4 ms·
When I was trying to look up an article from about the call to "redesign" hot dogs, I found this quote: "No parents can watch all of their kids 100% of the tim
by gav 14y ago
When I was trying to look up an article from about the call to "redesign" hot dogs, I found this quote:
"No parents can watch all of their kids 100% of the time. The best way to protect kids is to design these risks out of existence."
-- Gary Smith, director of the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-02-22-1Achoke22_ST_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-02-22-1Achok...
I feel that this is a sad state of affairs.
- anothermachine 14y agoWhy? Seems like a smart solution to a problem. We have designed many of the risks out of cars too, and I for one appreciate that.
- Gormo 14y agoIt is a smart solution to the problem, to an extent: mitigating risks in ways that are unrelated to the intended functionality of the product is usually a good idea. But mitigating risks inherent to the nature of the product in a way that reduces the product's functionality, reliability, or adaptability for other purposes isn't an appropriate solution. More broadly, and more importantly, designing risk out of our environment gives us less fodder for the development of our own faculties for risk judgment, and therefore makes us more dependent on external articles and less so on intelligence and caution for our safety, and this ironically makes is more risky for us to explore aspects of the world which haven't been already made artificially safe, and more subject to danger if the external sources of risk should shift. In other words, maintaining risk-free environments ultimately makes us less adaptable, makes the prospect of change riskier, and therefore reduces our evolutionary fitness.