Our Newfound Fear of Risk

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

by fejr • 13 years ago

338 193 13 years ago

dankoss• 13 years ago

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." - FDR

twoodfin2• 13 years ago

Sorry, but there is no remotely possible U.S. political world in which Afghanistan is not invaded after September 11. If avoiding military action after an attack on that scale is your standard for a "smart about risk" society, you'll be waiting a long, long time.

001sky2• 13 years ago

The interesting question is to turn this point on its head.

The conventional wisdom (before 9/11) was it was "too risky" to fight back against hostage takers on an airplane. That bit of social engineering led to a huge force multiplier when trained pilots turned civivian aircraft into cruise missles.

So, the origins of 9/11 have to do with mis-understanding the real risks we face. The opposite of ignorance is education, however. Its not per-se a totalalitarian police state. Which is where we seemed to have ended up.

VLM• 13 years ago

"That bit of social engineering led to a huge force multiplier"

Its possible to use this technique to predict the next set of attacks:

1) High levels of security theater mean long entrance lines in front of (perceived) high value targets. Therefore instead of attacking the high value target the security theater is protecting, the line of people waiting to enter gets attacked. I get nervous waiting in lines knowing any terrorist who isn't an idiot has their sights on me.

2) Whats the prevailing wisdom for suspected violence in a school? Lockdown, shelter in place, sometimes for hours. Perfect target conditions for a poison gas attack and/or arson. Yeah yeah I know what I'm told, but under actual attack I would have no desire to die so rather than shelter in place I'd GTFO as soon as the cattle herders start yelling. The safest armor against a weapon is being well out of its range, not a cheap door lock.

I would predict the odds of both of the above as near 100% in the near future. Its just logical. The next step would be to identify the perpetrators as mostly Saudi citizens (yet again) and therefore invade Iran. Or Syria. Or whoever else needs an excuse right now, while the bubbas back home wave flags to support the troops.

RougeFemme3• 13 years ago

Prior to 9/11, at least in the U.S., hijackers typically "simply" wanted money or to be flown elsewhere. As long as those demands were met, there were no casualties. So it wasn't that it was "too risky" to fight back - it was that hijacking was generally not considered life-threatening. The original reactions on 9/11 were not due solely to "social engineering", but to prior experience.

Vivtek• 13 years ago

And did that invasion change anything? Were the Taliban or al Qaeda eliminated by that invasion? Did you notice that the exact same justification was used to attack neighboring Iraq?

Sorry, but I happen to have lived through that year and the years following, and I know that given an America that lived up to its own hype, an invasion was easily avoidable. It's just that such an America doesn't exist. Too bad for us all.

mikeash6• 13 years ago

Even if the invasion was required, nothing required us to occupy the place for a decade and counting, turning it into a perpetual war.

Hook up with the Northern Alliance, bomb the hell out of their enemies, set them up, leave. They can't hold on to power? Oh well. The point has been made. The country returns to dictatorship and chaos? Well, that happened anyway.

rdl2• 13 years ago

I really liked how the US responded in Afghanistan in September-November 2001: sending in CIA and special operations forces to ally with anti-AQ and anti-Taliban forces, on a hundreds of millions of dollars total budget. That had almost all of the upside and virtually none of the downside of a big invasion.

omegant2• 13 years ago

A very good account of that part of the war is "First in: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan " by Schroen, Gary. He was the chief of the first CIA team to operate inside Afghanistan. A great read, just not what you´ll expect of a CIA operation, everything is donne in a much more "common sense" way than you may think.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

In 1984, the US funded IRA bombed the entire UK government, nearly killed them all. The UK did not invade Northern Ireland or Ireland. The police investigated, made arrests and people were convicted.

Acting humanely is not that hard.

HPLovecraft2• 13 years ago

link to US government funding? Or are you referring to private funding by US citizens?

anigbrowl8• 13 years ago

It did not 'nearly kill them all.' It killed five people, none of whom where in the cabinet although they were senior party members. The UK didn't have to invade Northern Ireland because Northern Ireland was (and is) UK territory and there was already a substantial active military presence. For about 25 years the British army sent fresh soldiers off to do a tour in NI to toughen them up.

