23 October 2010
The recent post on the risks of smoking looked at Rifkin and Bouwer’s “Risk Characterization Theatre” (RCT), a graphical device for communicating risks. The graphic in that post, which compared mortality rates of smokers and non-smokers taken from the pioneering British doctors smoking study, highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of RCTs. The charts certainly […]
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22 October 2010
In my last post, I made a passing reference to Gerd Gigerenzer’s idea of using “natural frequencies” instead of probabilities to make assessing risks a little easier. My brief description of the idea did not really do justice to it, so here I will briefly outline an example from Gigerenzer’s book Reckoning With Risk. The […]
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