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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

And people really do win the lottery, but you kinda don't base your life decision process on that undisputable fact.

And they die in car accidents on their way to get a lottery ticket. And people are horrible about comparing such small probabilities.

On the other hand you'll inevitably 100% die and very likely leave your child to live in the world (s)he is scared of.

> And people really do win the lottery, but you kinda don't base your life decision process on that undisputable fact.

Odds of winning the lottery: one out of 302,575,350; Odds of your child being kidnapped in a year: three out of 250

People who say "you shouldn't be afraid" are the same people who get into stupid preventable accidents. I'm ok with that.

How many of those are child custody disputes?

You cannot kidnap someone and call it a "dispute".

Your numbers are wrong.

205 kids per year are abducted by strangers in US. More people per year win some kind of significant lottery.

Your link starts off with a lie by statistics.

Also, there are 80M kids, if 205 kids per year get kidnapped that's still better odds than winning the lottery.

Depends on what specific lottery you have in mind.

And you can look at the raw incidence in various way to get various probabilities.

And even 205 in 80M is small enough so that people are unable to reason about it. Which you clearly display.