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

Car crashes kill over 35,000 people in the US every year. Plane crashes, on the other hand, kill ~350. Despite this, we have shows like Mayday/Air Disasters for entertainment on TV, and events such as the tragic death of 67 people on a commercial airline flight into DCA often make the front page of the news for a week, while the state of American roadway safety gets that same level of publicity maybe once every other year. Many of you probably recognize this as the archetypal example of the availability heuristic: the magnitude of and publicity following plane crashes causes them feel like a much bigger problem than car crashes. This is, of course, despite the fact that car crashes kill two orders of magnitude more people every year. Relatedly, I fondly recall taking my first computer science class. After the absolute basics of Python, the first real lesson we learned was to always break problems down into simpler tasks, until each task becomes rather easy to do. We later learned that this is a broader principle called decomposition.Decomposition is a very helpful cue, as it gives an obvious starting point for problems that may seem intractable: break them down. Even if there turns out to be a sub-problem that's an unavoidable blocker, decomposition at least allows for its identification. It's a tenet of modern programming and is implicit in many other programming heuristics (e.g., the single responsibility principle).By now you might suspect that this post isn't really about vehicular crashes, nor is it really about freshman computer science, and indeed I can confirm that suspicion. Having done so, I now want to let you know that many plane crashes are car crashes, and that luckily we can recognize this with freshman computer science.A few years ago, one of my plane crashes was generalized unproductivity. I wasn't a total doomscroller, but I knew deep down that I must've had time in my day that I could reclaim and put to more productive ends. Unfortunately, it was