In life, perception IS reality

From Seth Godin again today, the following illustration:

"Do you have an opinion about nuclear power? About the relative safety of one form of power over another? How did you come to this opinion? Here are the stats, and here's the image. A non-exaggerated but simple version of his data:

For every person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die due to coal, adjusted for the same amount of power produced. You might very well have excellent reasons to argue for one form over another. Not the point of this post. The question is: did you know about this chart? 

This last week has seen a fair lambasting of the media over the nuclear non-meltdown in Japan. The sky was not falling - but it gave plenty of Americans cause to pound the stump for or against nuclear power. And how about Libya? America and France are now bombing against the regime. Do we really know what's going on? No, not at all. And don't expect the western media to go down there and start digging for the real story. Won't happen. Too many vested interests at stake. But we'll plunder away, at whatever our day jobs are. All that other stuff is far away. So we'll just continue making the reality we want to perceive, because we can. Reality is just terribly subjective. Perception is almost fact.

D a v i d E v e r i t t - C a r l s o n

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