[Aloha]

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.

[resource_waste]

>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.

[ls612]

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.

[Aloha]

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.

[ls612]

Yeah my point was more we probably don't really need more stringent industrial safety standards if we have gotten deaths due to industrial accidents down so low. The cost/benefit tradeoff isn't there anymore.

[AlotOfReading]

CSB videos (deliberately) aren't trying to show the full human cost of incidents. The US is full of communities that have been poisoned for decades from these sorts of things, and workers have a lot more to worry about than dying.

[Aloha]

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).

[ndileas]

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.

[kulahan]

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.

[os2warpman]

Your thought experiment is flawed because its results are known already and you are discarding them for a catastrophizing fantasy.

And the harm reduction wouldn't be 0.001%, it would be practically 99%.

And it costs much less than $100k.

It's found in race cars, today, and you can install it today (in most cars).

[kulahan]

What can you install? I’m talking about a fake device. It can’t be installed because it doesn’t exist. It also obviously reduces harm by 0.01% because again, this is a thought experiment meant to illustrate a point.

I literally have no idea what device you think I’m talking about

[os2warpman]

5-point harnesses, roll cages, seatbelt-ignition interlocks, fuel cells, fire extinguishers, and Hans devices for drivers and passengers would eliminate nearly all vehicle fatalities.

They exist today and can be added to passenger vehicles for much less than $100k.

Broadly, the only fatalities they wouldn't prevent are offset frontal crashes at speeds so great as to be unreasonable and vehicles that have driven off cliffs or into bodies of water (though many would be able to self-extricate).

These are all dumb devices, I'm sure you were thinking of an AI or self driving doohickey.

We've already gotten results from your thought experiment. The results are: "an arbitrary point where cost/convenience lines cross over, based on general consensus but mainly liability costs".

If $10k (what I spent to get my Miata track-ready) isn't the line, $100k ain't it either-- especially since my solution saves tens of thousands annually and yours, like, less than one (45k deaths * 0.001% = 0.45 lives saved annually).

[shadowpho]

> 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.

[kulahan]

Well yeah, that’s my point - acceptable risk is, in fact, good. If it weren’t, then there would be no resistance to that $100,000 component. But of course we still want to reduce danger, so adding an extra 2% to the cost of a car is fairly reasonable.

[os2warpman]

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

A rear backup camera module, its wiring, and the screen cost less than $15 at volume for minimally-viable options and $100-300 for "good" (HD, guidance lines, proximity sensors, etc.) options.

Not $1,000-2,000.

What manufacturers charge for them is a different matter.

[Aloha]

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.

[BenjiWiebe]

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

[Aloha]

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.

[thegrim33]

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.

[Teever]

I think you're kind of looking at this the wrong way.

As I understand it 'vision zero' type programs are often an aspirational goal, and they implicitly recognize the near impossibility of reaching the goal, but that near impossibility doesn't make the goal undesirable or not worth striving for.

If you set such a goal you start to analyze the systems involved which cause accidents and deaths in a different way and you seek change them on a fundamental level to significantly reduce if not outright eliminate the possibility of certain categories of accidents entirely.

So instead of doing moderately effective but ultimately fleeting stuff like cracking down on speeders and drunk drivers through police action you redesign the infrastructure so that it becomes much harder for a car to physically strike pedestrians through traffic calming[0] measures, creating physically separate pedestrian and bike infrastructure so that cars just don't come in contact with people, or implement mass transit so that you simple decrease the number of drivers on the road and again physically separate them from automobiles to eliminate the possibility that they're involved in car accidents.

In doing so you not only reduce the number of accidents that injure and maim people but you induce them to be more physically active and therefore healthier so that they're able to better car accidents, slips and falls, and illnesses which ends up paying for the infrastructure improvements over the long run.

This is so much better than the alternative where speeders consistently speed and kill pedestrians in an unmarked cross walk so we decide to play whack-a-mole by increasing the police budget for photo radar for a while until the public forgets that this particular street is dangerous to cross on foot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

[Aloha]

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.