About Risk

[duraaraa 203]

Link:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/our_newfound_fe.html

Shamelessly stolen from Slashdot:

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

My opinion on this:

I basically agree. As soon as whatever the biggest risk to us is solved and no longer a risk, we find something else to make a bigger risk. Back in the old days, people were worried about their children getting sick and dying -- now we worry about our kids getting kidnapped (which isn't really that big of a risk... it happens, but not really so often.)

We used to worry about burglars, crime goes down, and we now worry about terrorists.

Personally, I think the government is doing way too much to try to protect us, to the point where we lose freedom. What do all y'all think?

[mota bhai 2,675]

The subprime fiasco was a great example of risk transference, except the parties taking on the risk were not savvy enough to know what they were doing.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

Yep. Americans are becoming a bunch of pussies.

Edited September 4, 2013 by The Patriot

[duraaraa 203]

Yep. Americans are becoming a bunch of pussies.

Absolutely. I'm sure this is true in California anyway.

My brother and his wife had a daughter. When my sister caught a cold, they made her wait two weeks after the symptoms stopped to see her. My mother is afraid of third hand smoke, and won't move into an apartment if a smoker had ever lived there, for fear of cancer. People I know bought expensive (and probably useless) suits and gas masks after 9/11.

Americans are truly becoming pussies -- there's not better way to say it.

[Protocol417 161]

Absolutely. I'm sure this is true in California anyway.

My brother and his wife had a daughter. When my sister caught a cold, they made her wait two weeks after the symptoms stopped to see her. My mother is afraid of third hand smoke, and won't move into an apartment if a smoker had ever lived there, for fear of cancer. People I know bought expensive (and probably useless) suits and gas masks after 9/11.

Americans are truly becoming pussies -- there's not better way to say it.

It's especially bad with people who have kids. I have a friend who still heads up a "parental concern" group because her kid basically got his lunch money stolen... SEVEN years ago (she describes it as "being mugged"). My own parents practically wouldn't let me leave the house at age 13 because once, at the local park, some kid had drawn a heart... a HEART... on the slide with a sharpie, and they were convinced this was evidence of "gang activity".

It was bad enough when I was a kid and we couldn't eat our Halloween candy until it had been x-rayed... now, kids can't even trick-or-treat after dark even in the safest of neighborhoods with hoards of parents to supervise them.

[Karee 4,190]

False advertising. I thought this thread was about the board game and world domination.