Another thing I wonder is why so many people are so incredibly bad at risk assessment?

I take risks but I always understand to the best of my abilities exactly what risk I am taking, what risks I am foisting on others, what the consequences will be if I fail, and what the benefits will be if the risk pays off.

Habits of an old trader, I guess.

But it’s not even hard. If you don’t concede to basic reality, of course, this will never help you. And most people seem to have very little connection to reality: half the people in this country don’t believe masks work despite not understanding anything about them, think the Covid-19 pandemic is a hoax, believe in extensive election fraud and that seditionist insurrectionists were just some lost tourists taking an unscheduled tour of the Capitol in full battle rattle.

It’s impossible to assess risk if your reality has been Fox News-ed into dipshit-ville. So half the country is a lost cause.

But what about the rest? What explains their complete mispricing of risk even by their own measures? Writing a book called Risk and the Real World is probably pointless because you can’t make people smarter, only angrier. Alas.