4.23.2006
Optimism bias is a well-documented phenomenon. Most people don't assign a great deal of weight to statistics; they don't think the rules apply to them. When you warn people about the dangers of smoking, lots of them whip out a story about some guy who smoked 10-20 cigars a day for 70 years and lived to be a hundred years old. The problem is, for 99.9% of these storytellers, this guy is George Burns.
