Don't ignore the car crashes, and remember your freshman CS

According to a LessWrong post, we tend to worry far more about plane crashes than car crashes, despite cars killing around thirty-five thousand Americans annually—roughly a hundred times the aviation toll. This reflects a cognitive bias called the availability heuristic: vivid, dramatic events feel disproportionately large. The author connects this to a freshman computer science lesson: decomposition, breaking hard problems into smaller, solvable pieces. They describe their own 'plane crash'—chronic unproductivity—which was actually composed of smaller 'car crashes': not enjoying programming, excessive social media use, and poor task tracking. By addressing these component problems individually—learning Vim, installing social media blockers, adopting a task manager—they made real progress. The lesson: when facing a large, seemingly insurmountable problem, decompose it. You're likely missing the individual issues for the larger difficulty.

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