The single most pernicious threat to liberty today is humanity's natural
tendency to misunderstand the statistics of rare events. We're just not wired to have good intuition about things that happen with extreme infrequency.

The rare – and the lurid – loom large in our imagination, and it's to our great detriment when it comes to our safety and security.

As a new father, I'm understandably worried about the idea of my child falling victim to some nefarious predator

But the fact is that attacks by strangers are so rare as to be practically nonexistent. If your child is assaulted, the perpetrator is almost certainly a relative (most likely a parent).

And yet we continue to focus our attention on the meteor-strike-rare paedophile attack

This is the same calculus that allows the fear of terrorism to take away our liberty: the statistically super-rare terrorist attack

Statisticians speak of something called the Paradox of the False Positive. Here's how that works: