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Schneier: We Need To Relearn How To Accept Risk
An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Schneier has written an article about how our society is becoming increasingly averse to risk as we invent ways to reduce it. 'Risk tolerance is both cultural and dependent on the environment around us. As we have advanced technologically as a society, we have reduced many of the risks that have been with us for millennia. Fatal childhood diseases are things of the past, many adult diseases are curable, accidents are rarer and more survivable, buildings collapse less often, death by violence has declined considerably, and so on. All over the world — among the wealthier of us who live in peaceful Western countries — our lives have become safer.' This has led us to overestimate both the level of risk from unlikely events and also our ability to curtail it. Thus, trillions of dollars are spent and vital liberties are lost in misguided efforts to make us safer. 'We need to relearn how to recognize the trade-offs that come from risk management, especially risk from our fellow human beings. We need to relearn how to accept risk, and even embrace it, as essential to human progress and our free society. The more we expect technology to protect us from people in the same way it protects us from nature, the more we will sacrifice the very values of our society in futile attempts to achieve this security.'"
Mitigate biggest risk and immediately something else becomes biggest. At some points you have to stop because every next risk is smaller and more has to be sacrificed for smaller piece of safety.
pass on this advice to a Progressive
Bruce is right. Even if our society managed to put enough measures in place to mitigate all but the risks associated with an asteroid impact, you surely would not want to live in that society, as the term "living" would be a loosely defined term at best. It would be a society essentially devoid of free will.
Write failed: Broken pipe
It's an aversion to being sued for not sufficiently managing that risk which leads to massive overreactions on the part of authorities and businesses.
For some reason, life these days (At least in Finland) is more and more about tiptoeing safely into an alzheimer-ridden adult-diapers-wearing dementia at the age of 100, and less and less about actually living and enjoying life.
I for one propose to increase the number of deaths by heart attacks, alcohol overdose, drug abuse, failed parachutes, and so on. That really is the only way to lower the mortality rates on the unwanted types of death...
It's life, no one gets out alive.
As someone who is familiar with a lot of theoretical work on decision making and the work of Tversky and Kahneman, but not with current empirical research, I am wondering where he gets his data from. By looking at a few examples you cannot establish general claims about how risk prone or averse we have become. Likewise, how does he know that risk aversity depends on the culture? Perhaps it does, but I want to see the study. And yes, there are plenty of studies in this field, it just seems that Schneier doesn't read them, or otherwise he should mention them.
So how about some empirical evidence?
Would be exterminating the lawyers.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Says the Anonymous Coward.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
All this stressing about risk, and the rules, and money it costs might be killing people today !
Here's an engineer who realized at an early age that discovery comes with some risk,
http://www.bentleypublishers.com/milliken [bentleypublishers.com]
He died last year at 101, http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2012/08/27/william-f-milliken-1911-2012/ [hemmings.com]
In "Equations of Motion: Adventure, Risk and Innovation", Milliken vividly recounts his experiences pushing airplanes and race cars beyond their limits. His exciting life provides singular, real-world insight into the challenge and joy of engineering and the history of vehicle dynamics as he created it in the air and on the track."
"Many readers of Racecar Engineering will either have a copy or have read Bill and Doug Millikens' Race Car Vehicle Dynamics. In the middle of this seminal work is a chapter titled Historical Note On Vehicle Dynamics Development, which gives a brief insight into the post-war period when all that had been learnt in aeronautics, stimulated by the urgency of war, began to be transferred to automotive engineering. Bill Milliken led this work, creating a Vehicle Dynamics Department out of the Flight Research Department at the Cornell Aeronautical laboratory (CAL).
This new book is the story of Bill"s life, from his earliest days building ever more daring vehicles: his design, build, flight and crash of the M-l aircraft; his desire to discover the science behind stability and control; his pioneering work in flight testing in the aviation industry pre-war and the formation of Flight Research Department at CAL where research into variable stability was started.
The transition to vehicle dynamics research was born out of Bill"s love of racing, notably at Watkins Glen and Pike"s Peak, with preparation and development carried out at CAL. To formalise what was going on, the Vehicle Dynamics Department was formed and Bill was fortunate to meet with Maurice Olley of GM which led to a multi-year relationship that funded the work to put vehicle dynamics onto a scientific basis.
