Living is fatal
The ability to reason clearly in the face of uncertainty.
If everybody could learn to deal better with the unknown, then it would improve not only their individual cognitive toolkit (to be placed in a slot right next to the ability to operate a remote control, perhaps), but the chances for humanity as a whole.
A well-developed scientific method for dealing with the unknown has existed for many years — the mathematical theory of probability. Probabilities are numbers whose values reflect how likely different events are to take place. People are bad at assessing probabilities. They are bad at it not just because they are bad at addition and multiplication. Rather, people are bad at probability in a deep, intuitive level: they overestimate the probability of rare but shocking events -- a burglar breaking into your bedroom while you're asleep, say. Conversely, they underestimate the probability of common, but quiet and insidious events — the slow accretion of globules of fat on the walls of an artery, or another ton of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere.
I can't say that I'm very optimistic about the odds that people will learn to understand the science of odds. When it comes to understanding probability, people basically suck. Consider the following example, based on a true story, and reported by Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University. A group of graduate students note that women have an significantly lower chance of admission than men to the graduate programs at a major university. The data are unambiguous: women applicants are only two thirds as likely as male applicants to be admitted. The graduate students file suit against the university, alleging discrimination on the basis of gender. When admissions data are examined on a department by department basis, however, a strange fact emerges: within each department, women are MORE likely to be admitted than men. How can this possibly be?
The answer turns out to be simple, if counterintuitive. More women are applying to departments that have few positions. These departments admit only a small percentage of applicants, men or women. Men, by contrast, are applying to departments that have more positions and that admit a higher percentage of applicants. Within each department, women have a better chance of admission than men — it's just that few women apply to the departments that are easy to get into.
This counterintuitive result indicates that the admissions committees in the different departments are not discriminating against women. That doesn't mean that bias is absent. The number of graduate fellowships available in a particular field is determined largely by the federal government, which chooses how to allocate reserach funds to different fields. It is not university that is guilty of sexual discrimination, but the society as a whole, which chose to devote more resources — and so more graduate fellowships — to the fields preferred by men.
Of course, some people are good at probability. A car insurance company that can't accurately determine the probabilities of accidents will go broke. In effect, when we pay out premiums to insure ourselves against a rare event, we are buying into the insurance company's estimate of just how likely that event is. Driving a car is one of those common but dangerous processes where human beings habitually understimate the odds of something bad happening, however. Accordingly, some are disinclined to obtain car insurance (perhaps not suprising when the considerable majority of people rate themselves as better than average drivers). When a state government requires its citizens to buy car insurance, it does so because it figures, rightly, that people are underestimating the odds of an accident.
Let's consider the debate over whether health insurance should be required by law. Living, like driving, is a common but dangerous process where people habitually underestimate risk, despite that fact that, with probability equal to one, living is fatal.
