Do committees who do such reviews equally ask themselves - if this does fail - can we live with it and justify our initial risk assessment and stand by it?
So often - risky decisions are made - many pass without incidence and yet, problems happen. Often such risks are reviewed in hindsight and the weight of the realisation of risk that pass into actuality. Though when they don't fail, nobody passes a second thought and over time, such risks get normalised.
That's a fair point, but the fundamental fact is that at some point, someone/something/some process needs to accept a level of risk, or perform some type of cost/benefit analysis. Sometimes the analysis is straight forward or easy to criticize. For example, when the costs are high, and benefits relatively low. It's super easy to criticize the shuttle disasters, because the cost of cancelling the launches are so obviously lower than the lives of astronauts (at least in popular discourse).
The issue is that all mechanisms to do so are susceptible to some variant of the problem you highlighted. As so highlighted in the OP's submission, individuals can make the exact same mistakes.
I feel that a lot of things comes from the fact that we are constantly encouraged to over-quantify risk. That is we take things where REALLY we don't have a good grasp of the real numbers, and then make something up. If we're good, they'll even be in the right ballpark. If we happen to choose to follow the course of action, and everything is working "just fine", we go back to our mental risk model, which we always knew was kinda made up, and then say "well, I guess I guessed wrong", and assign a lower risk.
Yes, it does get down to risk factors and the parallels with the reinsurance/insurance market with actuaries, is an aspect not lost upon me. As we know you can't put a price on a human life - but they do in the end.
So often - risky decisions are made - many pass without incidence and yet, problems happen. Often such risks are reviewed in hindsight and the weight of the realisation of risk that pass into actuality. Though when they don't fail, nobody passes a second thought and over time, such risks get normalised.