PHL145H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 21: Relative Risk, Group Polarization
Document Summary
Life is full of risk, just walking outside your house is a risk in and of itself. Its better to describe risks with numbers so people can understand them better. 1 000 000 (aka c: looking for an informative denominator depends on commons sense, find information in a consensus. People tend to underestimate high prob. (conjunction) and overestimate low prob. (disjunction) Best thing to do is: identify the things that are large risks in your life or your familys life, adopt a measure for you to avoid those risks. That being said, smoking is the single greatest risk factor. Sex (contracting a disease), love and marriage (divorce rates), jobs and business (injury and loss) Media creates fallacies and lead us to misperceived risks. Phl145: we usually downplay a risk when it involves changing huge portions of our lives. Small samples are pointless to draw conclusions from. Can"t neglect base rates either since they are the whole portion of it.
