The tragedy of low probability events

We live in an age of fear and yet life (in the US at least) is the safest it has ever been. Megan McArdle blames coddling parents and the media in a Washington Post column. She argues that cars and swimming pools are much more dangerous than school shootings and kidnappings yet we mostly ignore the former and obsess about the latter. However, to me dying from an improbable event is just so much more tragic than dying from an expected one. I would be much less despondent meeting St. Peter at the Pearly Gates if I happened to expire from cancer or heart disease than if I were to be hit by an asteroid while weeding my garden. We are so scared now because we have never been safer. We would fear terrorist attacks less if they were more frequent. This is the reason that I would never want a major increase in lifespan. I most certainly would like to last long enough to see my children become independent but anything beyond that is bonus time. Nothing could be worse to me than immortality. The pain of any tragedy would be unbearable. Life would consist of an endless accumulation of sad memories. The way out is to forget but that to me is no different from death. What would be the point of living forever if you were to erase much of it. What would a life be if you forgot the people and things that you loved? To me that is no life at all.

Harvard and Asian Americans

The current trial regarding Harvard’s admissions policies seem to clearly indicate that they discriminate against Asian Americans. I had always assumed this to be the case. My take is that the problem is not so much that Harvard is non-transparent and unfair in how it selects students but rather that Harvard and the other top universities have too much influence on the rest of society. Each justice on the US Supreme Court has a degree from either Harvard or Yale. That is positively feudalistic. So here is my solution. All universities have a choice. They can 1) choose students any way they wish but they lose their tax free status or 2) retain tax exempt status but then adhere to strict non-discrimination and affirmative action rules. The top schools already have massive endowments and hurt the locales they are in by buying property and then not pay property taxes. I say let them do what they want but tax them heavily for the right to do so. The government should also not subsidize loans for students that attend such schools.