Frequency and probability are judged by how easily examples come to mind.
People rate air travel as more dangerous than driving because crashes are memorable. Vivid, heavily reported hazards can feel more frequent than mundane hazards that kill far more people.
In practice
- A team estimates its outage rate from the two incidents it remembers, not the log, and is confident and wrong.
- A homeowner insures generously against fire and not at all against the flood that is likelier on their street.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- The catalogue of predictable errors