LOL what? It's at least 4 orders of magnitude more risky to fly 737 MAX compared to Airbus A320 (counting deaths per 100k takeoffs). 4 orders of magnitude are not irrational.
That's a relative measure, it could still be the case that the absolute risk is still quite low for each individual. It could very well be the case that the risk per individual is low enough to not cause serious rational concern, while the risk for the entire fleet is high enough to justify grounding it. In much the same way that golfing during a rain storm almost certainly will not get you killed, but if it became a trendy thing to do the number of people being struck by lightning would be significantly higher.
To put a finer point on it, I believe a 737-MAX is still safer than general aviation, which I think most rational people aren't scared of.
I become increasingly anxious of flying based on the size of the aircraft, not sure that I'm an outlier there. The smaller the aircraft the less stable the flight will be, which is what most people are afraid of while flying.
Why would they be skewed? Stats are stats. I'd imagine say we have a sampling bias if there are less than 1000 flights in total, as in the kinks haven't been worked out, but this is a production aircraft, with 1000s of takeoffs each day, maybe more than 1M in total during program lifetime. Sufficient to gather significant stats.
Almost all planes have more crashes in their early years, and many had worse or equally bad early records. It's too early to claim the 737-MAX will be inherently less safe than other planes using a multi-decade long measure.
