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I don't have a cellphone. You probably don't need one, either.
by ooli

    For the vast majority of us there is no empirical foundation to the idea of phones as essential to our security. That myth depends on something psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky call the "availability heuristic."

    Our minds focus on unusual, dramatic possibilities: the broken-down car on a dark and lonely highway; a health emergency where immediate contact is essential. But in reality those scenarios are extremely rare — rarer, no doubt, than accidents while texting or muggers preying on distracted phone users.

    Focusing on them leads to biased assessment of risk, which, in turn, contributes to a biased assessment of smartphones' utility.