[brigandish]

Risk is not a synonym for the likelihood of something happening, but the likelihood and its possible effect.

For example, the risk of not wearing your seatbelt on the motorway is high because, even though most journeys will not require a seatbelt to stop any negative effects, if something bad happens it will become very high risk without the seatbelt.

Without the negative effect there is no risk, so it's not just probability.

[godelski]

What are the risks? That people die. Do you know how many people died of preventable things just today?

Or it's scary because it means we're going to go to war? Then why aren't we scared sooner? Be scared of the thing that causes people to want to blow up planes. It's not like they just wake up one day and a country decides it's going to blow up a plane. Our government spies off so many people and the result is we're still scared to get on planes? What a waste of money

[brigandish]

I encourage you to look in to how risk is calculated. There are several ways, and all of them - excepting layman's attempts and Claude Haiku responses - are on a spectrum, not a binary. They do not resemble what you have provided.

[danaris]

As soon as you declare the possible effect to be effectively infinite in magnitude, you can justify any level of response to any level of risk.

That's not a sane way to do risk management. You have to be able to use common-sense human judgement as well as situational training.

And common-sense human judgement would tell you that, even if the possible effect is a plane full of people blowing up and that starting a war, the likelihood of that occurring because you didn't yell at a teenager to turn off a Bluetooth device is so infinitesimally small that it's not worth considering.

[brigandish]

Your first two statements are a straw man and thus, become a non-sequitur.

> As soon as you declare the possible effect to be effectively infinite in magnitude, you can justify any level of response to any level of risk.

The possible effect is not effectively infinite in magnitude, and no, it does not justify any level of response. Even if a rogue state decided to bomb a plane, that would not justify a nuclear strike in response.

The common sense that you urge is already being applied, and based on well established, well tested protocol. It's not authoritarian to tell someone to turn off their bluetooth on an aeroplane because they named it in an offensive way. That's common sense.

[godelski]

  > Your first two statements are a straw man

I think you're reading two comments up.

You can't just make a strawman and then when someone calls you out on it claim that they're making a strawman.

Though I'll admit, you gave me a good laugh. But troll harder. Either try harder to sound like an intellectual or learn more into the crazy fingers in your ears "la la la" character

[brigandish]

I quoted the straw man, so there's no mistake (on my part), and I would advise you to take a look at the HN guidelines before writing more comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#comments