In short, you have no idea what you're talking about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles

rwmj• 13 years ago

There's also no risk of the US being invaded by Afghanistan. The risk to the US was and is always very minor, akin to a tiny fraction of the number of people killed by cars or going to be killed by climate change. The US didn't have to spend trillions mitigating that risk, even if you assume those trillions did mitigate the risk.

jerf• 13 years ago

The direct military risk was small. The risk to global stability and the markets via the risk to the price of oil as part of a complex of destabilizing elements was much larger than that, though whether you judge it as large or small itself depends on various opinions and definitions. However, if you're the sort of person who's going to talk about risks in terms of things like "killed by cars", it should be pointed out that taking action to protect the price of oil is not immediately obviously wrong. Raising the price of oil substantially affects millions, if not billions, of poorer people a lot, and could prevent entire economies from raising themselves out of poverty.

Which suggests that if you want to end the US's involvement in the Middle East, you should probably be vigorously supporting shale oil, even if you believe it may have some negative environmental impacts. If they no longer have a knife to the jugular of civilization as we know it, it's a lot easier to ignore them.

lambda• 13 years ago

The U.S. could have participated only in targeted strikes against Al Qaeda, leaving the rest to local forces as a local matter that isn't our business, and not tried to occupy the country and engage in nation-building.

If they had done just a targeted strike against Al Qaeda, larger in scope but similar to what they did against Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, we probably could have gotten Bin Laden years earlier and not spent more than a decade trying in the morass that is Afghanistan.

Our mistake was deciding that we needed to get rid of the Taliban and build a democratic nation from what was left after they were gone. There was never any hope of that; the Taliban just fled to the hills, to Pakistan, or just blend in with the local population because many of them are the local population. We have failed at building a nation that can take care of itself after we leave; within a year or two, the Taliban will be in power again.

icegreentea2• 13 years ago

Overthrowing the Taliban was almost a prerequisite for those types of strikes. The initial strikes and action in Afghanistan by special forces and CIA were almost completely reliant on assistance from the Northern Alliance - for which over throwing the Taliban was always the goal.

The initial air strikes (unguided from the ground) were totally useless. It wasn't until they got SF/CIA on the ground working with the Northern Alliance that they could get it working.

In any case, it would never have been as simple as 'leave it to the local forces'.

twoodfin2• 13 years ago

This is more or less our current counterterrorism strategy in the wilds of Pakistan or Yemen. While I'm skeptical that such a strategy could have seriously damaged 2001-era AQ's ability to operate inside Afghanistan, I also don't think I'm qualified to debate its merits today. But that's not my point.

My point is that if another 9/11-scale attack occurred and the bad guys were in Yemen and the Yemeni government was not extremely helpful in bringing those responsible to heel, that "drones and spies" strategy could never be the limit of our response. It's just not politically practical, not even close. When Schneier talks about the "waste" of a war in Afghanistan, he should remember that the entire time Bush was sticking around trying to nation build, the Democrats were making political hay that Iraq was a sideshow and that we weren't spending enough attention/money/troops on Afghanistan. And indeed when a Democratic president was elected, he proceeded to spend more attention/money/troops on Afghanistan.

Once it was established that AQ was responsible for 9/11 and that the Taliban were not going to give them up on our terms, a major military incursion was politically inevitable. It's a little more dicey just how inevitable a long-term occupation was: President Gore presumably doesn't have to deal with an Afghani-Hawks-By-Convenience wing of his own party, and maybe gets out quick. But Schneier doesn't make this distinction: He seems to be imagining a world in which the war never happens at all because we properly measured its risks. I happen to think he's wrong about the risk/reward tradeoff of aggressively rolling up AQ and their support networks, but I'm sure he's being Utopian if he thinks he's in anything but a tiny minority who would be against a massive military response to another 9/11-like event.

anigbrowl8• 13 years ago

If it were so easy, they would probably have done that anyway as an opener. But it isn't.

njharman• 13 years ago

U.S. political world in which Afghanistan is not invaded after September 11

Agree and I wish we would have done exactly that instead of conquering Iraq.

r0h1n• 13 years ago

I'd wager that our increasing reliance on technology in all walks of life - education, anti-terrorism, policing, medicine, health etc. - also plays a role in fanning our fear of risk.

