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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.'"
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.
Actually, it's worse than that. In order to eliminate certain risks only really drastic solutions are effective.
I don't think certain risk elimination costs will become so high we're unwilling to pay. I believe the costs will go higher and we'll keep paying.
Eventually, people will understand that to avoid risks originating from the poorest countries, the final solution is to just eradicate those countries. After all, we don't want them for their population but for their resources. Instead of killing a few and putting a government that follows our orders, eventually we'll be capable (both technologically and socially) to just exterminate everyone in a country and replace them with resource extraction machines.
And once that problem is finally over, instead of the richest country vs the poorer one it will be between cities, and then neighborhoods.
The only thing stopping the richest from protecting themselves by exterminating everyone else is the shitty quality of the robots.
There's a step there that you are avoiding. To exterminate everyone in a country you might need a bomb, but you might also use a genetically targeted bio weapon. Or whatever else we invent.
The problem is that the biggest risk factor is not genetic - it is Islam. I suppose in the far future it might be possible to have intelligent swarms of robot "wasps" with poisonous stings, who can look out for indications that someone is a muslim, but the problem will still be with us for many years.
You must be one of the people who pose the biggest risk to society if you actually believe that, you are one of the stupid morons who is unable to critically evaluate anything not fed to you by fox news.
Islam is a religion, nothing more nothing less. Many people go through life being helped by Islam (just like Christianity) to be better people and act in ways less dictated by self interest and more in being nicer to ones fellow man. The problem is that just like Christianity a few years back it is twisted by some very sick individuals to justify their own sick ends.
This is hardly a fault of Islam since the main tenets of that faith were written down thousands of years ago and have been unchanged since (the Koran is actually less flexible in this regard than the Bible, although it worth remembering that Islam still recognises Christ as being a prophet so they don't exactly ignore his teachings). This is the fault of the person doing the twisting and the person who believe the twisted result. Hate preachers want us all to live in an Islamic Caliphate just because that puts them in charge.
We in the west though have similar people who try and twist christianity or democracy or patriotism towards their own ends: We have people who own arms companies who love it when we invade other nations as they sell more guns. We have people who own oil companies who love it when invading a country and installing a friendly government opens up a new market. We have politicians who carp on about something happening overseas and whipping up a furor amongst the public to distract from them humping their PA or giving their chums a tax break (ok, this might be an exaggeration but I certainly do not believe that many of our politicians act in our own best interest, they act in theirs).
The problem is not the idea of patriotism, democracy, christianity or islam. The problem is when we blindly follow interpretations of these ideas spouted by people with a hidden agenda. The only solution to this is that we question more of the information that it is given to us and think more about motives of the people trying to encourage our views in a particular direction.
(Just for the record, I think there is about as much chance of any western country becoming a caliphate as their is of world peace breaking out tomorrow. I am also a thoroughly decided atheist who has read about a few religions but decided that ultimately they are all the creations of man, not god so I would simply refuse to follow any religious laws that were imposed on me that I did not agree with morally anyway.)
I dont read
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.