I see a variant of this almost weekly. If you ever find yourself denigrating humanity’s risk management, recognize that we got this far, and consider how your model could use updating. 1/
Humans take risk in everything we do. It’s really important to *not* be paralyzed by known risks. So you internalize the risks you live with, and generally ignore them. 2/
But the new and novel risks - even if they don’t *yet* rise to levels you stably tolerate - capture your attention because they *might* go catastrophic. 3/
So yes, an American *today* is more likely to die in a vehicular collision than from the coronavirus. But collisions are not going to devastate America next month, but the slight chance that a pandemic might? Draws your eye. 4/
Now there is an argument that social media makes novel information more compelling - because it provides real-time visual information, with a graph of relationships to source it - but that isn’t about misprioritizing risk, it’s about not having good dampers. 5/5
