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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.
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.
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It's life, no one gets out alive.
Would be exterminating the lawyers.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
It appears you've been asleep for the last ten years, and possibly the twenty years preceding it that laid the foundation for the severe civil liberties issues we're facing now. Your UID indicates you should be old enough to understand this, unless you've led a rather sheltered life.
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3,000 lost lives have caused us to spend trillions on wars. A fraction of that invested in additional medical research would have saved far more.
A death in front of the cameras is worse more than a million deaths on a hospital bed...to a politician.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
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.
Almost but not quite - when something goes wrong, a large proportion of people start looking for some way to shift the responsibility from their own actions to some other party. Not quite everyone is like this, but the number that accept responsibility for themselves is diminishing and when you see one person after another getting away with shirking their responsibility it makes it harder and harder to justify and not go down that destructive path yourself.
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.
...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
...But somehow I don't have a problem with less-frequent building collapses.
I'm not sure how that's the fault of a "nanny state government" rather than overprotective parents. Mind you, I agree that - on the whole - kids today are overly sheltered. (Ugh, as someone not even 30 it pains me to write 'kids today.') But as someone who works with middle and high school students, I also don't think the problem is as bad as it is made out to be. It's usually one parent out of ten or twenty who are truly the obnoxious ones. They're just loud enough, and insistent enough, to paint ALL parents as whiney and over-protective, and thus all youth as sheltered.
But there are still kids running through parks and cities, spending money on candy, and going to play at the skate park. You may just not be hanging out with them.
PS - I'm from a major city in the US, which shapes my view. It sounds like, from some of your language, that you're not from the US. I'd be curious how/if things differ elsewhere, but can only speak from my experience.
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.
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