I _think_ technology tends to offer us two things: (a) an illusion of meaning, as risks are reduced to a discrete set of numbers in excel sheets or databases, and (b) a false sense of control, because we try all sorts of actions (like the ones Schneier mentions) to reduce some of those risks.

Then of course there is the cultural angle.

Risk tolerance is both cultural and dependent on the environment around us.

I'm from India and our willingness to tolerate or overlook risk is fairly high (I don't mean that in a good way, because most of the times we are fairly blasé about our personal/collective safety or about taking preventive actions almost to the extent of devaluing individual lives). But, for what it's worth, we are therefore more willing to tolerate violent risks like the ones Schneier mentions for longer.

Note: 2011 Schneier reference to a research study analysing risk and culture - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/risk_toleranc...

_mvuc• 13 years ago

When you treat adults like children, and children like babies, you get exactly that. And that's why a hundred years ago 14-year olds were captaining their own ships, and today you have 40-year olds who can't do their own laundry or balance a checkbook.

SkyMarshal2• 13 years ago

I also wonder if it's related to decreased birth rates in modern times - parents have fewer children than a century or two ago, so losing a single child to an accident of some sort is much more costly to the family, hence the increased risk aversion.

mark-r• 13 years ago

I doubt that losing a child has ever been less than awful no matter how many you have.

spin• 13 years ago

I have another explanation: If you have more kids, you don't have time to watch after them all as much.

mikeash6• 13 years ago

I don't think there's that much of a difference between now and then, just people paying attention to different things.

I know kids who were certified to fly airplanes by themselves at 14. We don't let them captain ships anymore, but that doesn't mean there aren't any capable teenagers anymore, they just do other things.

There were plenty of useless humans around a hundred years ago as well. We don't hear about them much, because why would anyone talk about a random 40-year-old who can't balance a checkbook a century later? The capable people are the ones who get remembered. The less-capable ones don't tend to be remembered much outside their family, and within that, there are plenty of stories floating around about Aunt So-and-so who never moved out of the house, never got married, never found work, etc.

Periodic• 13 years ago

There are have actually been a few young people sailing around the world solo in the last few decades[1]. I'm sure for each of those there are many who perform more mundane tasks or have jobs doing things like ferrying or tours. It's perhaps not as illustrious as it once was. Instead of captaining a ship we now have young people starting companies, trading one kind of venture for another.

1. http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/eco-tourism/stories/5-teens-who...

alayne3• 13 years ago

I'm sorry, but I'm going to call bullshit unless you can actually cite a reference showing some significant number of 14 year old ship captains in 1913.

angersock2• 13 years ago

If you count fishing and crabbing, and possibly ferrying, I would be unsurprised in the slightest.

sliverstorm7• 13 years ago

David Farragut comes to mind, although I don't know if the plural (i.e., many 14 year olds) applies.

coldcode• 13 years ago

Bruce is always the voice of reason. Too bad the people in charge are the voices of insanity.

Fargren• 13 years ago

As Bruce points out, people who are personally responsible for things when they fail are not insane in being risk averse. From their perspective, they are just playing it safe. Maybe we should be finding a way to make no one personally responsible for failures. But this sounds counter-intuitive, as personal responsibility is acknowledged as an effective mechanism to make people do their work right.

gioele• 13 years ago

Maybe we should be finding a way to make no one personally responsible for failures. But this sounds counter-intuitive, as personal responsibility is acknowledged as an effective mechanism to make people do their work right.

I think that a good middle-ground is what happens with judges in most of EU. In most systems you cannot directly sue a single judge for some misconduct that happened during a process. What you have to do is to sue "the state". Another judge will then judge the matter but then it is you vs the state, not against a single person; it is the state that takes care of all the legal things and legal costs. This gives the judges the freedom they need to be severe but just. Without this protection they will always be afraid of being sued by the losing party, especially when the losing party is a big, rich corporation.

Obviously, to counterbalance this exceptionally high degree of defence enjoyed by the judges, the state usually punish the judge with a fine or a suspension. But the intermediation of the state is able to rebalance the risks: if you do something wrong you risk a big fine, but you will not be dragged personally in a 10-year process that will destroy your career and your finances.

pdonis• 13 years ago

Maybe we should be finding a way to make no one personally responsible for failures.

