It is hard to say how unlikely it is. A plane crash may be unlikely globally but may be more likely among the planes of an airline that considers this acceptabl

It is hard to say how unlikely it is. A plane crash may be unlikely globally but may be more likely among the planes of an airline that considers this acceptable. Likewise, a drunk driver is more likely to cause an accident than the average driver. And as I was saying, I understand this attitude from the passengers. For them the risk of a crash may be severe but highly unlikely and in comparison to the risk of loosing their job acceptable. But I would have expected the average HN commenter to recognize the just like the risk is different for different types of drivers (and their cars due to maintenance) , the same applies to planes. So those less rare events may be more likely than the average. So making some events (and their consequences), that may already be more likely than the average for them, a number of times more likely is bad. Than again the average is just as uninformative a statistical indicator for HN commenters as it is for drivers and planes. This makes me think, when someone talks about something they perceive as the average of something do they perceive the median, the mode or actually indeed the mean(average)? There is a case to made that we actually perceive the mode (value that appears most often) instead of the mean.