My friend Ross Levatter sent me a thoughtful email challenging some aspects of my posts (here and here) on the risks we should fear. He gave me permission to post the whole thing. I also shared it with co-author Charley Hooper, who emailed me his thoughts. I’ll answer, and give Charley’s answer, after his letter. Here’s Ross’s letter:
I briefly skimmed your posts on what people are frightened of, where you note that many are frightened about rare events rather than more common causes of death or injury. You write “What should we fear? What threats are most likely to kill us?” Your underlying assumption is that the answer to the latter should strongly inform us in answering the former. But I don’t think that’s right.
The fact is, most adults have made peace with the fact they’re going to die at some point. Most people are not scared of dying per se. They go through the 5 stages, ending with acceptance. You don’t find massive amounts of fear in hospices.
It seems your paper’s underlying assumption is that FEAR of death by X should track LIKELIHOOD of death by X. But I don’t think that’s correct.
What ARE people frightened about?
1. UNEXPECTED deaths. Cardiovascular disease kills lots of people. Cancer kills lots of people. Shark attacks DO NOT kill lots of people. One might be frightened to anticipate dying of something that hardly kills anyone.
2. PAINFUL deaths. Here’s an Anthony Jeselnik joke: “My grandmother died last year. Initially, we all thought she died in the best way possible. What’s the best way possible? Right, in her sleep. But then we had an autopsy and we found grandma died in the worst, most gruesome way possible. During an autopsy.” In fact, numerically, dying in one’s sleep is orders of magnitude more likely than dying during an autopsy (which I doubt has actually ever happened unless you count vivisection.) But it’s hopefully understandable why the thought of the latter is more frightening than the thought of the former.
3. SUDDEN deaths. The *novel* coronavirus infection is very unlikely to kill you, especially if you’re under 70. But unlike dying of cardiovascular disease, this is not a death you’ve given any thought to up until a year ago. So it’s more frightening. A *NEW* way to die.
4. UNFAIR deaths. The odds of dying of a terrorist attack are extremely low. But to most people it seems very UNFAIR to be a perfectly healthy, active individual with decades of life ahead of him in the morning and dead in the afternoon.
I’m sure if I gave it more than casual thought I could come up with other distinctions, but I hope my point is clear. The belief that fear of death from X should track likelihood of death from X is an assumption that is not obviously true—it needs at least to be argued for—and is most likely, IMHO, false.
I basically agree with most of what he said because Ross keyed in on our words “fear” and “afraid.” I think we should have focused not on fear but on what things it makes most sense for a person to invest in preventing. Terrorism? No. Shark attacks? No. Being killed by a policeman while unarmed? No. Living a life to avoid heart attacks or delay them by 5 years? Yes. Being cautious around social groups to avoid COVID-19? Yes.
Charley put it better. He wrote:
His [Ross’s] points are correct and we did use the word “fear,” but what we were getting at isn’t fear as much as being smart about risks. If you want to live a long life, what should you think about and do?
To summarize his points, if we make peace with a manner of death, we no longer fear it. We fear those deaths that are sudden, painful, and unexpected.
We could have used “being smart about fatal risks” instead of “what fatal risks to fear.” But at some point, we start sounding like Star Trek’s Spock.
Now back to me: Consider the hospice point. If you’re in a hospice, then, if it was a good decision for you to be there, you have exhausted the alternative ways of preventing, without great discomfort, the thing or things that you’ll die of. It makes sense both not to fear the thing that will kill you and also not to invest further in preventing it. The time to act would have been much earlier when possibly a change in life style could have given you a couple more years of good life.
Ross then added a short additional point:
BTW, here’s another (I think incorrect) implication of this line of reasoning. Assume “Dying in your sleep” and “Dying from shark attack” are statistically exactly equally likely. Does it then follow that one should be equally frightened at the two prospects? I suspect most people, told they are equally likely, would still more greatly fear dying of shark attack.
I answered Ross as follows:
Yes, I would much rather die in my sleep, as my grandfather did, rather than dying in sheer terror, as his passengers did.
But seriously, folks, it is true that if you choose between two ways of dying that have equal probabilities, the one that is more painful is the one to avoid.
