How We Get Risk Wrong

David Ropeik argues that we can't conquer risk through emotion or reason alone:

What we can do to avoid the dangers that arise when our fears don’t match the facts—the most rational thing to do—is, first, to recognize that our risk perceptions can never be purely objectively perfectly 'rational', and that our subjective perceptions are prone to potentially dangerous mistakes. We have to let go of our fealty to the mythical false God of Perfect Reason, and recognize the risk we face if we irrationally assume we can be rational about risk.