No, we need to stop making a small group of people, namely, the government, responsible for very large failures, by making them responsible for things that have a very large scope. Instead, a much larger group of people--i.e., everyone--need to each be responsible for a much smaller scope, so that no one person, or small group of people, has to bear by themselves the consequences of a large failure.

newobj• 13 years ago

Related: at the PARK this weekend, and heard all the following utterances in the span of ten minutes from some parents: "NO RUNNING!" "IT'S DANGEROUS HERE" "YOU'RE GONNA GET HURT" "NO RUNNING!"

Talk about instilling fear and creating risk aversion. Sometimes you just have to let a child find out for themselves what's safe and what isn't. What you can get up and dust yourself off from and what you can't.

It's hard to do (I say this as a parent of 5 year old boy), but you have to resist the urge to hover over them and caution or approve their every move.

Amadou4• 13 years ago

Free Range Kids is a good resource for helping parents feel like good parents when they fight the urge to hover and over-protect.

http://www.freerangekids.com/

hef19898• 13 years ago

Sounds familiar. The most scaring part is that one moment you rant and laogh at parents telling their children to carefull. And then you turn around, see you kid something you don't like and guess what you do? Exactly the same thing.

Only speaking for myself, but more often then not I just don't have the patience to NOT say it. But I try most of the time at least.

mikeash6• 13 years ago

I think there's a huge difference between "be careful" and "don't do that". The former is just reminding the child to be mindful of their actions, which is a good thing. The latter is saying to avoid anything that could get you hurt even a little bit, which is very much not.

dalek_cannes• 13 years ago

There's also the problem of fear of litigation. I'm from a part of the world that is not as lawsuit-happy as the U.S. Amongst other things, medical treatment is very cheap here and people laugh at labels like "warning: device heats up when in operation" (seen on an iron made in the USA).

Florin_Andrei3• 13 years ago

I'm from a part of the world that is not as lawsuit-happy as the U.S.

This is because the safety net is non-existent here. If something really bad is about to happen, you know you're going to fall all the way down to the bottom. The solution? Sue the hell out of everybody.

Amongst other things, medical treatment is very cheap here

Yup. Exactly the opposite in the US. When the hospital bill requires a second mortgage, covering the costs via money awarded in a lawsuit might be the only solution.

kyllo• 13 years ago

I think the absurdity is not lost on some of the people writing the copy for these safety warnings. For example, after Liebeck v. McDonald's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaur...), companies started printing tautological statements like "WARNING: HOT COFFEE IS HOT" on the cups.

RougeFemme3• 13 years ago

I have a co-worker who is so risk-averse, she literally pushes her 4-year-old in the stroller to each piece of playground equipment - so she doesn't have to worry about running; even walking at the playground is forbidden for her child.

Yes, I'm a parent, but. . .

mikeash6• 13 years ago

I was going out for a walk with my daughter the other day and had the following conversation with my wife:

Her: Don't let her run on the sidewalk.

Me: What? Why?

Her: She's not wearing pants, just a dress.

Me: ...OK... what exactly is the relationship between these two things?

Her: There's nothing covering her knees, she'll hurt herself if she falls on the sidewalk.

I couldn't even fathom the connection without having it spelled out for me. I, of course, completely ignored the whole conversation afterwards.

eli_gottlieb2• 13 years ago

Wait... so nowadays kids aren't supposed to scrape their knees, elbows, arms, hands, and in fact basically everything?

Because that's what we did when I was young.

sliverstorm7• 13 years ago

I don't recall pants ever helping in that regard.

dspillett• 13 years ago

Conversely I once genuinely heard this streaked by someone to the kids they were herding around a supermarket: "if you two want to run around and make noise, go do it in the car park". Perhaps she was too far the other way...

rayiner• 13 years ago

I'd bet that much of the issue stems from the decline in birth rates among middle/upper middle class parents relative to the days of yore. When you only manage to pop out one or two kids, at great career sacrifice and monetary expense, each one seems to matter more than they did back in the day.

