Frequency x Severity

In my other job, we were assessing some large-scale changes this week, and it reinforced for me how difficult it is as humans to think about the fact that any risk is made up of two components — how bad a particular outcome might be, and how likely it is.

As humans, severity is all that matters, and in a way, it’s all that should — it doesn’t matter if a bad thing is unlikely if it’s sufficiently bad, and if it actually happens to you. Planes basically never go down, but if yours does, their reliability is of no comfort at all.

Of course, that’s not the whole story: frequency is exactly as important — they both get equal standing in the ‘sigma p(x)*x’ calculation. Which does kind of go to show that the application of the math is just as important as the math itself.

The worst and most common kind of math hubris is the kind that says, ‘the facts don’t care about your feelings’. In actual reality, empathetic people, and math experts know that the only thing that matters are the feelings, and our job is to align them as much as possible with the reality of the facts in order to allow people to be informed, empowered participants in choosing their own direction.

From the perspective of math learning, then, if you want people to be motivated and engaged, you can tell them ‘It’s just math, it’s important because it’s true, and you can feel any way you want about that but you still have to do it.’ I wish you all the luck in the world with that; you’re going to need it. The easier, simpler, I’d say better way is to help people understand what it has to do with them, and build your case for their engagement on that basis.