Comment by duxup
9 months ago
What I meant is, I think if 0 risk is your goal you're going to suddenly find non 0 risks everywhere. You won't find a 0 risk safe haven (if it isn't guns it will be a gas leak, accident of some sort), and that's a recipe for endless worry / lost life opportunities and so on.
Now picking a number is a little silly but OP picked 0, but if we did pick a non 0 number and did the math ... they might find the real risks far lower than they expect / find some piece of mind and operate a little more based on reality.
Risk is all about perception. I traveled in China, and felt completely safe. In Africa, in one place I see more armed guards, and I feel less safe than in another place where there are very few guards. At the same time I follow german news and not a day goes by where I don't read about some attack, people throwing rocks at trains, busy train stations that have a weapon free zone (which is really weird since you generally can't carry weapons anywhere in public) and I get the feeling that traveling in Germany is less safe than here in Africa.
The US doesn't have the best safety record. But I think it was always like that. I don't think it has gotten worse. Only the border controls feel more worrisome now.
I think this is kind of a tangent - surely we all understand that "I want zero risk" is technically an exaggeration. I think we can talk about the difference between "low" and "virtually zero" without getting into "there's always meteors" territory.
E.g. I'm an American, and I don't want to go anywhere (inside or outside my country) where my risk of being killed by malice or incompetence is "low", for most colloquial definitions of "low". I would like something lower than that. Feeling safe is a really big deal, especially when you have no agency. E.g. I'm happy to go on a, relatively speaking, "dangerous" hike.
I think realistic understanding of the numbers is a potential path for OP to really measure this. 0 being unrealistic ... from there you try to quantify what the other numbers mean for an individual and so on. So I think 0 is less of a tangent and IMO more of a pathway to being a bit more realistic / empowered to make the call.
I don't think 0 is unrealistic because I don't think they meant 0 mathematically, they meant 0 as when humans use the word to describe risk, which is near zero mathematically. I think it's a mistake to try to quantify this, as you suggest. That's not how humans work. I can't tell you what percentage, to two significant places, of risk I am willing to engage in for any given well-defined reward.
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