It is a book full of science, adventure, philosophy and humour, copiously illustrated with rare photographs, that will intrigue a broad range of those interested in both aircraft and vehicle engineering."
Review of Equations of Motion from Racecar Engineering - November 2006
...in response to catastrophic events, people demonstrate a willingness to sacrifice personal freedoms for a measure of perceived safety.
The author of this blog should be commended for this completely novel contribution to society.
Oh well, at least he provided an actionable recommendation: "We need to relearn how to recognize the trade-offs that come from risk management, especially risk from our fellow human beings. We need to relearn how to accept risk, and even embrace it, as essential to human progress and our free society."
Ok Bruce, "We" will get right on that. Thanks for the advice.
Assume you spend x million tax dollars. Doesn't matter on what. People had to work to make that money. When people work, accidents happen and people day. Someone good at statistics will probably be able to figure out X in the statement "when X million tax dollars are spent, on average one person will die in the effort of making that money". I don't think the number is very large.
But that means spending X million dollars to save one life is pointless because you will kill - in a completely unpredictable way - one life to get the money!
Business/governments are afraid of public backlash for NOT going to extreme lengths. As an example, if Obama today announced he was going to work towards repealing the PATRIOT Act and whatever silly laws have lead to excessive sums of money being spent on reducing the the already slim chance of dying in a terrorist attack, Republicans would go crazy claiming that the Democrats don't give a care if you and your family die. If schools right now weren't spending who-knows how much money on installing security cameras, hiring armed guards, etc. in response to Sandy Hook, there would be articles everywhere right around now claiming how the public school system is being irresponsible with the safety of children. Hell, I recently remember that there were actually people seriously considering shunning Starbucks because they won't become a gun-free zone where relevant laws don't require it.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
Not the AC above, but if you really need to tack a name to that statement, use mine.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...using, developing, producing, buying, selling weapons and learn to be friends with others instead of trying to dominate. Until that happens, they will be hated by others and receive terror up their asses and keep being the scared cowards they are today.
Problem is: there is no other world force able to control that this happens without destroying the US. If they gave up all this, they will be attacked by all those people, groups, nations who were attacked by them. It will take generations to overcome this.
Every country manufacture arms. The U.S. only does so more openly.
Big business is risk-averse. And in America today, big business runs everything.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
While not endorsing gunboat diplomacy, your ideas set up a Big Win in the 1930s. For "War" values of "Win".
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
For every ten thousand people who are unable to appropriately evaluate risk, there will be an insurance broker ready to exploit them.
Where is moderation: -1 False?
Though increasingly I start getting the impression that he's firing about a couple of "duh. You don't say..." statements. Or is it just 'cause I'm in the sec biz that it seems "duh" to me?
Why does anyone think security is in any way different from any other business? In EVERY business, every project, every goal you have, everything you do, the first 90% take 10% of the work, while the last 10% gobble up 90%. Be it 80/20 or 70/30 in yours, I won't split hairs, but that's how it is: A huge part of the project or goal is trivially implemented while a minimal part takes up the lion's share. I'd even go so far to say that in security, the ratio is 99-1.
The GOOD thing about security is that you can actually just do the first 99% and accept the risk for the rest, and get away with an incredible cost/benefit ratio. And you'll find that most companies actually use that strategy in their risk management and reach a security level of 95+ percent. Actually, the joke here is that most companies are, at least in my and I'd say "our" (yours too, I'd guess) definition of security standards, under-secured because of their IT-Governance and that "95% is good enough 'til everything is at 95%" rules. That's why trivial security mechanisms aren't implemented. We're already at 95 with sec. No need to throw money that way (and, believe it or not, most companies reach their "recommended" IT-Sec level easily. Simply because those 95% are SO dirt cheap, easy and painless to implement that they almost certainly ARE already in place, and if not a few pennies will do. You'll find the IT-Sec requirements usually in the "quick wins" quarter of the chart).
You see, companies already heed that advice. Mostly because they don't give a shit about customers complaining about shoddy security because, well, they'll still buy 'cause we're SO cheap. And yes, they do.
