It seems that in modern times, humans focus on safety almost to the exclusion of everything else. As much as the more traditional salutations "godspeed" or "have a nice day", we're even more likely to hear "drive safe" or "have a safe trip" or "be safe".
We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Surely you've heard the mantra "...if it saves just one life...".
The optimal amount of tragedy is not zero. It's correct that we should accept some risk. We just need to be up-front and recognize what the safety margins really are.
> We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe.
Are we? People saying "have a safe trip" is pretty weak evidence.
The counter evidence is just about everything else going on, at least in the US. Relaxed worker safety standards, weakened environmental protections, and generally moving as fast as possible.
We have 4 kids. Before we had our 3rd, we needed to buy a new vehicle solely because we couldn't fit 3 car seats into the back of our old car. And when traveling with kids, carrying 4 gigantic car seats plus your other luggage is not exactly as easy as you might think! It essentially rules out solo parent travel with all 4 kids. Transferring car seats between two cars, or installing car seats in a taxi, is a serious pain.
Furthermore, the evidence that car seats actually benefit safety is significantly less robust than you might think. The "mountains of evidence" that do exist for things like 70% reductions in fatalities, bizarrely enough, generally compare the rate of fatalities for car seats vs completely unrestrained kids. When you compare the rate of fatalities in car seats to kids wearing adult seat belts, the bulk of the evidence suggests essentially no difference. Fatalities happen when the forces involved are catastrophic and sadly a car seat doesn't help much for kids over 2.
Even a back of the envelope comparison makes this extremely plausible: car crash fatalities for kids 9-12 have declined by 72% from 1978-2017. If car seats and car seat laws save significant numbers of lives, you'd expect that the fatality rate for kids 0-8, who are generally in car seats, to have decreased much more. But it hasn't, it declined by 73% over the same period.
Now, car seats and boosters do seem to moderately reduce non-fatal injuries - huge spread of estimates here, most clustering around 10-25%. It's reasonable for most people to use car seats or boosters most of the time based on this alone, IMO, especially for young kids. But do they justify a mandate? IMO: no. Absolutely not.
Worth mentioning that mandates probably do succeed in one thing: they reduce the number of children born at all by at least 57x more than they prevent child fatalities. Roughly 8,000 kids per year, 145,000 kids since 1980. That's with the (unlikely, as discussed above) assumption that car seats do in fact save significant numbers of lives. But it's also entirely possible that they've prevented hundreds of thousands of kids from being born, somewhat reduced the nonfatal injury rate, and saved essentially no lives.
- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046 (car seat mandates "led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000")
Note that both the 45% and 59% estimate for injury reduction and the 28% estimate for fatality reduction all come from one research group using a proprietary data set. Everything that's independently reproducible points towards small or zero effect on fatalities and modest effects on injuries.
Yep. As I understand it, there's no statistical difference between a car seat and a seat belt over age two. We've known this for a very long time, too. But it's easy to make an emotional appeal to do something to make the world safer for children, even if what you're doing doesn't make any difference.
The evidence that car seats save lives is significantly weaker that you probably believe, as I detailed in another comment in this thread. But look: even if car seats make sense for a typical 5 year old on a typical drive in their typical car (which is a higher evidentiary burden than you might think), a mandate imposes a huge logistical tax that makes many normal things completely infeasible or impractical:
- travel with many kids (nope, physically can't carry 4 car seats plus luggage)
- using a taxi, e.g. to go see a movie (nope, can't carry a car seat into the theater)
- carpooling with other families (I'll drive them, you pick up? Nope, we'd have to shuffle car seats around.)
- rides with grandparents or other family members (sorry, we'd have to deliver the car seat to them first)
- splitting kids between two vehicles for errands (let's spend 10m wrestling car seats from one car to the other first)
The whole texture of independent childhood is altered by car seat mandates! Everything gets filtered through "is there a car seat available?". If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
> Car seats and booster seats significantly reduce the risk of fatal injury in crashes by 71% for infants and 54% for toddlers (1-4 years old), saving over 11,000 lives in the US since 1975
> Booster seats reduce the risk of serious injury for children aged 4-8 by 45% compared to seatbelts alone.
It's from the AI summary because it was the most quotable but the articles I found say pretty much the same thing. Seems pretty solid to me.
> If you haven't experienced this, it's hard to describe - and I think it's absolutely a case where tradeoffs like "how will this affect quality of life?" are completely overridden because "well, if it just saves one life..."
If you haven't experienced your children dying unnecessarily because it was inconvenient to make them safe it's hard to describe..
But sure everything would be better if any moron was allowed to decide how to keep their own kids safe.
Yes, I think that we'd all be better off if every person was allowed to have their own personal values, deciding what's more important to themSELVES, rather than piling on and trying to force every one into a one-size-fits-all solution.
For my part, I'd much rather have people wishing me "have a rich and fulfilling life" rather than "be timid and careful to maximize your time even if it's boring and unrewarding".
Sure, you can disagree with my priorities, but that's the whole point. We should each be able to have our own priorities.
