Don’t put money on that bet
Erm…
Researchers say that people who eat higher amounts of carbs have a higher risk of dying than those who eat more fats https://t.co/W5FlqU63qG
— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 9, 2017
Do you think the New York Times hasn’t been told?
Everybody has the same risk of dying. Everybody without exception. The risk is 100% for every single person. No matter how few the carbs you eat…immortality is not an option.
Not with that attitude.
Ha!
Protons get immortality and they are pretty spherical.
I have frequent occasion to notice this in my work. Americans almost believe death is an optional lifestyle choice that just might not be right for their family.
We humans are amazingly bad at understanding risk. I wish it were taught in schools.
Timing of death is somewhat optional. So’s the nature of the appointment. “Probably in the next two weeks” and “horribly”, for instance, is a combination we can usually do a bit to avoid. “Never” and “totally awesome if it happens anyway” may not be on the menu, but there’s a whole lot between those extremes and working that spectrum is a fine thing to do.
Mind you, if it means giving up pasta, we’re gonna have a problem NYT.
I do a unit on that in my class; they understand during the discussion, and get it all wrong on the test.
“Mind you, if it means giving up pasta, we’re gonna have a problem NYT.”
Amen, brother Engel!
Relevant article from theonion:
http://www.theonion.com/article/world-death-rate-holding-steady-at-100-percent-1670
iknklast, that doesn’t surprise me. In the past I’ve taught modules on risk too and I was never convinced I’d done a good job. Teaching software designers to evaluate the risk of their creations going wrong and how to document and mitigate those risks…. fairly successful. Teaching people to understand what risk is and how to develop our intuitions about it… not so much.
Quite a lot of that latter sort involved teaching people about personal privacy and security. The fundamental problem is always that people find it hard to connect stuff we do now to the problems that accrue in the future as a result of our risky behaviours.
Much like your experience, students tended to understand while I was talking and ask good questions, but then forget everything we talked about the instant they left the room. Those failures are mine, but I do think there’s a place to teach skills related to understanding risk from an early age. It should be part of the training about abstract thinking that most kids don’t have.
I would question that they are totally yours. We can teach students a lot of things, but they don’t exist in a vacuum when they are outside of our class. They are swimming in an ocean of misinformation, and when it comes to things that are different than what popular media, their parents, their churches, or their friends are saying, it can be difficult for us to cut through all that in the short period of time we have with them.
I constantly modify what I’m doing to try to be more effective, but so far, I get essentially the same results. Students come in with a particular background, and they remain within that background. Without erasing everyone else around them, the best we can do is introduce them to it, walk them through it, answer their questions, keep working on it when they’re with us, and hope that, in the future, they’ll remember enough that later in life it will hit them.
I didn’t appreciate risk, or statistical probabilities, or critical thinking in my first introduction, either. It took years of practice (and even with that, I’m not claiming to be perfect. I have no doubt I believe some things that are demonstrably untrue; if that demonstration should get through to me, I would quit believing those things, and I can actually give some examples, but I would hate to embarrass my younger self).