The local news informed my mother-in-law that Maytag was recalling dishwashers because a heating element could cause a fire. She has a Maytag dishwasher and so do we, so we googled Maytag dishwasher recall. Maytag had set up a page on its site for the recall. We entered our model and serial numbers and were able to schedule an appointment online for a repairman to come to our house and replace the faulty heating element. They’ve already repaired my mother-in-law’s machine — it took a half-hour — and will repair ours this week. The company seems to have handled this well and tried to minimize inconvenience to customers.

My father-in-law was over the other day — neither of our machines had been repaired yet — and when someone mentioned that we were just about out of silverware, he said something like, “You can’t run the dishwasher until they have fixed it.” He wasn’t adamant or anything, just said it off the top of his head. But I think his initial reaction is a common one and says something about how people respond to the news of some new danger or risk.

According to the recall notice, there have been 12 fires caused by the faulty heating element. There was extensive kitchen damage in one of the fires. There have been no injuries. The recall includes 1.7 million dishwashers. We have been using the dishwasher since we moved into the house last year, with no problems, and the previous owners had been using it for three years before that, presumably without a fire, since the machine and the house were not burned down. 1,700,000 other households have also been using the dishwashers week after week with no fires, minus the 12 fires, of course.

That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be a recall — if a faulty element can cause a fire, that element should be replaced, obviously. But how should we act when we learn about the recall? The recall notice says, “Consumers should stop using products immediately unless otherwise instructed.” But it has to say that — the people writing recall notices always say to stop using the item when there is even a minuscule risk, because they are trying to minimize lawsuits and bad PR that would surely result from any additional fires or injuries. Lower on the same page it also says, “Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled dishwashers, disconnect the electric supply by shutting off the fuse or circuit breaker controlling it…” 

I’m not going to live without clean forks because there were 12 fires out of 1.7 million machines. It’s far more likely for me to be hurt or my house to be damaged by any number of occurrences that I can’t predict or don’t expect. We’re probably all in more danger from the weather, car accidents, slipping in the bathtub, something we don’t see coming, than we are from our dishwasher. Are people really going to shut off the circuit breaker to the dishwasher? For some of us, that means walking all the way down to the basement.

I would be willing to bet that if all 1.7 million owners turned off the circuit breakers as instructed by the recall, since a very large number of those people (some elderly) would have to go up and down stairs in order to do that (in some cases multiple times, since many do not have properly labeled circuit breakers), there would be a much greater chance of someone being injured from falling on the stairs than there would be from a dishwasher fire that could result if no one shut off the circuit breaker. (Though probably you can’t sue Maytag if you fall down the stairs on the way to turn off your circuit breaker.) If we are acting rationally, since there are only 12 cases of fire being caused by the faulty element, we should act exactly as we acted before hearing about the recall. We should continue to use our dishwashers.

It’s reasonable to have a recall and get the heating element replaced, but just because something is on the news, or there is an increased risk, doesn’t mean there is considerable risk, especially over the short span of a week between the discovery of the recall and the replacement of the part. If I knew about the recall and didn’t schedule the repair and just continued to use the machine for five more years, I would be increasing my risk of fire, but by how much I don’t know. I would guess that a fire would still be unlikely even if I ignored the recall and kept using the machine for a few years, but maybe it would no longer be exceptionally unlikely, and in any case the repair is free and easy to schedule, so I wouldn’t recommend ignoring the recall. The more time that goes by, the more chance there is for a fire to be caused by the faulty element. But the chance of my dishwasher catching fire over the next two washes is too small to warrant any worrying or to keep me from using the machine.

This isn’t about my dishwasher, of course. It is about the way people worry about dangers that they hear about on TV, the way their understanding of risk affects their choices, and how they often misjudge the risks in comparison to the scale of time. If you were going to live 5,000 years (barring some accident that could cause your death), you would be taking a great risk to regularly ride in a car. Car accidents are too common, and over that length of time — if you drove in a car regularly — your chances of cutting your lifespan substantially short or suffering a debilitating injury through a car crash would be much higher than it is over the span of a normal human life. (And you’d have to live with that injury for a long, long time.)

It is reasonable for people who expect to live to be 80 or 90 to take the risk of driving in a car along with precautions like wearing seatbelts. People do get hurt and killed in crashes, but you are not likely to die in a car crash before you die from some natural cause. If you were going to live 5,000 years before natural causes would end your life, that might no longer be the case (I didn’t do the math), and you might reasonably conclude that riding in a car isn’t worth the higher risk of losing hundreds of years off of your life. (You might conclude the opposite, if you really like to drive or you value seeing the world more than you value hundreds or thousands of years of additional life.) It’s possible that 5,000 years from now, cars might have really good airbags, or we might teleport from place to place, but that’s not the point.

The point is, an understanding of probability and an awareness of risk in relation to time can help prevent the latest danger announced on the evening news from running our lives. Taking precautions and minimizing risk should be balanced by some understanding of what the chances are of something actually happening. 

The other point is that you can wash your dishes.

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