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by j16sdiz 1015 days ago
1. It's not just risk, it's also a risk/benefit balance.

2. We have 8 billion human on this earth. Is it bad to have 0.00001% of human alive (i.e. a few thousands) focus on 0.00001% risk?

1 comments

This is a commonly (mis)-used argument, that misses the fact that if the statistics tell us the risk is less than some value (lets say 10^-6), the assumption is that the risk is 10^-6. Often, statistical tests have the power to detect very rare effects, but not effects that are even rarer. So less than 10^-6 does not mean the risk is one in a million, it means we do not know how low the risk is (could be 10^-23), but we know that it is no higher than 10^-6.