Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
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
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.
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.