What's risky and what isn't

What do you think risk is? I don't mean generally, in life, Covid etc, but only in savings and investing. I came across an interesting answer to this question in a book named 'The Intelligent Portfolio' which has something very interesting about individual investors' risk perception here and how it contrasts with that of academic and financial services people. Those with a financial education generally think of risk as volatility, measured as the standard deviation, which is the extent to which a value fluctuates around its mean. For a saver, this is a meaningless number. For example, I could tell you that the standard deviation of the large-cap equity fund in which your SIP is being done is 11. It doesn't mean anything to you. Even if you went and spent half an hour googli