Your nanodecisions

If I thought my insurance provider was managing my risks, I'd be wrong. Every time I decide for or against: (i) eating an apple, (ii) walking through a cloud of smoke, (iii) putting my hand on a newly-encountered surface, (iv) taking a short-cut to work in my car, (v) clicking on a weblink, or perhaps even (vi) reading a book title, I am encountering new excitations and/or codes and therefore taking a physical risk. Hopefully, I'm also taking responsibility for the decision.

Is this a trivial fact that pertains only to me, or to you? Quite the contrary. Our communities are built on our individual ability to observe critically, and make these decisions in an informed way. They count on each of us as professional observers and decision makers, daily choosing a balanced trajectory along paths strewn with a million unavoidable risks.

As these risks become more complex and perhaps more challenging, it's crucial that we leverage our evolving abilities to communicate. In other words, this is an important question: How can we help one another think and communicate about our everyday choices, and how they relate to the risks we (and our communities) encounter on various scales of space, time, and organization?

Here a few ideas that sound good to me:

• Budget some extra time for talking with folks who have different perspectives.
• Learn about how the world is different to lifeforms on different size scales, like ants in the milliworld, microbes in the microworld, and viruses in the nanoworld.
• Read about processes that affect our world on different time scales, like solar evolution on the billion year scale, geological change on the million year scale, climate change on the thousand year (and shorter) scale, resource depletion on the hundred year scale, carbon dioxide emission on the ten year scale, and information technology whose global impact changes annually.
• Finally, discuss the impact of these processes on public health, the nature of friendships, family interactions, community participation, cultural involvement, and our understanding of the world around.

What other things might help?