18 ms·

Our Newfound Fear of Risk

338 points by fejr 13y ago

dankoss 13y ago
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." - FDR
twoodfin 13y ago
Sorry, but there is no remotely possible U.S. political world in which Afghanistan is not invaded after September 11. If avoiding military action after an attack on that scale is your standard for a "smart about risk" society, you'll be waiting a long, long time.
- 001sky 13y ago
  The interesting question is to turn this point on its head. The conventional wisdom (before 9/11) was it was "too risky" to fight back against hostage takers on an airplane. That bit of social engineering led to a huge force multiplier when trained pilots turned civivian aircraft into cruise missles. So, the origins of 9/11 have to do with mis-understanding the real risks we face. The opposite of ignorance is education, however. Its not per-se a totalalitarian police state. Which is where we seemed to have ended up.
  - VLM 13y ago
    "That bit of social engineering led to a huge force multiplier" Its possible to use this technique to predict the next set of attacks: 1) High levels of security theater mean long entrance lines in front of (perceived) high value targets. Therefore instead of attacking the high value target the security theater is protecting, the line of people waiting to enter gets attacked. I get nervous waiting in lines knowing any terrorist who isn't an idiot has their sights on me. 2) Whats the prevailing wisdom for suspected violence in a school? Lockdown, shelter in place, sometimes for hours. Perfect target conditions for a poison gas attack and/or arson. Yeah yeah I know what I'm told, but under actual attack I would have no desire to die so rather than shelter in place I'd GTFO as soon as the cattle herders start yelling. The safest armor against a weapon is being well out of its range, not a cheap door lock. I would predict the odds of both of the above as near 100% in the near future. Its just logical. The next step would be to identify the perpetrators as mostly Saudi citizens (yet again) and therefore invade Iran. Or Syria. Or whoever else needs an excuse right now, while the bubbas back home wave flags to support the troops.
    - anigbrowl 13y ago
      1) High levels of security theater mean long entrance lines in front of (perceived) high value targets. Therefore instead of attacking the high value target the security theater is protecting, the line of people waiting to enter gets attacked. I get nervous waiting in lines knowing any terrorist who isn't an idiot has their sights on me. This isn't going to happen because a bunch of people in line at an airport isn't a high-value target. I mean it would suck, of course, but 'bunch of people get blown up at an airport' isn't nearly as worrying as 'large plane falls/is steered out of the sky and into downtown.' It doesn't have much value to terrorists because it's not as scary and it won't generate vast numbers of photographs. Yeah, it seems obvious, but it's wrong. Because killing people is not the whole goal on terrorism. Making people panic is. We have lots of mass shooting incidents in the US, but there's relatively little political will to change the gun culture here because people are rarely (ie never) confronted with pictures of the aftermath. Similarly, if a line of people at an airport were killed, all the public would see would be ambulances and body bags. They would feel sorry for you but would not actually care that much on an emotional level. What made the 9-11 attack so clever, and devastating, was that the attacks were staggered in time so that you had people flying planes into some of the world's most famous buildings on live television. The last time anyone saw large amounts of stuff getting blown up for real on TV was during the first Gulf War. Yeah yeah I know what I'm told, but under actual attack I would have no desire to die so rather than shelter in place I'd GTFO as soon as the cattle herders start yelling. We have enough school shootings that we have some data on this. If you are running around trying to escape then a) you're an easily noticeable target and b) you're probably going to be in the way of law enforcement firing back at the shooter. I don't find your approach any more sensible than suggestions that everyone should be armed and that the possibility of a gun battle will be a sufficient deterrent. Given the number of people who engage in shootouts with the police, this is plainly not the case. Looking to sneak out makes sense, departing in a disordered GTFO fashion is just panic.
