Bruce Keener’s Lifestream

Far too often, we don't. We tend to be poor judges of risk. We overact to rare risks, we ignore long-term risks, we magnify risks that are also morally offensive. We get risks wrong -- threats, probabilities, and costs -- all the time. When we're afraid, really afraid, we'll do almost anything to make that fear go away. Both politicians and marketers have learned to push that fear button to get us to do what they want.

I wonder how much better off we would be if we wrote down all of our fears in a list, and then worked through the list one-by-one to overcome each fear. I suspect that the key problems in doing this are (1) we probably are not even aware of what some of our deep fears really are, and (2) some of the fears probably work for us, instead of against us and are best left alone.