You could alter our analysis by scaling the numbers, though, and in many cases that won’t matter. For instance, imagine that you would hate being killed by a shark 1,000 times as much as dying in your sleep. The odds of being killed by a shark are still so low that it doesn’t make sense to take account of that in deciding whether to swim in the ocean.
READER COMMENTS
Jerry Brown
Dec 14 2020 at 10:32pm
I don’t fear so much my own chances of death from this virus. It is more that I fear losing people I know and love. Even some old guys I never met like you who even though I disagree with often enough make sense at times. Stay safe Professor.
Dan K
Dec 15 2020 at 1:04am
The discussion reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death
robc
Dec 15 2020 at 9:02am
Wait…is that a bad thing?
KevinDC
Dec 15 2020 at 10:17am
At least within the Star Trek universe, it’s a bad thing. The three main characters are all on a continuum. You have McCoy, who is fiery and hot tempered. You have Spock who is unfeeling and logical. And you have Kirk, who was somewhere between the two – more even tempered and level headed than McCoy, but not as cold and unfeeling as Spock. And the usual message of the show was that Kirk’s approach was the right one. From my memory of the show and the movies, it’s almost never the case that if Spock had been the one making all the decisions, everything would have gone better. Indeed, one of the main tropes of the show was Spock and Kirk disagreeing with each other about Spock’s Purely Logical Approach to the situation – and how Kirk’s approach almost always proved correct in the end.
Also, as I hope this post demonstrates, I am clearly a well adjusted person who definitely doesn’t pointlessly overanalyze fiction at all.
zeke5123
Dec 15 2020 at 12:46pm
Very often though Spock’s “logical” approach is well…very illogical.
robc
Dec 15 2020 at 9:04am
Nicely done. It is an old joke, but I didn’t see it coming and it made my laugh. Proof that timing is the key to comedy.
Rob Rawlings
Dec 15 2020 at 10:32am
If people had no fear of shark attacks and routinely swam in shark-infested waters the number of deaths by shark-attack would be much higher. Following simple rules such as ‘avoid shark infested waters ‘ and ‘if you are in waters where there is even a small chance of sharks be vigilant and warn others if you see one’ keeps the death rate down. Is it possible that when people express concern (they often do this in a jokey kind of way) about the risk from sharks when they are in the water they are simply issuing a lightweight reminder about the shark-danger and associated protocols rather than expressing an irrational fear ? Perhaps if every time someone said ‘wow, I hope the sharks don’t get us’ they said instead ‘remember to eat a low cholesterol diet’ the number of shark-attack deaths would go up a bit ?
Charley Hooper
Dec 15 2020 at 1:34pm
On my honeymoon my wife and I went snorkeling at Molokini Crater, off the coast of Maui (Google it). I was already on edge, being a noob snorkeler in the middle of the deep ocean. Before we jumped into the water, the organizer said, “Be careful. There’s some hammerhead sharks down there.” Be careful? What does that mean? Swim faster? Be ready to punch anything that comes close? Stay in the boat?
I jumped into the water but had to get back out. It took me a few minutes to calm down enough to get back in. It turned out to be a beautiful, wonderful experience.
To this day, I still don’t know how one should be careful while snorkeling among sharks.
Rob Rawlings
Dec 15 2020 at 3:42pm
Well, for me it would have meant being careful by staying on the boat! As most hammerheads are harmless to humans I agree it was a pointless warning.
However if you had been swimming among great whites then maybe the annual death count for shark attacks might have been higher that year 🙂
RPLong
Dec 15 2020 at 10:34am
I think I disagree with Ross Levatter. While it’s true that many people fear “death by shark,” I don’t think most people should fear “death by shark.” Instead, they should do like Levatter suggests, and make peace with the risk.
I’m a type 1 diabetic, and I’m scared to die. In particular, I’m scared of what death for type 1 diabetics often looks like, with blindness, multiple organ failure, and complete dependence on other people to continue existing in a lonely personal darkness. That prospect is frightening, and also somewhat likely. Consequently, it’s my responsibility to make peace with that first, before I spend time tackling less likely death scenarios, such as death by covid-19 or death by terrorist attack.
