After the Columbia space shuttle disaster, a former NASA official who faulted the way the agency dealt with safety risk warned (in an AP story, March 7, 2003) that NASA workers believed, “If I’ve flown 20 times, the risk is less than if I’ve flown just once.”
a. Explain why it would be reasonable for someone to form this belief, from the way we use empirical evidence and margins of error to estimate an unknown probability.
b. Explain a criticism of this belief, using coin flipping as an analogy.