What Are the Odds?

I was at the credit union a few weeks ago, waiting to have some changes made to my account, when I had that worry that I seem to regularly have whenever I enter a bank or a credit union.

Suppose a robbery happens while I’m here?

I’m always a little skittish about going to one of those places because of the fear that I just might end up being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bank robberies do still happen, you know. There’ve been a few in our local paper over the past year. Suppose I end up in the middle of one of them?

But this time was different. I’d been thinking about statistics a bit over the past few weeks, and how we tend to focus on the least likely, most horrible thing, and not the most likely, more mundane thing. This was probably after having seen comedian Hasan Minhaj speak at this year’s Public Libraries Association conference about the infinitesimally small odds of being in a terrorist attack…as opposed to say…being killed in a car accident because you didn’t buckle your seatbelt.

And it’s not just him, who you might think was too close to the issue to be impartial. I know statisticians who say that Americans are absolutely awful at assessing risk; and that, once again, we worry about the least likely absolutely horrible thing, and don’t prepare at all for the avoidable tragedies that are most likely to hit us.

So this time I said to myself, “Shut up and sit down.”

It’s funny that I had to tell myself this, because whenever people come see me at the library, worrying about all the ways they can be hacked by simply going on the Internet, I often tell them that I could worry about the meteor that could fall on my house…but I don’t.

And speaking of librarians, in a recent thread on a librarian Facebook page about how to deal with challenged patrons who are being disruptive, one person said that you should never call the police, because we all know that the police shoot autistic people.

That was it. From anyone else, I might’ve just rolled my eyes and walked away. But this was someone representing a group of people who claim to be all about accurate information. So I said:

Really...has anyone actually looked at the statistics of how many people...black, autistic, white, neurotypical, Martian, whatever...have absolutely fine interactions with the police that don’t end in tragedy, or do we let the few news stories of situations where things went tragically wrong lead us to assume that the bulk of interactions are like that?

They’re called news stories for a reason, you know...because they’re so out of the ordinary and awful. 

Once again…do we let the extremely few really horrible, really attention-getting things lead us to think that they happen way more often than they do? And do we react more to those than to everyday things that we should really be concerned about?

I think so.

Now about that meteor…