Vindicated! Jared Diamond’s Recent New York Times Piece on Risk Management Confirms Counterintuitive Strategy on North Carolina Car Accident Prevention
Over the past several months, we’ve blogged a lot about how and why to reduce driver distraction. Most people know about the “major” distractions, such as cell phones, loud animals, kids in the car, etc. Such distractions can cause deadly North Carolina car accidents.
As this blog and countless others have documented, drivers who text while behind the wheel are more dangerous than motorists who drive while above the legal North Carolina limit for DUI.
But we have also harped on minor, subtle types of distraction. For instance, when you listen to the radio, eat, or even let your mind wander when behind the wheel, you in some sense degrade attention and put yourself at incrementally higher risk for getting into an accident.
It may sound a little OCD to suggest that you should never listen to the radio or even let your mind wander while you drive. But a new article by bestselling author Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel) confirms the utility of this kind of risk management philosophy.
In a recent article in the New York Times, Diamond discussed his experience living in New Guinea. One night, he and some natives decided to camp out. Diamond wanted to sleep under a tree, but his companions insisted that they sleep out in the open because they worried that a tree might fall on them. Diamond was perplexed. The chances of that happening were miniscule — something like 1 in 1,000. But as he thought about their objections more, he understood them.
If you sleep under a tree every night of your life, you will spend more than 1,000 nights under trees. Odds are, then, that on some random day, the tree will fall and crush you. The odds may be low on any given day. But over time, the probability does not work in your favor.
The general point Diamond argues (quite convincingly) is that we need to spend more time worrying about small chronic risks to prevent accidents. In other words, the idea that we should never listen to the radio and never let our mind wander while behind the wheel might sound extreme, in that it bucks the conventional way of doing things. But it actually makes sense.
Of course, if you’ve already been hurt or injured, you’re less concerned about accident prevention than you are with dealing with your current crisis. Call our Charlotte car accident law firm at (877) 529-1222 for a confidential consultation now.