The evidence on car seats is extremely weak and they prevent only a handful of injuries. You'd be better off redesigning roads or having more collision protection systems in cars. As self-driving cars get better to the point where they can communicate and eliminate many human errors, there's probably no need for car seats at all. In many situations they make things more dangerous, not less.
Thanks to risk compensation, making things "safer" doesn't necessarily improve safety. What are the odds that people drive their kids around more (increasing their risk) because having kids in car-seats reduces the perceived risk? How many of those people do you think can point at what the reduction in risk due to car seat use is [0], such that they compensate that risk "rationally"?
[0] Hint: As our sibling conversation shows, that's a non-trivial question.
Considering that driving (at least in the US) is a relatively unsafe means of travel compared to the alternatives, I can understand imploring someone to drive safe.
Our internal emotional thinking doesn't work very well with probabilities so it is a very common fallacy trying to reduce a probability to zero when it is completely irrational.
I feel like all the responses to your comment sort of prove its point.
As I was reading the post I was wondering along the same lines, if this is different from before. Going to space is an inherently risky activity. It's always going to be easy to write the "this is not safe" think piece, where you can either say "I told you so" or "Whew, thankfully we made it this time!" afterwards. Things like this only happen when you accept some risk and people say "yes" press forward.
All that said, not all risk is equal, and I'm trying to understand if NASA is uniquely dysfunctional now and taking needless, incidental risks.
America has been craving safety since 9/11, and it has made cowards of everybody, so in some sense I would agree.
But taking a risk regarding an unknown or to expand knowledge or actually accomplish something is one thing. Ignoring known and mitigable risks just to save money, save face, meet a deadline or please a bureaucrat is another.
Anyway these clowns even fail your criterion, because by covering up the results of the first launch/experiment, they are not being up front about a risk.
In my opinion this is a top-down, human hierarchy thing. CEOs and agency administrators create and set an organization's culture and expectations.
The irony is that a faulty heat shield is an engineering challenge that real engineers would love to tackle; all you have to do is turn them loose on the problem, let them fix it. They live for that. I find it actually aesthetically offensive that the organization and its culture has instead taught them venal, circumspect careerism, which is cowardice of a different kind.
Maybe not so much "oblivious to safety" as "oblivious to probable risk." We worry to much about low risk events (like airline flights) and don't worry enough about higher risk events (like trips-and-falls, driving a car, poor diet...)
I wouldn’t say humans are oblivious to safety. The Apollo program was very successful as long as you’re not related to Gus Grissom, Ed White or Roger Chaffee. But those three (preventable) deaths aside, Apollo was quite successful and figured out some huge problems.
If you’re interested in a heck of a good read, the Columbia Accident Investigation Report is a good place to start:
It looks at the safety culture in NASA and at how that safety culture ran into budget issues, time pressure and a culture that ‘it’s always been okay’. But people were aware of the problems.
There’s a really frustrating example from Columbia where engineers on the ground badly wanted to inspect the shuttle’s left wing from the ground using ground based telescopes or even observations from telescopes or any other assets. There’s footage available was an email circulated where an engineer all but begged anyone to take a look with anything. That request was not approved - they never looked.
Realistically there’s a point to be made that NASA wasn’t capable of saving those astronauts at that point. But they had a shuttle almost ready to to, they could have jettisoned its science load and possibly had a rescue of some sort available. They never looked though but alarm bells were ringing.
It’s more accurate to say people are highly aware of safety but when you get a bunch of us together, add in cognitive biases and promotion bands we can get stuck in unsafe ruts.
I'd say it's more accurate to say the people who are actually smart work as engineers. Leadership is generally engineers who were better at office politics than engineering, or just business majors etc.
So you have a group of really talented people using their talents to do awesome things, and then you have some useless idiots who are good at kissing the right asses, running the show and taking most of the credit. And that's how you end up killing astronauts, because the useless assholes in charge aren't even competent enough to recognize when they should listen to the brains of their operation. All they care about is looking good to their superiors and hitting some arbitrary deadline they've decided to set for no damn reason etc.
If you're looking for programs where mistakes were not made, Apollo is not the program to choose. I highly recommend visiting Kennedy Space Center some time where they go in-depth on how close it came to never happening after Apollo I. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
That being said, I'm a big proponent of "you can't make ICBM's carrying humans 100% safe", but you sure can try your best.
Us humans do have difficulty with safety. Sometimes we are able to overcome that problem to an extent. Here are some the few examples where humans have done well with safety: FAA commercial airlines, Soyuz, ISS, Shinkansen trains, US Nuclear power post 3 mile island, Vaccines, and the Falcon 9.
It seems that in modern times, humans focus on safety almost to the exclusion of everything else. As much as the more traditional salutations "godspeed" or "have a nice day", we're even more likely to hear "drive safe" or "have a safe trip" or "be safe".
We're very nearly paralyzed by insisting that everything must be maximally safe. Surely you've heard the mantra "...if it saves just one life...".
The optimal amount of tragedy is not zero. It's correct that we should accept some risk. We just need to be up-front and recognize what the safety margins really are.