Risk Communication
An extract from a very interesting and eye-opening talk by Peter Sandman about risk communication: " The fundamental principle of risk communication can be summarized in a number, [which] is the correlation between how much harm a risk does and how upset people get about it. If you look at a long list of risks, and you rank them in order of how upset people get [about them], then you rank them again in order of how much harm they do, then you correlate the two, you get a glorious 0.2.... That is, the risks that kill people and the risks that upset people are completely different. If you know that a risk kills people, you have no idea whether it upsets them or not. If you know it upsets them, you have no idea whether it kills them or not. If you replace mortality with morbidity in the calculation -- you're not killing people, you're just making them sick -- our correlation remains 0.2. If you use ecosystem damage, the correlation is once again 0.2, and if, as this group li