Only after I make peace with the most likely and pressing risks should I spend time fearing other, more remote risks like suffocating in the vacuum of outer space or being swallowed by a blue whale.
I think that’s the kind of thing the Regulation article was driving at, so it resonated well with me.
Alan Goldhammer
Dec 15 2020 at 11:09am
The prospect of death is far different these days than it was one hundred years ago. The advent of SARS-CoV-2 changed things for everyone in one way or another. The advance in vaccines and medications moved most infectious microorganisms into the nuisance category (readers may be surprised to know there are still cases of the bubonic plague in the US every year but they are quickly treated with antibiotics). Diabetes and cardiovascular diseases can be treated with lifestyle adjustments and medicines. Some forms of cancer are now treatable and more will be with new advances in immunotherapy.
We are all going to die but the question is when. I think the letter is spot on and the responses from David and Charley are good as well. It all comes down to a fear of the unknown (also known as the Rumsfeld Paradigm). This is what a lot of us are battling and frustrated about.
drobviousso
Dec 15 2020 at 11:16am
I’ll add another observation that kind of expands on the point – valence. We know we don’t treat all deaths the same. When those old Japanese engineers volunteered to go into the Fukushima reactor, they might have died. Painful, horrible, deaths. But I would have felt incredibly proud of them, as a fellow engineer. Rule 1, 2, and 3 of engineering is “you’ll kill people if you screw this up,” and seeing them make hyper-rational choices (they were very old, so not many years left anyway) to uphold the credo of our tradition and work to save so many lives was awe inspiring.
I bet non-engineers don’t feel that way.
Different people get hit by deaths different ways. Stereotypical Progressive American sees death by gun violence as a unique and powerful tragedy. Victims of middle-eastern terrorist attacks? Less so (not no importance, just lower). Stereotypical Conservative American sees it the opposite. I bet the name Nidal Hasan ruffles a lot of conservative feathers and not many progressive feathers.
This isn’t crazy or irrational. These people have different first principals, different values, and different ethics. I, as a crazy libertarian, lose my mind over police killing and deaths caused by Leviathan (e.g., the increased road deaths caused by TSA incentivizing more driving and less flying, which is safer). Does the fact that I, Stereotypical Progressive American, and Stereotypical Conservative American are all irrational? I don’t think so.
Fred
Dec 15 2020 at 11:42am
My fears, our fears, are not prioritized on some objective rational basis. When I’m in a commercial airliner, my heart races on takeoff. I have flown on small private airplanes with a friend piloting, and I was not concerned. There is no rational basis for this distinction. I get nauseated if I see a rat, but I like squirrels. Irrational thinking is not exemplified only by fears but also by likes. Bright red, low to the ground cars that go vroom-vroom make me smile more than econobox autos. I like chocolate in excess of my body’s physical need for cocoa nutrition. We are just not all that rational.
The great thing about economics is that it tries to nail down the way things play out in the real world; it lets the real world decide what is rational rather than some a priori world people carry in their brains. Yes, I know that success at doing this is not 100%.
Peter Gordon
Dec 15 2020 at 1:47pm
We are more likely to have made our peace with odds that are familiar to us, such as the dangers of the daily commute. Covid19 is too new and too strange to us to be placed in that category.
Phil H
Dec 15 2020 at 8:00pm
This series of posts has been really great, as have the comments.
I hope DH has learned from them that this area is more complicated than he thought! There are at least two separate levels of complexity.
First, people’s individual reactions to risk are very diverse. Anyone who declares that people “ought to” fear/respond to risk in any particular way is on a hiding to nothing, simply because everyone’s fears are different, everyone fears in different ways, and everyone seeks to handle their fear in different ways.
Second, there is an important distinction between institutional responses and personal responses. Institutions don’t feel fear, so DH’s rational arguments about calculable risk may well be better suited to shaping institutions rather than influencing individuals. But the interplay between the personal and the institutional is complex, particularly when politics gets involved.
So thank you to DH for engaging with this problem rationally and publicly.
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