It's different with governments that won't just get a quick outcry when a security blooper happens (like a corporations would if they, say, lose every CC number of your customers). If a plane crashed anywhere into a building again, the press would have a field day. HOW could this happen? Didn't our law makers learn anything from 9/11? Did they simple ignore it and go on with their life? What do we have those useless twits for if they do not do ANYTHING? You may fill up here with statements of your choice, but one thing is certain: This administration is finished. Done. Nobody will give them credit for anything anymore. And you better forget about winning the next elections for at least half a decade. People tend to remember those things (and the other party will spend a lot of time and money reminding them of it).
So we need 100% security. Not because we really want it or need it. Not because the scenario is so dangerous to us, the people.
It's dangerous to them, and their place at the feeding trough.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...using, developing, producing, buying, selling weapons and learn to be friends with others instead of trying to dominate. Until that happens, they will be hated by others and receive terror up their asses and keep being the scared cowards they are today.
Or we'll just build a bioweapon that targets matrilineal mitochondrial DNA and kills off all the terrorists.
Or we'll get a functional nanotechnology, and change our enemies minds by, you know, physically moving their atoms around until we actually make them think the way we want them to.
I think there should be free lawn darts for everyone.
Bruce really is quite insightful in his observations. I can not recall ever having read something from him that was not well reasoned and thought provoking. We as a people seem to be striving for a bubble-wrapped world and we are all the worse for it. With the greatest risk comes the greatest rewards, at the current average level of risk here in the USA, we are completely deserving of a Cracker Jack prize. Seems as if the race to the bottom is near completion.
I agree with the article. Increasingly people relinquish life experiences, if not life itself, out of fear and an unwillingness to take any risks. People who avoid trips to far away countries because of fear of a plane crash are a common occurrence. Yet I also know people who avoid excursions on weekends because they are afraid of being involved in a traffic accident. People who are afraid to visit concerts out of fear of crowds or stampedes, people who love oriental style and culture yet would never visit a country such as Morocco out of fear of kidnap or a terrorist attack.
I have to admit, I also experience this fuzzy fear of doing something new, moving out of my comfort zone, leaving the safe haven of my apartment, my town, my daily routine, every time I leave to do something out of the ordinary. I blame the worldwide media and my addiction to news. It seems like bad things happen all the time, everywhere. But it's important to put things into perspective. The world is a very big place, and 99.998% of the time people are safe and nothing happens. Of course, on those very rare occasions where something unfortunate does happen, it makes news and penetrates into our awareness, tickling our fears.
Of course, just as important as putting things into perspective, is not to be stupid and take unnecessary risks. You want to experience oriental culture? By all means, visit Morocco: Casablanca, Marrakesh, Fes. The people are very friendly and there are beautiful things to see there. But please, stay out of Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq... accepting risk does not have to encompass being reckless.
Looking back, I don't regret a single time I kicked myself in the butt, stepped out of my comfort zone, and experienced new things. Yes, I was anxious on numerous occasions, mostly at airports, nervous and afraid. It doesn't matter. In the end, it was all worth it.
Bruce is
No. You're projecting your own ideas onto others in order to come up with an answer you like. The history of humanity is filled with those who went away from others on purpose, with motivations all over the cognitive map.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
People have been saying this for well over a decade. No offense, Bruce.
...but failure is unacceptable.
Standard operating procedure in nearly all industries today.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
But we do not even mitigate the biggest risk first. Arguably the biggest risk right now to us is cancer. However, in the US, the budget for cancer research is a pitiful 5 billion $/yr, which is rather small in comparison to the 79 billion $/yr for military research and testing.
Sources for budgets:
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/NCI/research-funding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#By_title
A risk category that is growing is the tremendously large screw ups. In the past, we just did not have the capacity to snuff out so many lives at once by mistake. The sinking of the Titanic, the crash of a modern passenger jet, the largely failed evacuation of the twin towers, the highway pileup or the toxic gassing of a whole town from a chemical accident were simply not possible in the past.
All of these have active accident prevention efforts in place when they occur. It is not that risk is not being addressed, it is that the high consequences of a mishap ultimately make blame in adequate proportion impossible. And so the system continues to set up for systematic failure. Airline safety is a pretty good example of how a systematic learning process can help to address this, but consequences still continue to grow. And, as risks get to be global, like nuclear winter, ocean acidification or global warming, the chance to learn from mistakes diminishes because there is no next time in which to be more careful.
Or we'll just build a bioweapon that targets matrilineal mitochondrial DNA and kills off all the terrorists.