Also, paradoxically, the safer things get the more people worry about the dangers that remain. This is rational. Say doing this or that during pregnancy results in 1 in 10,000 women dying during child birth. If 1 in 100 women die during child birth anyway, it's not a big deal. But if improvements in medical technology gets the base rate down to 1 in 10,000, then suddenly you're talking about doubling your risk.

kbenson• 13 years ago

I would say it's got less to do with the perceived (even subconsciously) value of the children, and more the experience of the parents. For the first child, you're often hyper-conscious of threats and problems. With later children you've better assessed what's important to pay attention to and what isn't.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

I became a parent later in life, and I do think that is a factor. In addition to how hard it is to have a kid, I personally have a much greater sense of my own mortality now then I did in the early 20s. It's hard not to let this color the way I parent.

venomsnake• 13 years ago

Direct quote from a friend:

"First kid - food drops on the clean floor - burn the food sterilize the place. Second kid - food drops on the clean floor - wash it and give it back to him. Third kid - she ate the cat's dinner? It's the cat's problem, not mine."

awj• 13 years ago

As a parent-to-be, this is the one thing that scares me most. You can't learn risk assessment while living in a bubble. Which means I'm going to have to watch my kids run into problems I know I could prevent because what they learn from the experience is more valuable than preventing the situation.

That is a terrifyingly difficult decision, given the potential consequences.

WalterSear2• 13 years ago

If you start very early, you'll give them the wherewithall to mitigate and avoid the worst situations.

alayne3• 13 years ago

Are you saying there weren't overprotective parents before? This thread is full of a lot of confirmation bias / society is going to hell in a hand basket type of discussion. Boy, kids these days, right? I'd like to see some facts because I don't find it very credible.

graeme6• 13 years ago

Talk to some older folks.

My dad describes walking to school with other schoolchildren in Montreal in the 1950s. They'd be alone, without adults, going miles.

When playing, they were out dusk to dawn on city streets with no adult supervision.

deerpig• 13 years ago

There have been a number of studies -- middle class children in Western countries now never go more than a couple of meters from their front door on their own.

Growing up in the late 60's in New England, my parents kicked us out of the house in the morning during summers and no one thought twice about us unless we didn't show up for dinner.

Children in American live under house arrest, they are used to having people with guns in their schools. They have no freedom to play, think or do much of anything which isn't scheduled. The whole concept of a "play date" is so twisted and sick as to be beyond comprehension. And all of this is because of some weird belief that children are in more danger today than any time in history. It's not true, the rates of child abuse, kidnapping, and everything else that parents are scared of haven't changed much from when I was a kid.

I would never ever raise a child in the States....

BillyMaize• 13 years ago

Having grown up with parents who acted like this I can say it makes for a miserable childhood.

I wasn't allowed to even ride my bike past one neighbors house on each side when I was a kid because my parents were convinced I would be kidnapped. I couldn't go to a friends house without my parents walking me all the way up to the door and then I had to report home every hour or two or they would call the police as if I was missing. They wouldn't even let me use sharp silverware because I might have hurt myself accidentally. And don't get me started on learning to drive....

I realized only in college how sheltered my life was when I noticed how everyone else was living their lives while I was constantly afraid I was going to die any minute. It has taken years to undo the damage and I honestly despise my parents for it (among other reasons as well).

contravert• 13 years ago

On the other hand, many people don't have a healthy fear of automobiles, considering the lethality of the physics involved in a collision.

aasarava• 13 years ago

As a parent of young kids, I can attest that many parents in my peer group are constantly reminding their kids not to be careful NOT due to a fear of risk -- but rather from wanting to avoid an injury that's going inconvenience everyone.

If your child crashes his bike and gets a bloody knee on the playground, your relaxing afternoon at the park is most likely over and now you have a crying child, bloody clothes, a damaged bike wheel, and potentially another child who is now screaming because you have to leave the park to go find bandages. If your child breaks her arm, it's even worse -- off to the hospital you go, followed by a child who can't take a bath or get dressed by herself for a month.

Do some parents take this to an extreme and deny their kids some fun? Sure. But a lot of times, it's just about trying to maintain a level of mindfulness so that everyone can continue having fun for the afternoon.

WalterSear2• 13 years ago

Everyone? I've only witnessed this behavior as a way to avoid inconveniencing themselves.

GrinningFool• 13 years ago

That argument reads to me like this: "If my kid injured himself, I would be inconvenienced - so let's take extra steps to make sure I am not inconvenienced."

