Main contribution from Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Most people basically either ignore a risk or take it extremely seriously. You can assess the numerator of a risk very well but not the denominator of chance. There’s very little in-between for most people.
This raises a thorny question. Should you insulate policy-makers from often-irrational public pressures? I think that the only thing you can do is try to have as healthy a balance as possible, although I would generally err towards less insulation. For all of it’s messiness, I’m usually skeptical about placing limits on public power. Policy-makers generally suffer from the same cognitive biases as everyone else, and it’s not clear that the benefits of more insulation would outweigh the risks of more insulation. The best you can do is improve the decision-making of the public. We need to spend more time discussing cognitive biases in school and building tools that could help diagnose and combat some cognitive biases (though the issue is that the people most likely to use such tools are the least likely to need it).