General Paranoia

Americans are notorious for getting scared of everything. They don't know how to estimate the likelihood of something happening, so they elevate even the most minor of things to danger levels.

Here's a few examples. A few years ago, there was the DC sniper (turns out there was two, but only one did the firing). There were about 7-8 people shot or killed. This sent the entire greater DC area into a panic. Reports were that the folks were in a white van (they weren't) and they had attacked gas stations, so everyone got really nervous about white vans and gas stations.

One woman was killed near some place like a Home Depot. Consider how many other people may have been nearby that weren't shot. The odds of being the next sniper victim were really tiny, even if you were so unlucky as to be in the immediate vicinity of the sniper. Even so, people were scared, because they didn't like the idea of something random happening to them.

Or for something less scary, there was the spinach scare a while back which caused almost every food service to stop selling it for a few weeks. Or the more recent tomato salmonella scare. It seems far easier to simply ban the guilty vegetable than to do testing to be sure that the vegetable is fine.

Most recently, there was a water main break in Montgomery County, and the county advised boiling water and limiting water usage for three days. Was this number obtained from some reasonable science or engineering? Or was this randomly picked as to be paranoid safe, but not to be so crazy inconvenient (e.g., a week or more) that people would really be upset. Can't they test the water supply? Obviously this would take time, and they need to give advice right away, so better to give the paranoid advice rather than have everyone complain.

And why is it that people can't do their own testing? I'm assuming it's either difficult or expensive or something.

Remember when there were no seatbelt laws, no child seats? I'm sure there were kids killed because there were no such laws, but how many accidents have you gotten into lately? Sure, you don't want to be the one parent that gets into that one serious accident where you regret not having the safety seats in place, but at what point do you decide that it's better to take the kids and risk the accident and when is it better to leave kids at home?

Now, some of this is simply the cost of inconvenience. Baby seats aren't so costly. So parents buy them. And I suppose there's probably some law about their use in any case, just in case parents want to be more cavalier with their chances.

The dumbing down of America manifests itself most greatly in the panic people have over dangers with tiny odds.