And to your point, there are cases where this is valid - when the inconvenience would extend beyond just "oh my afternoon is ruined" and into "everybody's afternoon would be ruined".

enraged_camel2• 13 years ago

>If your child crashes his bike and gets a bloody knee on the playground, your relaxing afternoon at the park is most likely over and now you have a crying child, bloody clothes, a damaged bike wheel, and potentially another child who is now screaming because you have to leave the park to go find bandages.

Well, yes. This is called parenting: it is expected that, as a parent, you will have to endure a certain amount of inconvenience so that your kid can learn to ride a bike. Now, if he or she is endangering other kids while learning, then it's valid to step in. But thinking about your own convenience sounds a bit selfish.

decasteve2• 13 years ago

I get dirty looks from other parents (and grandparents especially) when my daughter and son (5 and 4 resp.) are climbing and jumping off of things at the park. They've become quite talented at jumping from fairly high heights (relatively).

SourPatch• 13 years ago

Here's someone who was willing to accept some risk in order to help her son learn on his own:

http://www.nysun.com/opinion/why-i-let-my-9-year-old-ride-su...

code4life• 13 years ago

I joke constantly with my wife "Don't! You're going to break your arm!"

hilarious - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XBb-YYszLI

PebblesRox• 13 years ago

I'm a fan of this TED Talk: 5 Dangerous Things to Let Your Kids Do He explains some ways to help kids learn to be safe around dangerous things. http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_...

andypiper• 13 years ago

Hmm. Read this as "newfound fear of RIAK" - either spent too much time on datastores lately, or need my eyes tested.

daurnimator• 13 years ago

Anyone else read this as "Our newfound fear of Riak"?

I got half way through the article until I re-read the title...

Aloha• 13 years ago

I've been talking about risk for a couple years now.

Kids today have no idea what a reasonable risk is because most of them have not be allowed to make any life choices (or for that matter, any choices at all), so when they hit adulthood, they have no real idea whats a reasonable risk or not. I think we will see this effect odd parts of our society more and more as time goes on.

zeteo• 13 years ago

It was a lot easier to tolerate risk when people had a common Big Picture. This could be provided by religion, ideology etc. Such attitudes still hold in some places, e.g. Amish communities seem more resilient after school shootings [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_school_shooting#Amish_com...

microb• 13 years ago

Indeed. Repeated use of scapegoats like "communists" and "terrorists" may make up for our move away from religion as a source of shared ideology [1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating#The_.22scapegoat_m...

Florin_Andrei3• 13 years ago

And when the Big Picture is fractured, trust disappears.

I see the anti-vax craze as primarily an issue of trust and control. "I don't trust Those People (the doctors)" or along the lines of "I need to control everything, including my vaccine schedule".

smacktoward• 13 years ago

Or perhaps, "I can't control nearly anything anymore, so I'm going to get super focused on those few things I still can control, like my child's vaccine schedule."

People have spent decades now having their lives turned upside down by forces they're told they can't control: market movements, giant corporations, unresponsive political systems. Rather than pushing back and trying to assert some control over those things, which would require collective action, they focus inward instead on those things in their lives that they know they can control. It almost doesn't matter if their interventions there make things better or worse; it's more about giving the feeling of being In Charge.

It's like the CEO of the failing company who spends all his time micromanaging the colors on the company Web site home page. He can't give an order that will turn the business around, but he can give an order to change those colors. Which makes him feel like he still has some control over the future, even though he really doesn't.

mtdewcmu3• 13 years ago

I think it's motivated a lot by fear of autism, which contributes the vindictiveness. It also seems to be an offshoot of the anti-science left, which embraces natural food, loathes agribusiness, and prefers alternative medicine to the hated big pharma. I think it's grounded in Romanticism [1]. There's definitely a mistrust of doctors, but I don't see it as being generically about control.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism

XorNot• 13 years ago

I found this article trite. It's merging 3 disparate concepts which have complex explanations, and deciding instead it's to do with risk.

Militarization of the police force is a big one for example - that has practically nothing to do with risk and everything to do with politics and budgeting. It's "tough on crime" writ large, with people then demanding to see the results of all the money being spent which isn't needed - so enter military surplus and suddenly every small town has an APC and a SWAT team but absolutely no need for one (and usually insufficient training). And once you have those things, every problem starts to look like it needs a SWAT response since you've got to justify having them.