      - angersock 13y ago
        At risk of never flying unmolested again--you do realize that you've identified the lacking qualities in the aforementioned attack plan, and that those can be readily addressed by such simple actions as hitting more places at once over a longer period of time? The entire point of the article is that that sort of a analysis is ongoing, is that when you try to deal with an opponent you are dealing with something actively exploring a solution space. That's what makes the security theater so annoying--it's clear that there are a dozen ways to stage a successful attack were one so inclined, none of which would be stopped or even slowed by our current (or any forseeable) measure. I think people need to realize that the number of Bad People in the world is really small, and that they shouldn't give up freedoms in hopes of somehow decreasing their exposure. Large state and private groups are much more harmful, especially because they turn Not Bad People into Annoyingly Inconvenient And Impersonally Malicious People.
  - RougeFemme 13y ago
    Prior to 9/11, at least in the U.S., hijackers typically "simply" wanted money or to be flown elsewhere. As long as those demands were met, there were no casualties. So it wasn't that it was "too risky" to fight back - it was that hijacking was generally not considered life-threatening. The original reactions on 9/11 were not due solely to "social engineering", but to prior experience.
    - 001sky 13y ago
      So it wasn't that it was "too risky" to fight back - it was that hijacking was generally not considered life-threatening. ==What about the risk of <operating from the wrong premise>?
    - jessaustin 13y ago
      That high-pitched noise you heard was the point, zinging swiftly over your head. All the pre-9/11 "experts" who told us to bend over and let the goat enthusiasts have their wicked way with us, didn't do so in a nuanced, situationally-aware fashion. They said, "always cooperate with hijackers." The fact that organizations existed the purposes of which were to kill Americans and destroy American resources, was blithely ignored by the "experts". Only through long conditioning did they cow the general public enough that four or five dudes with really short knives could hijack a plane. While the last plane was still in the air, the general public realized what bullshit that had been. When "experts" talk about "risk", it's never "things are pretty good and getting better". (I.e., it's never the truth.) They always want us to fear more, and as a result pay more. It's not different now.
      - RougeFemme 13y ago
        No, didn't miss the point - just didn't agree. Pre 9/11, we didn't have a plethora of "risk" experts telling us what to do. Most people listened to news - good, bad, or indifferent - parsed it for themselves and acted accordingly - not according to what the seldom-heard-from experts said.
        jessaustin 13y ago
- alan_cx 13y ago
  In 1984, the US funded IRA bombed the entire UK government, nearly killed them all. The UK did not invade Northern Ireland or Ireland. The police investigated, made arrests and people were convicted. Acting humanely is not that hard.
  - HPLovecraft 13y ago
    link to US government funding? Or are you referring to private funding by US citizens?
    - graeme 13y ago
      Private funding. It's well known the ira raised funds from easy coast cities.
      - HPLovecraft 13y ago
        "It is known." Yea im aware of that... The comment I was replying to gave the impression that it was the USG specifically doing the funding.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    It did not 'nearly kill them all.' It killed five people, none of whom where in the cabinet although they were senior party members. The UK didn't have to invade Northern Ireland because Northern Ireland was (and is) UK territory and there was already a substantial active military presence. For about 25 years the British army sent fresh soldiers off to do a tour in NI to toughen them up. In short, you have no idea what you're talking about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles
    - mietek 13y ago
      > It did not 'nearly kill them all.' It killed five people, none of whom where in the cabinet although they were senior party members. The article you quote says 5 were killed and 31 were injured...
- rwmj 13y ago
  There's also no risk of the US being invaded by Afghanistan. The risk to the US was and is always very minor, akin to a tiny fraction of the number of people killed by cars or going to be killed by climate change. The US didn't have to spend trillions mitigating that risk, even if you assume those trillions did mitigate the risk.
  - jerf 13y ago
    The direct military risk was small. The risk to global stability and the markets via the risk to the price of oil as part of a complex of destabilizing elements was much larger than that, though whether you judge it as large or small itself depends on various opinions and definitions. However, if you're the sort of person who's going to talk about risks in terms of things like "killed by cars", it should be pointed out that taking action to protect the price of oil is not immediately obviously wrong. Raising the price of oil substantially affects millions, if not billions, of poorer people a lot, and could prevent entire economies from raising themselves out of poverty. Which suggests that if you want to end the US's involvement in the Middle East, you should probably be vigorously supporting shale oil, even if you believe it may have some negative environmental impacts. If they no longer have a knife to the jugular of civilization as we know it, it's a lot easier to ignore them.
