The Worst Example

There is a trick that sometimes gets pulled, and I want to show it to you so you’re less likely to fall for it. The trick happens in three steps:

Step 1: I show you a picture of a really brutal car wreck. Multiple cars, many fatalities, flaming wreckage, really the worst example of a car accident. I tell you (truthfully!) that this car accident happened in our county.

Step 2: I tell you (again, truthfully!) that our particular county has 5,000 car accidents a year.

Step 3: I ask you for some small amount of support – money, votes, signatures, whatever – in order to enact some plan to reduce that number.

Did you notice the trick?

I first showed you an extremely non-typical example of something. The vast majority of those 5,000 “car accidents” are fender-benders with no injuries, let alone fatalities. In our small county, it’s mostly people bumping into each other at a stop sign or even single-car collisions with mailboxes or what have you, but they all get recorded in that statistic because that’s technically what they are. After you had a very vivid (and terrible) image in your head, I told you how many car accidents there were each year, knowing full well that what you would picture is 5,000 flaming wrecks with multiple fatalities. This would seriously inflate the severity of the problem, making you more likely to acquiesce to my request.

People will do this all the time, and it’s so subtle most people won’t ever notice it. An especially insidious element of this trick is that if you do object to it, someone might say, “Oh, so you think car accidents are just fine and you’re okay with them?” Of course not – but the price I’m willing to pay to prevent 5,000 fatal pile ups is much higher than the price I’m willing to pay to prevent 1 fatal pile-up and 4,999 fender-benders. The whole category might be bad, but since we can’t assign maximum resources to fix every bad thing, we have to take an accurate measure of how bad each thing is.

People trying to raise resources for their thing don’t want you to do that, though. So they do this. Just be aware of it.