The Hazards of Unnecessary Fear: Division 4 MST Students Explore Probability and Risk

By Division I Media & Journalism reporter Theo

In the spring, Division 4 MST students worked on projects involving risk and game theory. Game theory is a field of mathematics that covers the best moves to make within a particular set of rules. The students also covered the concept of risk, which is a more broad idea involving probability, information, and modeling. The class was presented with several possibilities for projects to do around risk. Many chose to write an essay analyzing the risk of a given decision, including cost-benefit analysis. Some students chose to do an exponential ladder in which they specifically looked for events of varying frequency in the real world, like car crashes or a baby born with silver eyes.

To learn more about what they were learning, I talked to MST teacher and Head of School Josh Abrams. When I asked him about what he really wanted the students to take home after a project like this, he responded, “I want them to know what to actually fear, and I want them to know how to be able to assess risk mathematically, not by what sounds scariest.” He gave the example of people preparing for huge natural disasters but not remembering to put safety lights on their bike. Being struck by a car on a bike us much more likely, but a hurricane sounds a lot scarier. As such people don't think about the more pedestrian risks to their lives. Josh and the other MST teachers hope to change these perceptions.