In matters of life and death, nature asymmetrically, necessarily, and massively favors making Type II errors over Type I errors.

From Psychology Links, 2/5/2025 by Arnold Kling. He quotes The Smoke Detector Principle: The Evolutionary Advantage of Overreaction, Notes on anxiety, depression, and borderline personality disorder by Rob Henderson.  

When met with ambiguous risks, the body is calibrated to respond as if the danger is bigger than it really is, rather than under-respond. As Nesse and his co-author have put it, “the cost of getting killed even once is enormously higher than the cost of responding to a hundred false alarms.”

Type I error is to not notice the snake, get bitten, and die. Type II error is to see a stick, think it’s a snake, and run away. Evolution shaped us to make more Type II errors than Type I errors.

 

Alternatively, in matters of life and death, nature asymmetrically, necessarily, and massively favors making Type II errors over Type I errors.