I recently started a job in the aerospace industry, and it's still taking me a little bit of time to get used to the concept of risk, simply because it: 1) i

I recently started a job in the aerospace industry, and it's still taking me a little bit of time to get used to the concept of risk, simply because it: 1) is rarely addressed in education (nowhere in sciences nor humanitites) 2) is an extremely "scary" word 3) is difficult to visualize. The combination of all three of these factors means that people don't realize that risk is an everyday thing: there are probabilities and outcomes that you need to weigh in order to make the decisions properly. Risk management is big if you're managing multi-million dollar contracts or huge rockets, but it seems to never filter down into the common psyche, which is disturbing. Humans have successfully managed risk to fly planes and go into space, so we have the models to make these decisions, yet we don't seem to be able to properly apply it on the ground. Is the solution more education? I think so, but in a different light: people need to accept that bad things happen, and that you can model the probabilities and work out for yourself what tradeoffs you're making. Rarely is it all good and bad, and by estimating the expected value, you get the opportunity to say "no, this costs too much" in response to all-out "safety" measures.