Knowledge of statistics is severely lacking, and airports are just a prominent example of this (people freaking out over what is an incredibly unlikely threat).

Knowledge of statistics is severely lacking, and airports are just a prominent example of this (people freaking out over what is an incredibly unlikely threat). Another example would be, leaning way too heavily into what a handful of people say in comments, when there’s no way you could ever read enough comments to form a statistically significant sample of what “people think” of you. The incredible rarity of these events should have shut down most spending from the beginning, and a new government department should never have been allowed to form around it (any more than we should have allowed a “Department of Lightning Safety” to be created). Then they compound the problem by allowing rare events within rare events (such as “shoes may kill us!!!”) to drive entire policies and waste even more time and money. Heck, if we understood statistics we’d be marching in the streets demanding a far larger number of representatives, since having approximately one million people “represented” by a member of the house means they could never possibly know what their constituents want even if they spent every free hour trying to find out. What I want is for people to be educated enough about statistics to not be fooled, and not to overreact to things based on what a few poor samples tell them.