The line-by-line is growing wearisome and increasingly pointless, so I'll limit this to two points.
Stop and the read context of the comment. One in a million isn't my number, it was his. My point is that to many people, one in a million sounds like a small risk, but with 700 million passenger embarkments in a year and each person probably carrying something, his comment that one in a million causes a problem is an enormous risk. One in a billion is significant.
You're still perpetuating the problem. You're choosing arbitrary probability values and then saying "WHOA, THEY'RE SIGNIFICANT EVEN WHEN TINY!" because you're multiplying them by a big number. That remains mathematically and logically specious until there is
some basis for those probabilities. There's a great little book by a Stanford professor named Sam Savage called
The Flaw of Averages that is not only written at a high school level but also does an excellent job of articulating why these types of expected value calculations make no sense.
Etc. etc. etc.
Or we could, as you suggest, make everything in the world as dangerous as driving and relax regulations until we lose 40,000 people a year in air travel.
However we chose to set our priorities, it should be knowingly, not because we just guess at an answer.
You'll be distressed to learn that I actually agree with your sarcastic suggestion to make the world as "dangerous as driving" -- but the reason rests with your second point. Some probabilities and outcomes simply cannot be known
a priori. When you hop in the car, you are choosing to do so given your tolerance for risk. And that risk has something to do with the uncertainties (probabilities) involved. While you might not know those probabilities, they are easy enough for you to find out. In this situation, however, the scientific evidence is inconclusive at best. It's not good policy to run around outlawing things because you're worried about a tiny chance of an event when the real probability may be orders of magnitude lower, or even zero.
You have created a false dichotomy between "15 minutes of convenience" and "40,000 people a year." That's great as a scare tactic, but completely unrealistic. If the policy changed, and planes started falling out of the sky, I guaran-damn-tee you that the policy would revert in very short order.
You'll probably counter that any lives lost in the name of 15 minutes of time on gadgets is a bad trade...or that we'd get into some middle ground where there's uncertainty about the cause of accidents. The former has to do with your attitudes toward risk and uncertainty, while the latter is a logical straw man. Should the policy change, you have the right to pursue other modes of transportation to reach your destination. But most of the rest of us will, given the lack of evidence supporting the relationship between interference and accidents, continue to fly until new information suggests we shouldn't.
If you think there is some scientific test that should be run but hasn't, I pose the question: why hasn't it been done? And if there isn't a valid scientific test, I pose the question: why are we even debating this as opposed to applying the experimental method to the real world?
I'm not going to say that you can't go through life scared of everything you don't know. A lot of people have done just that. But I think it's a pretty sorry way to live.
