The stress-testing trident

While stress testing is a much discussed topic, an accepted definition of best practice remains elusive. David Rowe proposes a three-pronged approach

We humans have a difficult time incorporating highly unlikely events into our thought processes. More often than not, we either ignore them as too unlikely to be relevant or obsess about them beyond any justifiable degree of concern. Which of these extreme mental states prevails usually depends on whether we have recently experienced something that dramatises a given event. Thus, most people today have an unrealistically high level of concern about the individual risk from a terrorist attack