- Downside: though the chances of being affected by brain-eating bacteria are small, the consequences are large, so it makes sense to worry about it not just in proportion to its frequency
- Novelty/newsworthiness: we're pretty aware of the risks of, say, driving or smoking, and we mentally take those into account; we're not as aware of the risks of brain-eating bacteria or a novel coronavirus
- Imperfect measurement: Because being affected by brain-eating bacteria is so rare, the number of cases is almost certainly undercounted; similarly, because the novel coronavirus is novel, people are unlikely to be good at recognizing it 100% of the time
- Non-death negative outcomes: I imagine having a small part of your brain eaten by bacteria is pretty bad even if you don't die
We regularly see outage postmortems make it to the top of this same website, despite those outages only affecting one company and their specific choice of software, and only happening once.
- Downside: though the chances of being affected by brain-eating bacteria are small, the consequences are large, so it makes sense to worry about it not just in proportion to its frequency
- Novelty/newsworthiness: we're pretty aware of the risks of, say, driving or smoking, and we mentally take those into account; we're not as aware of the risks of brain-eating bacteria or a novel coronavirus
- Imperfect measurement: Because being affected by brain-eating bacteria is so rare, the number of cases is almost certainly undercounted; similarly, because the novel coronavirus is novel, people are unlikely to be good at recognizing it 100% of the time
- Non-death negative outcomes: I imagine having a small part of your brain eaten by bacteria is pretty bad even if you don't die
We regularly see outage postmortems make it to the top of this same website, despite those outages only affecting one company and their specific choice of software, and only happening once.