alt Hacker NewsOn an individual level, we all have a variety of hammers over our heads. Cancer has killed far more people prematurely than nuclear weapons. Something like 500,000 people a year are murdered. Traffic/bicycle/pedestrian accidents also kill more than nuclear weapons. Even compared to a once-in-a-century nuclear war that perhaps kills a billion people, cancer will kill roughly a billion in the next century anyway. So, for the rational/selfish person, the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about.
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If I fall 1 feet one hundred times, I'll probably be Ok
If I fall 100 feet once, I won't.
1m people dying in 1 day is not the same as 1M people dying over a decade.
Also. People generally dont fear death itself. This is expressed by people in pallitative care. Its the chaos and uncertainty preceding death that is really feared
Does your risk assessment methodology also account for near misses? Agency? Morality? Source of risk? Costs of mitigation? Benefits? Something like actuary tables?
Mitigation of bike and pedestrian deaths is cheap. Just reform land use, advantage people over vehicles. Oops, now you're into culture and values.
Mitigation of cancer deaths is very expensive. Though we didn't invent cancer, we feel the moral imperative to "cure" it. And yet, while we're mitigating it, we're also making it worse. Cross purposes. What's your balance sheet for this conundrum?
Drugs kill lots of people. We own that one, right? How's the War on Drugs working out?
In conclusion, I wish I could wave away these dilemmas with a cute nominator and denominator. But I can barely reason about them before my head explodes. So I'm not buying what you're selling. Life's a bit more complicated, a bit more empirical, a bit less rational, than your tidy equations.
I think for a lot of people, myself included, you try not to worry about things you can't control.
"Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere. Write that down." - Van Wilder
Cancer isn't something that humans develop and control. It's also very unlikely to kill 20-year-olds. On the other hand, it's almost guaranteed if you happen to live long enough. Finally, getting cancer doesn't mean that everybody around you also gets one. Getting hit by a nuke is something that is totally under human control, it's not going to discriminate by age or gender, and is likely to wipe out most of the humans you care about along with you.
A better comparison would be climate change vs nukes. If you have the time to worry about the former, you should also worry about the latter since if the nukes go off, we won't even get a chance to get killed by the environment.
Worry is unproductive in the sense of feeling anxiety, sure, but it's noble to worry at the various hammers in the archaic definition to "move, proceed, or progress by unceasing or difficult effort, to shake or pull at with the teeth."
Some of the hammers such as the hammer representing nuclear weapons - are caused by people and can be solved by people. There's a big game theoretic hill to climb over, but social pressure and advocacy have been effective at making progress. Others, like cancer and general senescence, are more of a looming threat that's a fundamental characteristic of biology, we can (and should) worry at them to make incremental progress but we're unlikely to suddenly eliminate them. The murder rate is enormously dependent on individual location and individual relationships. Traffic/bicycle/pedestrian accidents are enormously dependent on individual behavior.
Of those threats, addressing the problem of nuclear weapons - especially for a member of Nihon Hidankyo, with a personal and persuasive story of the damages these weapons caused - is probably near the top of the list for actions which can have the greatest positive change.
> So, for the rational/selfish person, the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about.
Until you have children and future generations to worry about. Then it suddenly seems quite a bit more pressing that their world could be obliterated at a moment's notice by a small handful of decision makers.
Those other things are also worth worrying about too.
Gee, I hope the people in charge don't think "the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about"
Extrapolating from two samples to "once-in-a-century" does not strike me as rational.
I once knew an academic who would not fly in an airplane. He was invited to a distinguished conference across the country, but complained to me that he was too scared to fly. "Why?" I ask.. "Terrorists" he replied.. "it is too serious. I just can't do it". so a year or two pass and then I see this Academic again. While talking he mentions that he just returned from a great conference far away. "What? I thought you were afraid to fly in an airplane!" .. He replies "that was true, I was scared of someone carrying a bomb on the flight. But, I calculated the statistical odds of there being TWO bombs on a single plane, and it was infinitesimal..."
"So now I carry my own!"
That depends on where you live. There are people right now in certain places who are terrified of the nuclear threat.
I'd like to think of myself as a rational person, yet I worry about it. Because it's not just a matter of math; the effects of a billion people dying at once would be far more detrimental than the deaths from cancer over a century.
(One might think this line of reasoning that some people apply is a coping mechanism to ignore the reality, but that might be a different conversation)