“In its stoking of our fears, the news cruelly exploits our weak hold on a sense of perspective.” Alain de Botton, The News: a User’s Manual “The availability heuristic, like other heuristics of judgement, substitutes one question for another: you wish to estimate the size of a category or the frequency of an event, but…

Familiarity reduces insecurity, so we feel more comfortable describing and combating the risks we think we understand: terrorists, immigrants, job loss or crime.  But the true sources of insecurity in decades to come will be those that most of us cannot define: dramatic climate change and its social and environmental effects … Tony Judt, Ill…