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The problem here is not the law, it is the people who think the fact that one person (out of over 100 million families in America) got arrested for doing a thin
by ramy_d 9y ago
The problem here is not the law, it is the people who think the fact that one person (out of over 100 million families in America) got arrested for doing a thing that sounds reasonable is a reason to change your behavior.
actually it is the law. We can't expect parents to gamble their parenthood and their lives - even if the odds are 1 in 100 million. And i suspect the odds are not that small, just in this thread there are multiple stories of social services being called for what used to be common place attitudes towards children and their autonomy. There's even a person fully admitting they would also put in a report if they witnessed such a thing.
I'm not saying your arguments are bad. In fact, they are on point. But perceived danger vs Actual danger is, from looking at the whole anti-vaccer movement, the big contributor here. But if parents are getting put in handcuffs for having their kids play outside then yeah, they need to be protected from a systemic standpoint.
- lsc 9y ago>We can't expect parents to gamble their parenthood and their lives - even if the odds are 1 in 100 million Every day when you strap your kid into your car seat, you are rolling those dice, at odds considerably worse than 1 in 100 million. You can't face risk by saying "we need to stamp it out, no matter how small the chance or how great the cost" It doesn't help me if you protect me from meteors if I'm millions of times more likely to be killed by a traffic accident, and the same resources could drastically reduce the chance of that death. You need to look at what resources you are willing to spend on risk mitigation, and then look at where you can spend those resources to most effectively mitigate risk.
- Spearchucker 9y agoYou're basing your argument entirely on probability, and assuming all risk must be mitigated. Or I'm taking you too literally, in which case I apologise. However. Risk exposure is more than probability - it's probability multiplied by impact. And only then does one consider an approach - accept, transfer, manage, and so on. In this case if one chose to manage the risk, the mitigation would require (one possibility) enshrining something in law, so that parents of these kids DON'T get prosecuted. That's a one-off, and possibly no more expensive than the cost of a single prosecution/incident. Given that, doesn't it make sense to do this, making it just go away, and giving people that peace of mind? Regardless of the low probability? Cost is clearly less than protecting a populace against meteors.
- Retric 9y agoBeing arrested is the tail end of a much larger realm of bad things that could happen. Making your 1:100 million odds meaningless. Further, these bad outcomes are not evenly distributed so a farmer in Iowa has a very different risk profile.
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- ivanhoe 9y agoIt's pointless to discuss if it makes sense mathematically because humans don't function that way, we're just not very good in probability. Everyone is looking at eliminating the risks with the simplest possible solution. When you strap kids in your car seat you use special kid seats to insure that they'll be protected as much as possible. If there's a chance that you loose your kid because you've let it go play on its own outside, you will not let it go anymore. It's as simple as that, perfectly normal human reasoning.
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- otempomores 9y agoThe problem is helicopter parents who constructed their identity around supervision get a vision of beeing superfluous or even harmful. Your unsupervised self reliant youngsters are a attack on their lifestyle. Good luck defending with law against that