Comment by brigandish
11 hours ago
Risk is not a synonym for the likelihood of something happening, but the likelihood and its possible effect.
For example, the risk of not wearing your seatbelt on the motorway is high because, even though most journeys will not require a seatbelt to stop any negative effects, if something bad happens it will become very high risk without the seatbelt.
Without the negative effect there is no risk, so it's not just probability.
What are the risks? That people die. Do you know how many people died of preventable things just today?
Or it's scary because it means we're going to go to war? Then why aren't we scared sooner? Be scared of the thing that causes people to want to blow up planes. It's not like they just wake up one day and a country decides it's going to blow up a plane. Our government spies off so many people and the result is we're still scared to get on planes? What a waste of money
As soon as you declare the possible effect to be effectively infinite in magnitude, you can justify any level of response to any level of risk.
That's not a sane way to do risk management. You have to be able to use common-sense human judgement as well as situational training.
And common-sense human judgement would tell you that, even if the possible effect is a plane full of people blowing up and that starting a war, the likelihood of that occurring because you didn't yell at a teenager to turn off a Bluetooth device is so infinitesimally small that it's not worth considering.