The Conquest of Hell Gate [pdf]

I think one of the problems of modern society is the level of risk people deem acceptable - its now near zero, instead of "reasonable risks".

Aside from that, culturally the value we impart on a single human life has also changed too - death used to be much more common, infant death in particular - its not uncommon to go to an old cemetery and see a single family having buried three or more children, with another 2-3 having survived to adulthood. This was not something limited to the lower classes either, Calvin Coolidge had a son who died of sepsis from a blister while he was president.

>I think one of the problems of modern society is the level of risk people deem acceptable - its now near zero, instead of "reasonable risks".

I've watched plenty of youtube videos that say something like 'But management needed dem profits so they took the risk'

So... let us not pretend we don't cut corners and take risk. There are plenty of modern deaths and environmental destruction because people take risk.

What I think should be more acceptable, is that people take personal risks. Nothing wrong with accepting risk being the first person in an unregulated prototype space ship or taking unverified medicine.

Are you implying that was, somehow, good? Because it was bad. Most major religions / ethical paradigms agree on this.

People, individually, should take risks if that's what they want, and it's not going to hurt others. I'm totally fine with skydiving, base jumping, rock climbing, whatever. I'm not fine with pumping chemicals into the local water table because that's the way Grandpa do.

The regulatory and legal strangleholds we have put on modern society allows large organizations to roll the dice with abstract and diffuse risks - often without owning the liability from those choices, but often preclude individuals from taking their own personal risk assessments and deciding to take part or not - because the liability rolls someplace else (aka, you can always sue).

The biggest issue I have, is we allow large organizations to make decisions on difuse/abstract risks - often without owning the liability from those choices, but roll many liabilities up for an individual choice to an organization - its perverse, and should be the other way around.

If I do something that earns me a darwin award at work, my company probably should not be liable for it.

These types of arguments are always so easy when you present everything as insanely black and white.

A thought experiment: if we could install a device which increases the likelihood of everyone surviving a car crash by 0.001%, but it costs $100,000 should it be mandated in every car? After all, this involves a victim as well.

I don’t think anyone would agree to that particular law. There is inevitably going to be a cutoff where you say “the increased safety is no longer worth the cost”. That’s acceptable risk and it’s not only good, it’s absolutely necessary to a functioning society.

I watch those USCSB videos too and the takeaway I have is that even with these sorts of fuckups there are a single digit or low double digit number of people killed in industrial accidents each year in a country of 350 million. That suggests that we are actually pretty good at chemical safety already.

> if we could install a device which increases the likelihood of everyone surviving a car crash by 0.001%, but it costs $100,000 should it be mandated in every car

I mean we can do that right now and we don’t.

However we do mandate rear back up camera which costs $1-2k and saves some percentage of lives when backing up.

So it’s all about balance.

Not to mention the discussions around risk are too coupled to political positions / zealotry now, so they can no longer be civilly discussed. If you ever take the position of wanting to accept what you believe to be reasonable risk, it's standard practice for the opposition to slander you as an evil person that wants to kill people/babies/homeless/whoever. For example: the other person in this very comment thread that interpreted you saying we don't have acceptable levels of risk anymore as people like you wanting to poison the water table.

An illustrating example might also be the US cities like Seattle that have their "vision zero" programs. A "vision", and related actions, to get to zero traffic related deaths or serious injuries every year. It's the official position of these city governments that literally any non-zero death rate is unacceptable. No matter how low the death rate is (and it's already very low). They officially accept zero risk. Is that reasonable? Is it even about the death rate or something else? Either way, it's fully undebatable.

rear backup cameras are one of the cases where I think the math falls apart - its like 250m dollars to save approx 30 lives a year - where is does work is reduced body damage to vehicles, however I dont know thats enough to mandate them.

Very much agreed - and actually the fact that people can poison the water table is the exact problem we have, abstract and diffuse risks (tragedy of the commons type stuff) is treated one way, but the chance of risk to an individual is treated another. We worry very much about individual lead or asbestos exposure, but yet there is no system plan to clean it up. An example - We've spent lots of effort on trying to eliminate Leaded AvGas (which primarily effects users of it), but not as much on environmental lead from batteries.

Part of this is driven by the social media discourse and polarization - We essentially had a whole bunch of ideas which were outside of the window of normal discourse that have now been adopted as ideology and dogma by their respective camps. Once an idea is dogma/key ideological tenant it's really hard to challenge it.

Vision Zero should be viewed for what it is.. as a dumb idea.

I love those USCSB videos!

The biggest thing we have done is managed to protect the general public, which IMO is what should be done.

Surely the backup camera wouldn't need to cost that much?