Or we'll get a functional nanotechnology, and change our enemies minds by, you know, physically moving their atoms around until we actually make them think the way we want them to.
See what I mean? This is the fear and need for domination that I was talking about. You are so scared of the world that your immediate response is that you need to attack someone Have you even considered other options?
...But somehow I don't have a problem with less-frequent building collapses.
The attitude is "if I can fault someone else then I'm completely off the hook" along with "I can take out my anger on whoever did this to me and it will be OK".
And before the self righteous conservatives start whining about welfare, I would like to point out that both conservatives and Christians are some of the worst offenders. Just think about every time some self absorbed pulpit pounding asshat preacher says that a natural disaster is the "wrath of god punishing the wicked". He's found someone to blame and clearly approves of the suffering, death and destruction. So much for "Christian charity" and "hate the sin, love the sinner".
And it's not the intrinsically inferior brown skinned immigrants who are to blame for wrecking the US. Rep King from Iowa is doing the racists equivalent of flapping his penis out in public when he says 'for everyone who is a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there, they weigh 130 pounds and with calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.' Conservatives have taken the blame game to heart and made it their own.
Why is Snark Required?
Over here in Germany the federal minister of the interior talked about a fundamental right above all other fundamental rights written down - security.
When I was a kid, I used take my pocket money every Saturday morning, tear out of the house at who knows what speed, down the street, through the car park of the recreation center, across the sports oval and through to the corner store (all the while shouting who knows what at the top of my lungs). Then I would go and spend my pocket money on all kinds of lollies (most of which would probably be eaten by the time I got home).
All of this was done with no parental supervision whatsoever.
These days if that happened, the parents would be yelled at for allowing their kid to go out unsupervised, yelled at for allowing their kid to run so fast though car parks and sports ovals and things with such a high risk of being hurt in the process and quite possibly yelled at for allowing their kids to spend their money with no controls on what they are buying.
Note that I also did other "dangerous" things like walking/riding my bike to school, playing on playground equipment and accessing the Internet without a parent looking over my shoulder at all times.
Well, we're still underestimating the level of risk related to peak oil and global warming.
Those are bigger problems than buildings collapse.
Why can't the next x million fix that problem? With enough mallets, winning at wack-a-mole is trivial.
I agree with the man in this respect, and I'm not old. However, this latest comment from Schneier sounds like my grandfather when he gets on his soap box. Like Schneier, most things my grandfather says are correct, but my grandfather's reached the age where all he cares about is being right and not about how people perceive him. The problem with that mentality is that the majority of society cares too much about what people think about them and not enough about doing right. To convince those people, one has to be a little more tactful.
A fine case of attacking the man, not the argument.
Risk is acceptable when we can control it. Undesirable risk is when the textile factory you're working in collapses around you. Fun risk is when you catch air off a snowy cliff on Snowbird or make a big tackle off a rugby scrum. There's always a chance you'd end up in a hospital but all the fun makes it worth it.
So, I wonder if JP Morgan's risk (and subsequent loss) of $6 billion should be considered an acceptable risk or not. It was a substantial risk, but ultimately it was their own business risk. Yet, we (the US) seemed to treat it like a national crisis.
If you post your phone number I'll call you and we can discuss.
Risk....
Without risk mitigation you would be dead already! Leverage the hell out of every advantage we can to mitigate the risk to the civilized world.
I almost sounds as if you are one of "them", are you?
People have responded to this with statements about terrorism/security and such, but the first thing I thought of was vaccines. The anti-vaccination folks constantly declare vaccines to be a bigger health risk than the disease they protect against. Part of the problem is that vaccines are so successful that most folks today don't remember a time when polio, measles, whooping cough, etc ravaged the world. They don't remember people dying or being permanently maimed by these diseases. (This includes me, by the way.)
To some people, this lack of personal experience makes them imagine the diseases as if they were a "bad cold." Then, they hear about the "toxins" in vaccines and the bad risk assessment kicks in. They figure that the high danger (as perceived by them) of vaccines outweighs the low chance of getting the disease and the low severity (again as seen by them) of the disease. So they skip the vaccinations - and then herd immunity breaks down, people get sick, and die.
Though I wouldn't trade being safe from these diseases, this state of safety has altered the ability of some people to make good risk assessments.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Just talk to anyone who had their retirement in stocks in 2008. In this context, risk stinks.