Of course that's just one facet of it, there are others but it's totally disingenuous to pretend its some irrational fear of risk driving any of this.

ryguytilidie• 13 years ago

Militarization of the police force is a big one for example - that has practically nothing to do with risk and everything to do with politics and budgeting. It's "tough on crime" writ large,

This seems like a contradiction. It has nothing to do with risk, yet the people who want it are the "tough on crime" type. Don't you think that those people see NOT being tough on crime as a risk?

emiliobumachar4• 13 years ago

To re-state sibling ryguytilidie's point: risk aversion is the root cause. Risk aversion is the reason why voters favor politicians perceived to be "tough on crime", feeding the whole process you described.

cyanoacry• 13 years ago

I recently started a job in the aerospace industry, and it's still taking me a little bit of time to get used to the concept of risk, simply because it:

  1) is rarely addressed in education (nowhere in sciences nor humanitites)
  2) is an extremely "scary" word
  3) is difficult to visualize.

The combination of all three of these factors means that people don't realize that risk is an everyday thing: there are probabilities and outcomes that you need to weigh in order to make the decisions properly. Risk management is big if you're managing multi-million dollar contracts or huge rockets, but it seems to never filter down into the common psyche, which is disturbing. Humans have successfully managed risk to fly planes and go into space, so we have the models to make these decisions, yet we don't seem to be able to properly apply it on the ground.

Is the solution more education? I think so, but in a different light: people need to accept that bad things happen, and that you can model the probabilities and work out for yourself what tradeoffs you're making. Rarely is it all good and bad, and by estimating the expected value, you get the opportunity to say "no, this costs too much" in response to all-out "safety" measures.

decasteve2• 13 years ago

Our fear of risk associated with exploration comes to mind. Why haven't we sent someone to the Moon (again) or Mars?

Compared to early sailors, mountaineers, and polar explorers we seem to have lost the tolerance for dangerous exploration. Otherwise we should have by now sent a person on a (potentially) one-way trip to Mars.

lazyjones• 13 years ago

If risk-aversion is the central issue here, there should be a higher risk involved with a) shooting or otherwise harming civilians when you're law enforcement, and b) taking away liberties when you're the lawmaker. But with a dysfunctional justice system and a voting system that cements the broken 2-party regime, this won't ever be the case.

jcromartie• 13 years ago

My greatest fear is that it will never get better.

mathgladiator2• 13 years ago

I think it can get better, but it's going to require a collapse of the whole system.

acabal• 13 years ago

I think it's become a cultural thing, unfortunately. I've spent the last few years seeing the world, and the difference in attitudes between the people of many other countries and Americans at home is striking. We've become a fear-based culture.

I have an anecdote from a month or two ago. My girlfriend--she's German--and I were in Boston's central park, where there's a wading pool for children. The place was extremely busy with families and children everywhere--and also crawling with police. As the mother next to us ushered their 9-year-old into the pool, the mother loudly told her, "If anyone touches you, you scream!" My girlfriend laughed out loud at the silliness of it (the child was within eyeshot, in a pool filled with other children and families, in broad daylight, and surrounded by police) and commented to me about how afraid Americans are of everything.

Now that's just an anecdote. But we're seeing bits and pieces of this everywhere. Parents fearful of pedophiles around every corner. TV commercials about new drugs, scaring us into thinking we have some painful disease. ("If you've had chicken pox, the shingles virus is already inside you..."). People like the Free-Range Parenting blogger getting harassed and hounded. The ballooning security and surveillance apparatus. The militarization of our police, and draconian and unfathomable laws and sentencing requirements. The TSA, which is pure theater in service of fear. Bits and pieces.

I find myself increasingly thinking that the fear-based environment in the US is not a place I would want my children to grow up in. It breeds a dangerous us-vs-them (the brown people, the druggies, your neighbor) mentality and leads to suspicion and hatred.

Unfortunately I don't know what to do about it other than move to a different, more emotionally stable country. Culture is hard to change and takes a generation.

indefatigable• 13 years ago

Yet Germany has institutionalized the same mentality on a more abstract level.

"Global warming might be happening, shut down the energy industry!"

