Quotes About Risk

Never throw caution to the wind. It could whip back into your eyes and blind you.

So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you've got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don't. Such are the vagaries of life.

The swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

Most people are terrible at risk assessment. They tend to overstate the risk of dramatic and unlikely events at the expense of more common and boring (if equally devastating) events.

If the consequences of pretending to know can be so damaging, why do people keep doing it? That's easy: in most cases, the cost of saying "I don't know" is higher than the cost of being wrong—at least for the individual.

The future is far less knowable than you think.

La probabilidad de que un norteamericano medio muera por un atentado terrorista en un año dado es aproximadamente de uno entre cinco millones. Tiene 575 veces más probabilidades de suicidarse.

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg understood this. "In medicine, or in science, [if] you go down a path and it turns out to be a dead end, you really made a contribution, because we know we don't have to go down that path again," he said. "In the press, they call it failure. And so people are unwilling to innovate, unwilling to take risks in government.

So it may be that going to the hospital slightly increases your odds of surviving if you've got a serious problem but increases your odds of dying if you don't.

life, going straight up the middle is the boldest move

The probability that an average American will die in a given year from a terrorist attack is roughly 1 in 5 million; he is 575 times more likely to commit suicide.

Morning robberies yield far more than afternoon robberies . . .' - When to Rob a Bank: A Rouge Economist's Guide to the World by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

New York State, for instance, has not as of this writing executed a single criminal since reinstituting its death penalty in 1995. Even among prisoners on death row, the annual execution rate is only 2 percent—compared with the 7 percent annual chance of dying faced by a member of the Black Gangster Disciple Nation crack gang. If life on death row is safer than life on the streets, it's hard to believe that the fear of execution is a driving force in a criminal's calculus

Un choque de automóvil es un asunto violento, y pueden sucederle muchas cosas terribles a una masa de carne y hueso que se desplace a gran velocidad dentro de un objeto metálico y pesado que se para de repente.

But putting your faith in a coin toss—even for a tiny decision—may at least inoculate you against the belief that quitting is necessarily taboo.

Para evitar heridas graves, los cinturones de seguridad funcionaron, una vez más, igual de bien que los asientos para niños de dos a seis años. Pero para heridas más leves, los asientos funcionaron mejor, reduciendo la probabilidad de heridas aproximadamente un 25 por ciento en comparación con los cinturones.

Por razones que Auvert y otros científicos no comprenden del todo, se descubrió que la circuncisión reduce el riesgo de transmisión del VIH hasta en un 60 por ciento en los hombres heterosexuales.

Décadas de estudios han demostrado que un niño que nace en un entorno familiar adverso tiene muchas más probabilidades de convertirse en un delincuente.

Come up with a terrible idea? No problem—just don't act on it.

Los cinturones de seguridad reducen el peligro de muerte hasta en un 70 por ciento;

Elephants, meanwhile, kill at least 200 people every year. So why aren't we petrified of them?

The basic reality," Sandman told the New York Times, "is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different.

But if you are told that you have a 10 percent chance of dying within the next year, you might worry a lot more, perhaps even choosing to live your life differently. And if you are told that you have 10 percent chance of dying within the next minute, you'll probably panic. So it's the imminent possibility of death that drives the fear—which means that the most sensible way to calculate fear of death would be to think about it on a per-hour basis.

Sometimes in life, going straight up the middle is the boldest move of all.