While this reasoning is superficially appealing it leads us down the road to grotesque cost-benefit analysis. For example, if putting a cancer causing substance into the environment only causes deaths over a long period of time while the cost of using a benign alternative is high by all means we should allow pollution. Does even the cost of automobile seat belts justify the expense?
Really? You'd think that if you read Pinker's book on the decline of violence, but not if you re-examine his statistics. By examining only the worst events in a particular period, he provides a skewed view of the risk of death by violence. Much better to consider the probability of dying by all violent causes in a particular year/century. Given that some major atrocities in centuries past were exaggerated, it's likely that the 20th century is at least the second and possibly the most violent in the last 2K years. (And killing only gets more efficient with time and technology...)
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/MC11slides/sp-Slide039a.JPEG
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/11/06/opinion/06atrocities_timeline.html?ref=sunday
Women are more risk averse. And the growing gynocentrism of our society is the reason for greater and greater risk aversion. With the passage of the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States this greater risk aversion became far more important than it had ever been previously. As the political system readjusted itself to deal with "women's issues" we saw an increasing need to mitigate risks of all kinds. This became the "political correctness" that is eating our society alive right now. Today we must kiss the last boo-boo, save the last life, or we are inhuman male animals who don't care about others. Today we cannot say "leggo my eggo" when it comes to rights and freedoms if there is any pain or suffering to anyone (including ourselves) related to our exercise of a right or freedom. Rights and freedoms naturally cost us on a daily basis. They cost money, inconvenience, even life. And when women and feminish men control life beyond a certain unknowable point all our rights and freedoms will disappear into a black hole of hysterical concern for others. I feel we are approaching that point.
How do we once again accept risk enough to save our rights and freedoms and our ability to continue to grow and develop? We must re-male our society and government. How do we do that? We must re-visit the nice, but fatal nineteenth amendment to the Constitution that erroneously gave women an absolutely equal place in life in all things by force. We must not eliminate the female vote, but we must decrease its value with respect to the male vote. I suggest a female vote should not be greater that somewhere between .75 and .85 of a male vote in order to bring enough respect for risk back into our society. Unless we do this we can expect to continue our descent into fear, mediocrity and failure as a nation.
E Proelio Veritas.
Two problems, actually. One is that we are dealing, not with a fear of risk, but a phobia towards it: the terms are related, to be sure, but the latter is taken to an irrational degree. If we don't want to spend our lives in padded rooms, then we must be willing to forego the mantra of "Never Again."
But the other problem comes in when the current political fashion of empathy-based arguments comes into play. We are asked to empathize with people who have been traumatized, in the moment of their trauma. Anyone would say "Never Again" in those circumstances: that's a large part of what it means to suffer trauma, and the very definition of empathy demands it from those practicing it. But the recently-traumatized are not known for their rational decision-making abilities. There's a reason we tell people to wait a year, or even longer, before making big decisions. There's a reason we devote whole branches of psychology to studying the effects of trauma. PTSD is no longer one monolithic thing, but a whole spectrum of defined conditions.
This, I think, is where the current phobias come from: a well-meaning but sorely misguided attempt to make decisions by empathizing with people who are in no condition to make those decisions. Pathos has its limits, and we have arrived at the current state by ignoring those limits. Certainly empathy has its place when it comes to the healing process, but when the time comes to make big decisions, we need to step back and look at things more rationally, even when rational thought means accepting the status quo.
Everything is a risk on some level or another. I wouldn't want to be protected from all them. The cost of doing so both in lost opportunities and in lost liberty and freedom are simply too great.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
It seems like /. runs Schneier's blog posts all the time...and I'm ok with that! They're usually great reads.
I think the article gets one important point rather wrong. Those who take risks tend to be those coming out of the most secure backgrounds. This is pretty much the core observation leading to Plato's Republic. If you grow up at risk, you are less likely to chose risk than if you grow up secure. Now, our response to 9-11 might be too large, but it is not owing to being risk adverse. It is more a function of having a privileged and sheltered decider ready to risk a lot, even our civil liberties, to carry out a family vendetta.
Douglas Adams got it much closer. It was being sheltered and safe that led to the krikkit wars.
Just because something is a bigger source of mortality does not mean that budgets should be distributed accordingly. The benefit of additional funding might not be worth it, because the problem is so hard. If you want to be theoretical about it, you want the cost of one additional life saved to be equal across all investments.
