Not everything is relative

One of the most common approaches to deepening people's understanding of risks was to provide quantitative estimates for various types of risk. This approach assumes that information obtained in the consideration of such data would be quite useful to the process of making the right decision, as the scale of the individual and society. So, there is an opinion that we should try to measure all of our risks quantitatively, and then we will be able to compare these risks and to decide which ones to accept and which to reject. Lord Rothschild argued that there is no reason to panic regarding the risks of life until, until you compare the risks that you are concerned about, those that don't bother, but probably should bother. Clever, but what we will be looking at such information.

Usually, such arguments are accompanied by elaborate tables, and even a "risk catalogues", which represent the different indices of death or disability, for a wide range of life risks. For example, comparative data were selected for the risk that a person exposed for 1 hour, showing that 1 hour of riding a motorcycle is as risky as 1 hour stay at 75 years of age. Or, for example, developed a table of activities (for example, a flight for one thousand miles on a jet plane, 3 hours in a coal mine), each of which was considered to increase the annual chance of death of 1 out of a million. The compiler of this table stated that "these comparisons help me evaluate risks, and it seems to me that they can also help them. But the most important use of these comparisons should help us to decide, as a nation, to improve our health and to reduce the rate of unhappy cases". Similarly, other researchers ranked the many types of risks in terms of how they reduce the life expectancy on the basis of the assumption that "at a certain approximation, the order of the risks (in this table) must be order social priorities."

All these compilers comparative data on the levels of risk do not take into account the fact that the comparison of risks is not a decision-making procedure. It does not require the removal of particular findings, for example, the contrast between the risk of riding a motorcycle and the risk of old age. Moreover, even in aid of intuition, risk comparison has several inherent limitations. For example, although some people feel informed, knowing that one takeoff and landing aircraft reduces life expectancy on average 15 minutes, others are completely puzzled by this information. After all, when landing a plane you either die prematurely (almost certainly more than 15 minutes) or will not die. For many people, the average values do not cover adequately the nature of such risks. In fact, it was found that patients facing the prospect of surgery for lung cancer, also asked about the potential threat of death during surgery and its positive results, contributing to the increase in life expectancy. And it was quite reasonable that probably is caused by a person's ability in stressful situations to evaluate risks more adequately than arguing about them abstract.