Doggedly pursuing the elimination of one risk while blinding oneself to all other risks and costs is not good risk-management. The author intuitively knows thi

Doggedly pursuing the elimination of one risk while blinding oneself to all other risks and costs is not good risk-management. The author intuitively knows this, because he's still asking the questions about going to the supermarket or the doctor, but is still writing about "risk" as a single dial that you turn up or down. That's not as useful as thinking about "which risks am I introducing or amplifying by taking this action, and which ones am I mitigating; what total set of (each outcome times its probability) am I willing to accept?" "[x] was a bad risk" is something that history's winners get to decree about [x], which is how we get stories of which oracles had the gods' favor.