I tell people: if it's in the news, don't worry about it, because by definition, news is something that almost never happens.
The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.
We tend to ignore the high probability of small gains or losses and focus on big payoffs or disaster despite remote odds.
Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.
That the chance of gain is naturally over-valued, we may learn from the universal success of lotteries.
I think my brain just has a natural way of going to what would be the most insane thing, the least likely option.
We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.
The public totally discounts low-probability high-consequence events. The individual says, it's not going to be this plane, this bus, this time.
We are all vulnerable to the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of vivid, cognitively available risks rather than statistically likelier, but less salient, risks.
