Coursework, the night before
Your only copy of a large piece of coursework is on one laptop. It has never failed. It is due tomorrow.
What do you do?
Step 1: What Would You Do?
There is often more than one good answer. Pick one and see what happens.
Choosing subjects
You are choosing between a subject you find easy and one you find interesting but harder. Somebody tells you a story about a person who took the hard one and regretted it.
How much should that story weigh?
Step 2: What That Was
The name for what you just worked out.
Every risk has two numbers: how likely it is, and how bad it would be. People argue about risks while each holding a different one of the two.
Rare and enormous
A house fire is very unlikely this year. You still have a smoke alarm, because the size of the bad outcome does the work, not the likelihood.
Likely and small
You will probably lose a pen this month. Nobody insures pens. The likelihood is high and the size is nothing.
Start from how often it happens
Before asking whether this case is unusual, find out how often the thing happens at all. A vivid story is not a frequency.
Step 3: Try It
These ones do have right answers.
Which Number Is Doing the Work?
Sort by what makes each one worth taking seriously.
For each, is it the likelihood or the size that justifies the precaution?
Tap something to move it.
- Empty
- Empty
Step 4: Quick Check
Two questions, then you are done.
Question 1 of 1
A friend says flying is dangerous because a crash was on the news. What is missing?
Step 5: Your Life Mission
Something to do away from the screen. Nobody is checking.
Two numbers
- Pick something you worry about.
- Write down how likely it actually is, as best you can find out.
- Separately, write down how bad it would be.
Why: Splitting the worry into two questions usually shows which one you have been answering.
Step 6: What You Learned
- Every risk has two numbers: how likely, and how bad.
- Some precautions are for likely things, some for enormous ones.
- Find out how often it actually happens before deciding this case is unusual.
For the grown-up
Adolescent risk assessment is not generally poor at estimating probability; it is poor at weighting consequences that arrive later. Framing conversations around size-of-outcome rather than likelihood tends to land better.
The news-frequency point is worth returning to repeatedly. It explains a great deal about why the world feels more dangerous than the numbers say, and it applies to everything from crime to health scares.
This lesson pairs with the statistics work in the math courses. Here the aim is only that "likely" and "serious" are recognized as two separate questions.