And even that is simplistic. Is 10 years more of life strapped to a hospital bed equivalent to 1 additional year of life totally unencumbered? Hence the QUALY (Quality Adjusted Life Years).
Beyond this, some problems are just hard. During the American military involvement in South East Asia, mines (IEDs, really) were the source of over 50% of casualties. The problem is that solving the "mine problem" is very hard, so even if you were to spend 10 times the money on it, it would still be no further ahead. There's just some fundamental issues.
Cancer is much the same. First off, there's myriad forms of cancer, and they start/progress by different mechanisms. And we've made enormous progress in reductions of deaths from cancer, largely by education (don't smoke, basically), and we've identified various and sundry carcinogens, and we've reduced the exposure to them by legislation and education. However, when it comes to "curing" cancer, we're not nearly so far ahead, in the general case. "cut it out" "burn it out" "poison it out" seem to be the most viable strategies today. I would say that the poorest performance is on "detecting cancer" at the very early stages. High false positive rates cause large costs and side effects (with the legions of cut/burn/poison faction standing ready to spring into action at a moments notice), so while I have friends whose lives have almost certainly been saved (or at least extended) by such actions, I'm not sure that *overall* we're doing very well.
OTOH, most military research funding has fairly well defined goals, and it has lots of spinoffs. There's that work in the 60s on survivable communication networks with distributed control. Nuclear electrical power generation, whether you think it good or evil, was greatly facilitated by military R&D funding during Manhattan project. Radar was almost entire developed with military R&D funding, as were most navigational aids. GPS was developed as a means to accurately do mid-course correction for ICBMs, among other things. In fact, virtually all advances in navigation and mapping for the last few centuries were primarily funded by the military. More recently, we have improvements in prosthesis and trauma care (the latter contributing to a need for the former). It's not good that we're in the business of blowing ourselves up and getting shot at, but if we are, then it's a good thing we are investing in technology to minimize the downstream effects. (and, of course, we also do invest in ways to avoid getting hurt in the first place, but that's in the "hard problem" category, like detecting IEDs and land mines)
and you will easily see that in some cases it's never enough.
The fact is, for the western world, risk is largely eliminated. Plague, famine, pestilence, and war - all are pretty nonexistent in the civilized world.
We evolved to deal with immediate, natural risk.
I'd suspect that the human brain is rather good at this in the aggregate - witness, for example, the breadth of 'home remedies' or natural herbs etc that have been determined to actually have some sort of core chemical that (surprising to scientists) actually DOES have a beneficial effect.
So now we're reduced to worry, more than risk-management.
Rather than facing starvation, we worry that we're eating too much.
Rather than facing working day and night to barely survive, we worry that we're too sedentary.
Rather than face the constant risk of agonizing death from the billions of germs trying to kill us like Typhus and Diptheria, we worry that there *might* be a vanishingly small cumulative risk of cancer from the additives that make our food safe from spoilage, mold, etc.
Rather than facing the imminent pillage, rape, or murder by a neighbor village that's decided we have something they want, we worry that there might be some crazy zealot somewhere who might harbor some resentment vaguely against our society.
Seriously, I suspect that worry is endemic to the human creature. If we don't have actual things to be concerned about, we invent / inflate them to fill that psychological space.
Oh, and Cracked has a wonderful article on this: http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-reasons-news-looks-worse-than-it-really-is/
-Styopa
Yup yup.
...this makes too much sense for mass acceptance.
It's been said before, and it's damn right. We're spending obscene amounts of money to fight a bunch of boys (who don't have girlfriends) who enjoy strapping bombs to their bellies.
Jeez.
Mitigate biggest risk and immediately something else becomes biggest. At some points you have to stop because every next risk is smaller and more has to be sacrificed for smaller piece of safety.
Who says we always have to sacrifice freedom for increased safety. Yes, protecting us against risk from other humans often involve this, but it doesn't have to.
We can reduce risk of violent crimes by giving people an alternative (decent social benefits, unemployment support, free education or just after school programs).
We can reduce of traffic accidents by requiring more education for driver licenses.
We can reduce risk of repeat offenders by making better rehabilitation or just prisons that honor the human rights convention.
The list goes on...
My point is: We need to stop thinking hard solutions are the only solutions...
