Careful

In Careful: A User's Guide to Our Injury-Prone Minds, Steve Casner offers several practical insights to help reduce accidents and improve safety in everyday life.

He provides insights to improve personal safety by addressing the psychological factors that contribute to accidents and encouraging more deliberate, thoughtful behavior.

Some key takeaways include:

• Mindfulness and Attention: Being more aware of your surroundings and actively focusing on tasks can help reduce distractions, which are a major cause of accidents. Casner emphasizes the importance of attention and slowing down when performing tasks, especially those that involve risk.
• Understanding Cognitive Biases: Our brains often downplay risks due to biases like overconfidence or optimism. By recognizing these biases, you can make more informed decisions and avoid underestimating potential hazards.
• Stress and Fatigue Management: Stress and fatigue impair judgment, so managing both is crucial for safety. Casner advises regular breaks, proper rest, and stress-reduction techniques to keep your mind sharp and avoid mistakes.
• Developing Good Habits: Repeated safety behaviors, like wearing seatbelts or following standard procedures, can help make safe actions automatic. The key is to practice safety habits consistently so they become second nature.
• Anticipating and Planning for Risks: Casner suggests thinking ahead about potential dangers before you act, whether you're driving, working, or engaging in recreational activities. Planning and being prepared can help prevent accidents before they happen.
• Learning from Mistakes: When accidents do occur, it's important to analyze what went wrong and learn from them. Reflecting on past experiences helps to improve decision-making in the future and prevent repeating the same mistakes.

Safety Based on our vulnerabilities:

1. Paying attention
   • Multitasking (Task switching) - we CANNOT multitask
   • People come up with some of their best ideas when they are spacing out
   • Don't try to do 2 things at once if either one of them is important
2. Making Errors
   • Mistakes happen when we don't know what we're doing
   • Forcing function (Japanese poka-yoke) - makes it difficult to do the wrong thing
   • Get in the habit of simplifying anything that can be simplified
3. Taking Risks
   • How we end up in risky situations:
     • We don't understand the risks
       • Small risks stop being small when they are faced repeatedly
     • We think the risks don't apply to us
       • 5 year survivability of a small business is 35% in the USA
     • We are more accepting of risk than others
       • Men more risky than women
       • Teens are more risky than adults
     • Temporary insanity
     • Everybody else is doing it
     • It was totally worth it
       • Benefits matter - when thinking of risks, we also consider likely rewards of taking the risks
       • Risk homeostasis: if you make something a little safer, people will respond by being about that much more risky, and safety will go unchanged.
4. Thinking Ahead
   • System 1 (Fast) and System 2 (Slowly)
   • Most of what we do doesn't require a lot of deliberate thought
   • Idea of the Cognitive Miser: How we so often charge ahead after doing the minimum amount of thinking
   • We don't always know what to think ahead about
   • To be careful, we can keep 4 questions in back of minds:
     1. How could this go wrong?
     2. Should I really do this?
     3. What can I do to prevent this from going wrong?
     4. What would I do if it did go wrong?
   • When we don't think ahead, we resign ourselves to being reactive.
   • Practice imagining what can happen (a think ahead)
5. Looking Out for One Another
   • In the heat of the moment, we think of "I"
   • Seeing the consequences of our actions or others isn't easy
   • We're in a hurry - Don't be
   • Ethics becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increase
   • We're just not in the mood
   • Learn: The skill of being able to pause and consider the likely consequences of whatever it is you're about to do, not only for yourself but for those around you.
   • Try to predict what others might do - Be predictable yourself
6. Taking and Giving Advice
   • We struggle with advice because:
     • There's too much information
     • We might struggle to understand
     • Our own ego

Be safe at home:

• 1 in 15 people in the United States suffer a medically consulted injury while at home every year.
  • 50% of all unintentional injuries and deaths happen while using tools inside the house.
  • Use the right tool for the job
  • Use the tool in the correct manner
• Protect kids - keep dangers away and out of sight
• In 1995, the rate at which youngsters drowned in the United States was 3 for every 100,000 children.
• Create routines

Random stuff

Why we can never seem to balance fun and risk? Because they are often one and the same thing.

25% of all speeding related fatalities happen on streets where the speed limit is less than 35 miles per hour.

Work is safer than home!

• In 2015, the rate at which people in the United States died as a result of unintentional injury was about 42.7 for every 100,000 people.
  • In 2014 in the United States, 4,005 of the 136,053 unintentional injury fatalities happened at work. That's 2.9%!

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