Happy Earth Day—may we correctly assess and resolve the overwhelming risks that our planet is suffering from.
Last Monday I discussed how to get rich and still be a political lefty (go back and review that if you’re still muddling along un-rich). Today, some broader, mostly non-economic points—but my opening sentence a week ago—“Risks are everywhere and have big roles to play in our lives”—still applies to what I’m saying today.
This still applies, too (Buckner so immodest as to quote himself? Surprise, surprise.)— “Learn what actual risks are.” I don’t mean to imply that precise knowledge of risks is always or even usually possible—often approximate is the best you can muster—and sometimes even that isn’t available.
When you’re betting your buddy a buck on the outcome of the big game, the real risk (of losing a dollar) is usually unimportant. But even on friendly wagers, people sometimes are a bit foolish. I’ve had guys tell me, seemingly in all seriousness, that they’d never bet against their favorite team, because they would be “disloyal.” That suggests that the team might not play as well if you didn’t bet for them, or that you could “jinx” them—silly and irrational.
Sometimes risk assessment can be much more important, sometimes pretty obvious: better not to wander around in an open field during a thunder-and-lightning storm. And most people know that even if they’re way off about the risks. (Lightning kills 20 or 30 people in the US each year and injures many more, some of them seriously. If you assume an average life span of around 80 years, odds of being struck in your lifetime are about 1 in 15,000. Pretty rare—but not zero.)
With some things, risks can be unknown and even contradictory: applying for a job or for admission to a program or school can be stressful—and you really can’t know, if after you do or don’t apply and do or don’t succeed, whether the outcome you hope for is even in your best interests. But it’s worth time and effort to weigh the possibilities as well as you can.
All of us are going to die, of course (see last Monday for a little on taxes, just to be sure we’ve hit the two big certainties), but what specific cause might do you in may not be easy to pin down. (For more, see Dr. Konrad Hayashi’s guest Letter a year ago—“How We’ll Die” on 12 April 2023).
And you can probably affect the probabilities by learning and by listening to your doctor. You probably don’t even need the doc to tell you that moving more and eating less will help, or that giving up smoking is a plus.
But what about wearing a seatbelt? Twenty-five or thirty thousand people die in auto accidents in the US in most years. Estimates are that if everyone wore seat belts all the time, as many as 2500 or 3000 fewer people would die in accidents each year. Are there any downsides—people trapped in cars by malfunctioning belts, etc.? Yes, but the risk of not wearing seatbelts are far greater than these unusual downsides. And it affects others—not just the driver: a non-seatbelt-wearing driver is considerably more likely to lose control of his auto in an accident and endanger others.
What about vaccinations? There are some side effects from getting vaccinated against most illnesses, a few of them quite harmful—but the risks from that are vastly smaller than the known risks from the diseases. There is a tremendous amount of misinformation spread about this subject—and it’s worth your time and trouble to learn the truth.
Can taking risks be fun? Some people certainly seem to think so, and thrill rides and even spooky movies seems to attest to it—but I’d urge caution. If it’s only an apparent risk—riding on a well regulated roller coaster, as my friends Martin and Cheryl go out of their way all over the world to do—then there’s little chance of harm.
But children riding in the back of pickup truck? No! That seems like great fun to the children, but even a low-speed minor accident can be quite dangerous to children so unprotected. Don’t let that happen.
Important risk also permeates our lives during election years. If you’re supporting one guy or the other over something you read or heard about him, you owe it to yourself and your fellow citizens to make as sure as you can that the information you’re relying on is sound. Same goes for ideas, political or otherwise, that you care about.
As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted last week, alluding to an essay that Tom Flynn urged me to read a quarter century ago (Tom said that the Jesuits at Xavier of Cincinnati introduced it to him):
In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases. “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote. A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/18/opinion/transgender-care-cass-report.html
How do you know if you know enough to decide? It’s hard and it requires thinking and checking and even temporarily distrusting your own conclusions. Read widely, from sources friendly to your views and from hostile sources. It’s quite difficult, but be open to changing your mind.
And if at all possible, take a philosophy course on epistemology. If Keith Parsons is offering one, anytime, anywhere, any way—take that one!
I wrote back at the end of October about a related part of this—when to seek evidence before accepting something and related matters:
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Betting against your favorite team is a way to ensure that, whatever the outcome, you have something to cheer about.
Just sayin'.
Thanks for the plug, Ed. W.K. Clifford was a brilliant philosopher and mathematician. Had he not died in his early thirties, his name would be as prominent as those of the most notable Anglo-American philosophers of the nineteenth century, such as James, Peirce, and Mill. His essay on the ethics of belief shows the basic connection between rationality and ethics. We have epistemic duties just as we have moral duties. In fact, epistemic duties are a subset of moral duties. Beliefs have consequences and when people act on irrational beliefs, bad things happen. I think that Clifford's stricture that we should believe nothing without sufficient evidence is a bit too strict. I have an infinite number of beliefs and it would be impossible to check each one for the sufficiency of its evidence. Further, many beliefs are subjective or based upon immediate perception or memory rather than evidence. I remember having coffee for breakfast this morning, and I don't need to go to the kitchen to check for evidence. Other beliefs are inconsequential. I (weakly) believe that the Georgia Bulldogs football team will win a third national championship in four years this year. So what if I'm wrong? However, when millions of people are invincibly certain that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election and that the 91 felony counts against him are all a "witch hunt," this is something serious.