Things like after school programs have been shown to reduce crime. And we don't have to reduce crime much in a neighborhood in order for the money to come back tenfold in terms of reduce insurance payout, less police work, fewer prison cells, more contributing members of society, etc..
(Notice how suggestions above doesn't require anybody to sacrifice essential freedoms).
Soft solutions are also solutions, they reduce risks and have a high return on interest, it's just not as simple to prove that they work.
So no, we need to rethink how we reduce risks... Yes, there are also some risk which we must accept, obviously, but there is still work to do.
What catastrophic event do you think SWAT teams and other paramilitary police forces were a response to?
Palm trees and 8
Argumentum ad Personam (probably mispelled)
An invalid argument in ancient Rome, and over 2000 years later, just as bunk!
...using, developing, producing, buying, selling weapons and learn to be friends with others instead of trying to dominate. Until that happens, they will be hated by others and receive terror up their asses and keep being the scared cowards they are today.
Problem is: there is no other world force able to control that this happens without destroying the US. If they gave up all this, they will be attacked by all those people, groups, nations who were attacked by them. It will take generations to overcome this.
We could, at least, tone it down a bit. For example, right now the US spends more on it's military budget than the next 26 countries combined. I don't think it's going to destroy us if we cut that down to, say, spending more than the next 15 countries combined.
Or maybe we could just stop blowing up civilians with drone strikes, then posthumously labeling them 'enemy combatants' so the American media can sugar-coat the murders.
Just a couple thoughts.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
A bit tough, considering your statement is actually more reasonable than most anti-US ones. Hilariously naive though, and points for irony by posting this anonymously.
captcha: ironical
Ever notice kids don't play outside anymore? That's because parents are worried about pedos and abductors. Now, the risk might be minute, but if something happens everyone piles on the parents like they were out smoking crack and neglecting their kids. That infamous story of the European girl abducted from her hotel room. Her parents were pretty close, yet everyone freaks out as if by not having their child 24/7 within sight they were bad parents.
I watched a movie/tv show from I think the 40s-50s. A woman pushing a kid along in a stroller, stops, parks the kid outside, and walks into a local shop with no fears of abductors or slavers. But, she also had no fear that she's be vilified for it.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
every faith has bits at their core and many faiths have common bits.
I could see my own church sharing a park with a Wiccan "coven" during a Cookout and that might be easier than sharing with a fellow Baptist Church. (my church as the habit of cleaning up after ourselves).
The point here is you need to allow some risk to allow a girl to DANCE (and maybe FLY).
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Problem is: there is no other world force able to control that this happens without destroying the US. If they gave up all this, they will be attacked by all those people, groups, nations who were attacked by them. It will take generations to overcome this.
who cares as long as they're all dead
The problem is complacency. We should always strive to keep ourselves ready.
Nobody could ever agree on a way to measure risk, let alone decide what the biggest risk we can focus on. When asked what the biggest risk is a lot of people would say "teh gays" or "them Mexicans takin our jahbs".
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
You are so correct, fyngryz! I mean, take a look at the long list of attacks compiled at TheReligionOfPeace.com. All religions are equally violent, so it's possible to compile a list like this about every religion, right? Er, wait...
Okay. So riddle me this: if "having weapons" is so horribly bad... why are people buying the ones we're selling?
Sounds like somebody wants the US to unilaterally disarm and allow any third world shithole that wants to take something pillage freely.
please, please ... pass on this advice to a Progressive
While you're at it, point out that a lot of their prescriptions INCREASE risk while purporting to reduce it. It's doubly annoying when they work so hard, throwing money, effort, and restrictive laws into trying to solve a problem when the effort and sacrifice actually makes it worse, in a positive feedback loop.
Progressives have no monopoly on this, either. Neocons, consdrvatives, and even Libertarians do it as well. It's easy for all to do things to attack a problem and not see that the indirect effects of the effort cause more harm (even in terms of the problem being attacked) than the first-order effects help.
Some examples:
- Gun control: Private ownership and carrying of guns REDUCES crime, violence, victimization, and death, while citizen disarmament increases them.
- Attempts to police the world produce "blowback", creating new and/or motivating existing enemies, increasing, rather than decreasing, the risk and costs to the US from war.
