on the belief that they can assess the likely outcome), they engage in activities**—climbing vertical rock faces without ropes, skydiving, bullfighting—**whose risks of serious injury or fatality may be a thousand-fold higher** than the risk associated with such dreaded involuntary exposure as a terrorist attack in a large Western city. And most people have no problem engaging daily and repeatedly in activities that temporarily increase their risk by significant margins: hundreds of millions of people drive every day (and many apparently like to do so), and an even higher risk is tolerated by an even larger number of smokers—in affluent countries, decades of education has reduced their ranks, but worldwide there are still more than 1 billion of them. "**In some cases this disparity between tolerating voluntary risks and trying to avoid wrongly perceived risks of involuntary exposures becomes truly bizarre**, as people refuse to have their children inoculated (voluntarily exposing them to multiple risks of preventable diseases) because they consider government requirements to protect their children (an involuntary imposition) as unacceptably risky—and have been doing so on the basis of repeatedly discredited “evidence” (most notably linking vaccination to a higher incidence of autism) or rumored perils (the implanting of microchips!). "And the [[SARS-CoV-2]] pandemic elevated these irrational fears to a new level. Humanity’s best hope to end the pandemic was mass-scale vaccination, but long before the first vaccines were approved for distribution, large shares of the population were telling pollsters that they would not get inoculated. "**Widespread fear of nuclear electricity generation is yet another excellent example of risk misperception.** Many people smoke and drive and eat excessively but have reservations about living next to a nuclear power plant, and polling has shown lasting and pervasive distrust of this form of electricity generation despite the fact that it has prevented a large number of air pollution–related deaths that would have been associated with burning fossil fuels (by 2020, nearly three-fifths of the world’s electricity came from fossil fuels, and just 10 percent from nuclear fission). And the comparison between overall risks of nuclear and fossil-fueled electricity generation does not flip even when the best estimates of all latent fatalities from the two major accidents ([[Chornobyl]] in 1985 and [[Fukushima]] in 2011) are included." ([Location 2773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08SGC3TD3&location=2773)) --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[probabilistic-thinking]], [[risk-management]], [[nuclear-energy]], [[pandemic]], [[illusion-of-control]], [[control]], **Source** -- [[202412030828 - B - How the World Really Works]]