Humans are naturally terrible at risk assessment.
The situations in which our native intuitions developed are not the situations in which we now live; so our intuition no longer serves us very well. We have two very strong and not very helpful ‘intuitions’.
Stranger Danger: The tendency to pay more attention to threats from outside the group than within. How many parents fret over their kids being abused by strangers, when the vast majority of child abuse cases are perpetrated by family members? How many trillions do we spend fighting terrorists compared to fighting people who fiddle with their phones while driving? One of those things has nearly killed me once and may get it done in the future…. the person who nearly killed me doing something careless and stupid, not religiously motivated.
Immediacy: The tendency to pay more attention to threats that are more visible, examples of which have been seen lately. That makes great sense if you’re living in small community with no electronic communication. It really messes you up if you spend a lot of time watching the national media pick up on a single dramatic that happened thousands of miles away and shows the video a thousand times and spends millions of words harping on it. Things that happen in our little town NEVER make national news (thankfully).
So what’s better? Assess three parameters. Weigh the three together to decide how much time and effort to spend prepping for a particular scenario.
Seriousness:
If this event happens, how bad will it be? We don’t prep for thunderstorms beyond having flashlights easy to get to, but we have prepped for tornados. The thunderstorm will certainly happen, but if we’re not prepared the worst plausible outcome is we get wet or sit in the dark for a bit.
Likelihood:
Terrorism is an evil thing; I’m not saying we should ignore it at a national level. We don’t personally prep for it a bit though. We just don’t think people with a political (perhaps disguised as religious) hatred of Americans even know my little town exists; and we don’t have an abortion clinic to blow up. Financial disasters and extended power outages? Plans are in place for those, because they’re expected at some point in our lives.
Impact:
I do not prep for a super meteor impact landing and triggering the Yellowstone supervolcano to erupt. It might happen, and we’ll all be * Outta Luck. We do prep for dramatic weather and financial problems, because our being prepared for those can make a big impact on whether the events are inconvenient or disastrous. We aim to thrive, no matter what events life throws at us … but we recognize some things are just beyond control.
Note; this post contains some information previously published on 3BY but no longer appears elsewhere.