Valuing Risk: Part 4

  It's Ain't Necessarily So

I'm preachin' dis sermon to show

It ain't nessa, ain't nessa

Ain't nessa, ain't nessa

Ain't necessarily so !

Just because the consequences aren't what you want, it ain't necessarily the risk.

While often the likelihood has been confused with the risk, it is also possible to mistake the consequences of an event for its risk.  Risk is always the product of likelihood AND consequences.  For example voter fraud.  If the consequences for your candidate is that voter fraud will cause them to loose the election,  then consequences would be very bad (even if the backers of the opponent might view those consequences differently!)  That does not mean that the risk of voter fraud is also high.

The Brennan Center’s seminal report , The Truth About Voter Fraud, found that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices. The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud, and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. That means that the risk of voter fraud for that hypothetical candidate is 100% * 0.0003 %.  Even if the likelihood was 100 times as greater, the risk of voter fraud is then only 100% *0.003%= 0.003%.

Confusing the consequences of voter fraud with the risk of voter fraud is even harder to understand than confusing the likelihood with the risk.