- Drug prohibition creates more drug use and criminal enterprises, rather than reducing drug use, and harms the drug users more than the drugs do. Its component programs often have counterproductive pathologies of their own. One example is the D.A.R.E. program, which attempts to use peer pressure to encourage kids to ignore peer pressure, and has been shown to increase drug use.
- Grabbing advances to any program, rather than considering whether achieving goals in the wrong order makes things worse rather than better. (A Libertarian example: They want both open borders and an end to government wealth distribution such as welfare programs. Unfortunately, opening the borders first leads to an influx of social program dependents, making the overall problem worse (and increasing the voting block to preserve and expand the programs), when fixing or eliminating the programs first would remove most of the downsides to opening the borders later.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Here's a thought...we call it the Department of Defense..why not use it that way. There's no need to disband the military in its entirety, but you could start by just playing defense. None of this "the best defense is a good offense" crap...we should use our military to defend ourselves and allies* instead of offending the rest of the world.
* allies not including countries where our military is propping up an unpopular regime.
Avoiding risk?
You are either old or dead.
Like the risk of genetically inherited cancer and diabetes, as well as the absorption of ubiquitous man-made toxins. Not to mention the Randian Darwinism that Schneier is affected with.
Take more risk?
We did that when we let the Capitalists stop paying for retirement for the workers via the 401(k) scam.
Look how well THAT worked!
First we need to learn to identify risks for ourselves. Only then can we properly evaluate and accept risks.
America has been sold on the risk of terrorist violence, because of one attack over a decade ago. So we allow ourselves to be groped, violated and irradiated because we do not properly understand the risk. We allow budgets to soar unchecked because of the great terrorist threat.
On a more recent note : the same folks who sold us the terrorist lie are currently churning out lies about Syria. Overstating the "absolutely undeniable proof" that the regime is using chemical weapons, in order to spend another trillion on cruise missiles, spy planes, and everything else needed to defeat the eeeevil Syrian leaders.
The American people need to apply some critical thinking, evaluate these risks for themselves, and make third voices heard.
This signature is false.
We hate to see our children get injured, so we wrap them in wool, then bubble wrap, with a layer of nerf for good measure. We put them in schools that won't crush their fragile egos, declaring everyone's a winner. These pampered, protected children grow up into risk averse adults. Without getting them killed, there's a lot to be said for teaching kids and adults to take chances, push beyond their limits and discover both the cost and value of living a larger life.
We're perfectly happy with the risk of climate change (cue a dozen comments proving my point) but one opinion from the legal department that somebody who violates all the warnings and gets a nosebleed will have grounds to sue can keep a cure for cancer off the market.
See also "no vaccinations for my kids, I'm worried that they will catch autism"
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Agree completely. This is one of the reasons our space program costs a fortune and goes nowhere. The folks involved intimately understand and choose to accept the inherent risks of space exploration, but, the general public does not. We need to learn to balance risk / reward once again.
Just let me know when you're ready to reduce the arbitrary penalties you've set up against risk-taking, things like:
* Forcing a lack of risk (health and safety requirements)
* Reducing the benefit of risk (high taxes, demonization of 'profit')
* General interference (forced labor requirements, restrictions on who you can do business with and how, restrictions on what can be pursued at all)
* General ignorance and fear of 'the new' (people easily convinced that every new chemical is an airborne poison, protests against technologies that will likely reduce the market for their current job)
* General socio-political crusading (pursuing ever more meaningless 'charitable' interests to make themselves feel proud while ignoring if their efforts are actually successful or beneficial)
Until these get reduced, risk-taking is a punishable offense.
I totally agree. My take on this is with the Multimedia Arts. Movies are made to formula. Music is only deemed successful if it enters the charts.
My favourite movie of all time is Bladerunner, what was considered a flop at the time.
What's the greatest album you've ever heard/owned? Most likely, it was a band's first album, the one where no one knew who they were until then.
Risk management is a business having money in the bank in case their next/current venture fails. Not trying to regurgitate something that's been done 5,000 times already.
For the same reason that everyone knows it's bad to ruin our environment and everyone keeps doing it. Because if we stop, we're at a disadvantage to everyone else who still does it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't think there are too many people who are extremely violent because really orchids are the best kind of flower
You say that, and you know someone is out there building a bomb to rid the world of those fricking orchid bigots.... oh orchids and your superiority complex... you'll get what's coming....LOL.
This is my sig.
No problem. You go first.