It is unlikely that you will be crushed to death by a falling satellite. It is also nonzero. Stanford engineering professor Ronald Howard was the founder of decision analysis. He made it a point to mention the latter, the danger of splat.He is best-known for his research on dangerous thrillsformal processes that often use statistics to help you decide if you want to jump out from that airplane. Many people can sleep peacefully knowing that satellites are orbiting overhead, and they don't have to calculate the chances of a fatal collision. People don't blindly run into traffic. It is important to manage the risks of your life.It has been more difficult to find the right balance between safe and sensible in recent years. The choices that were so simple and easy to make in the summer are now more complicated and risky. After a few maskless gatherings, I realized this about three weeks ago. I also visited a couple of dance floors. Could I? Could I? Los Angeles County reinstated the indoor mask mandate just days after I had been struggling to find a 2002 playlist among a crowd of sweaty strangers. It became clear that our euphoric opening was not timed. This happened just as the country began to become familiar with the highly transmissible Delta version. Our collective dial was too hot and too fast. My inner risk calculator was not calibrated. Again, I asked myself: How much freedom can you have?SIGN UP Subscribe to WIRED to stay informed with your favorite Ideas writers.In a similar time of increasing case numbers and before widespread vaccination, last winter I wrote about Microcovid, an online tool that was created by six roommates in San Francisco. It calculated the risk of exposure to viral disease. Their Mission District home was called Ibasho by them, a reference Ada Palmers sci fi novel Too Like the Lightning. They all wanted to do things in a world of pandemicindependence. There were partners to see, protests and workplaces to attend. However, the nature virus is that any roommate's behavior can also be a threat. Different desires, shared risks. They decided to budget their viral exposure. They agreed together on what was reasonable and they lived their lives according to that agreement-freedom within limits.Although there were no epidemiologists among this group of techie 30somethings, they did have a few statisticians who could read Covid-19 research and question experts about their assumptions. Their common unit of account represented a one in a million chance of contracting the virus. Howard called this a micromort or one in a million chance of death. These calculations included the estimated rate of indoor transmission between people and the local prevalence. They were able to calculate the actual situation based on how people are living and how much time they spend.These numbers were not perfect. However, consistency is the key word. Our brains don't have the ability to act consistently. This applies not only to how we behave but also how we coordinate with others. Sometimes we get seduced by large payoffs or become too concerned about big risks while taking much smaller risks that can lead to greater danger. This is especially true when the risks around us change constantly, as they were throughout the pandemic.