"We can't use nuclear power, someone might get cancer! Keep mining coal and etching solar panels!"

pavs• 13 years ago

They are not even remotely the same thing.

pzuraq3• 13 years ago

That's a ridiculous comparison, The fact of the matter is that those decisions are completely logical. Whether or not global warming is happening, we will run out of fossil fuels and fissionable material eventually. Solar is renewable, self sustaining. By building out solar Germany is reducing there dependence on foreign countries and securing there future; Possibly helping to reduce global warming is just icing on the cake.

petervandijck• 13 years ago

Which leads to a culture where everyone is afraid of touching kids that are not their own. It's really sad.

a3n2• 13 years ago

When my own kid was very young I was paranoid about touching him in public. It didn't stop me, but I was mindful of it, and I would occasionally feel I was getting extra scrutiny by some parent; a man not at work in the daytime, holding a young boy's hand.

Feh.

mathgladiator2• 13 years ago

I wear a shirt that says "Free Hugs", and I've had many adults take advantage of it. The other day, a kid asked me and I got all weird and "can't"... I don't wear that shirt anymore.

akshatpradhan• 13 years ago

Absolutely true. My g/f coos at other people's kids, but I look the other direction. The last thing I want is a liability for friendliness.

lectrick4• 13 years ago

Boston's a poor example. It's possibly the most socially-conservative place on earth I've ever lived in other than a Muslim country.

api5• 13 years ago

Tangent: I lived in Boston for a while. I'm glad to read stuff like this as it reminds me that it wasn't me.

PSA: Boston is not liberal, except a little bit in the abstract NPR "latte sipping" academic sense. Culturally it is unbelievably, stiflingly conservative, far more so than "red states" for example.

mtdewcmu3• 13 years ago

The most unfortunate part isn't that we worry too much -- it's that we worry about the wrong things. Not enough people seem to be concerned about the unaffordability of health insurance, or the fact that 401k plans are unlikely to cover retirement.

api5• 13 years ago

I'm suspicious that this is constructed, and is precisely the idea. American TV is one long stream of things to be afraid of-- other than the things you should be afraid of. It's distraction.

mjallday• 13 years ago

Unfortunately I don't know what to do about it other than move to a different, more emotionally stable country. Culture is hard to change and takes a generation.

That seems extreme. The situation you describe seems directly under control of the parents. Eg you can solve this for your child by simply not subscribing to that culture.

weland• 13 years ago

It's not that easy. Not subscribing to the culture of most parents tends to result into isolating your child.

djvv• 13 years ago

I completely agree, as someone who grew up in East Europe and is now in the US. The contrast between my childhood and what I see here is huge. And before someone counters that I come from an uncivilized place let me say what I saw 4 years ago while living in Amsterdam. Kids who were in 3rd or 4th grade would bike to school alone, crossing streets with traffic and so on.

ape4• 13 years ago

Maybe people drove after 9/11 to avoid the TSA -- not because they thought planes were riskier.

emiliobumachar4• 13 years ago

The TSA is an aberration of risk aversion, so Schneider's point still stands.

JshWright• 13 years ago

I'm currently sitting in JFK. I found this article interesting (as I do most of Schneier's writing) and almost read parts of it aloud to my wife who is sitting across from me. It then occurred to me that discussing rational responses to terrorism while sitting in an airport would likely be ill-advised...

ISL• 13 years ago

It's probably the ideal forum.

ixacto• 13 years ago

This new trend of a kinderocracy is troubling to say the least. If we are not able to accurately assess risk, how will society at large manage social norms and not turn into a police state?

One of the main things that parents fail to realize is that most of the child abusers are actually not pedos in the park with slr cameras. "about 60% of perpetrators are non-relative acquaintances, such as a friend of the family, babysitter, or neighbor. About 30% of those who sexually abuse children are relatives of the child, such as fathers, uncles, or cousins. Strangers are perpetrators in only about 10% of child sexual abuse cases." -VA.gov http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/pages/child_sexual_abuse...

My guess why society at large has actively been ignoring the reality of child is abuse is that we as humans and families obviously want to be able to "do something" to protect their children. Saying that non-relative acquaintances are the most likely to be abusers is not going to go over well, but hell I could be wrong.

j_m_b• 13 years ago

The pussification of America is not new.

Our Newfound Fear of Risk

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