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Comment by blenderob | Hacker News Reader

> a real risk of a lot of stress for 0 gain in actual safety, or worse.

Couldn't parse this part very well. Do you mean that there is a risk of taking stress but without getting any safety in return?

But if the OP decides not to travel, then they are eliminating stress, aren't they? So they are both benefiting from reduction of stress and the safety is definitely not becoming worse by taking this decision.

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What I meant is, I think if 0 risk is your goal you're going to suddenly find non 0 risks everywhere. You won't find a 0 risk safe haven (if it isn't guns it will be a gas leak, accident of some sort), and that's a recipe for endless worry / lost life opportunities and so on.

Now picking a number is a little silly but OP picked 0, but if we did pick a non 0 number and did the math ... they might find the real risks far lower than they expect / find some piece of mind and operate a little more based on reality.

I think this is kind of a tangent - surely we all understand that "I want zero risk" is technically an exaggeration. I think we can talk about the difference between "low" and "virtually zero" without getting into "there's always meteors" territory.

E.g. I'm an American, and I don't want to go anywhere (inside or outside my country) where my risk of being killed by malice or incompetence is "low", for most colloquial definitions of "low". I would like something lower than that. Feeling safe is a really big deal, especially when you have no agency. E.g. I'm happy to go on a, relatively speaking, "dangerous" hike.

I think realistic understanding of the numbers is a potential path for OP to really measure this. 0 being unrealistic ... from there you try to quantify what the other numbers mean for an individual and so on. So I think 0 is less of a tangent and IMO more of a pathway to being a bit more realistic / empowered to make the call.

I don't think 0 is unrealistic because I don't think they meant 0 mathematically, they meant 0 as when humans use the word to describe risk, which is near zero mathematically. I think it's a mistake to try to quantify this, as you suggest. That's not how humans work. I can't tell you what percentage, to two significant places, of risk I am willing to engage in for any given well-defined reward.

> That's not how humans work.

I 100% agree. I mentioned that in my first post.

But then we recognize our emotional responses and even superstitions and we think about it and sometimes by doing so improve our lives.

In the end of course this is OP's call to approach this how they wish.

Risk is all about perception. I traveled in China, and felt completely safe. In Africa, in one place I see more armed guards, and I feel less safe than in another place where there are very few guards. At the same time I follow german news and not a day goes by where I don't read about some attack, people throwing rocks at trains, busy train stations that have a weapon free zone (which is really weird since you generally can't carry weapons anywhere in public) and I get the feeling that traveling in Germany is less safe than here in Africa.

The US doesn't have the best safety record. But I think it was always like that. I don't think it has gotten worse. Only the border controls feel more worrisome now.

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