- Vivtek 13y ago
  And did that invasion change anything? Were the Taliban or al Qaeda eliminated by that invasion? Did you notice that the exact same justification was used to attack neighboring Iraq? Sorry, but I happen to have lived through that year and the years following, and I know that given an America that lived up to its own hype, an invasion was easily avoidable. It's just that such an America doesn't exist. Too bad for us all.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    Even if the invasion was required, nothing required us to occupy the place for a decade and counting, turning it into a perpetual war. Hook up with the Northern Alliance, bomb the hell out of their enemies, set them up, leave. They can't hold on to power? Oh well. The point has been made. The country returns to dictatorship and chaos? Well, that happened anyway.
    - icegreentea 13y ago
      You may recall the last time something like that happened to Afghanistan, it led to the whole civil war that resulted in the rise of the Taliban and AQ in the first place.
      - mikeash 13y ago
        As opposed to this time, which is leading to a whole civil war that's probably going to result in the rise of the Taliban again?
      - jessaustin 13y ago
        Yes "adverse" consequences always occur in countries we don't understand and don't particularly care about, no matter what awful things we do to them. (Next door in Iran, how did that Mosaddegh coup turn out?) The only real argument is over how much wealth will be transferred to our military-industrial complex, and how many Senators will get to go on another junket as a result? On those questions, I vote "less" and "fewer".
- rdl 13y ago
  I really liked how the US responded in Afghanistan in September-November 2001: sending in CIA and special operations forces to ally with anti-AQ and anti-Taliban forces, on a hundreds of millions of dollars total budget. That had almost all of the upside and virtually none of the downside of a big invasion.
  - omegant 13y ago
    A very good account of that part of the war is "First in: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan " by Schroen, Gary. He was the chief of the first CIA team to operate inside Afghanistan. A great read, just not what you´ll expect of a CIA operation, everything is donne in a much more "common sense" way than you may think.
    - rdl 13y ago
      Yeah, one of my favorite books. Eric Blehm's "The Only Thing Worth Dying For" covers the same time from the perspective of the ODAs rather than CIA. (The thing I still don't understand is what moron at Group decided to let the battalion leadership deploy to the field, rather than remaining behind. They caused a bunch of friendly fire incidents and generally lost the initiative CIA and the ODA/ODBs had gained. It seems like it was just a bunch of useless 1990s-military senior officers who wanted to have cool stories to tell.)
      - omegant 13y ago
        Thanks for the heads up. I am going to buy it today.
- lambda 13y ago
  The U.S. could have participated only in targeted strikes against Al Qaeda, leaving the rest to local forces as a local matter that isn't our business, and not tried to occupy the country and engage in nation-building. If they had done just a targeted strike against Al Qaeda, larger in scope but similar to what they did against Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, we probably could have gotten Bin Laden years earlier and not spent more than a decade trying in the morass that is Afghanistan. Our mistake was deciding that we needed to get rid of the Taliban and build a democratic nation from what was left after they were gone. There was never any hope of that; the Taliban just fled to the hills, to Pakistan, or just blend in with the local population because many of them are the local population. We have failed at building a nation that can take care of itself after we leave; within a year or two, the Taliban will be in power again.
  - icegreentea 13y ago
    Overthrowing the Taliban was almost a prerequisite for those types of strikes. The initial strikes and action in Afghanistan by special forces and CIA were almost completely reliant on assistance from the Northern Alliance - for which over throwing the Taliban was always the goal. The initial air strikes (unguided from the ground) were totally useless. It wasn't until they got SF/CIA on the ground working with the Northern Alliance that they could get it working. In any case, it would never have been as simple as 'leave it to the local forces'.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    The U.S. could have participated only in targeted strikes against Al Qaeda, leaving the rest to local forces as a local matter that isn't our business, and not tried to occupy the country and engage in nation-building. This is more or less our current counterterrorism strategy in the wilds of Pakistan or Yemen. While I'm skeptical that such a strategy could have seriously damaged 2001-era AQ's ability to operate inside Afghanistan, I also don't think I'm qualified to debate its merits today. But that's not my point. My point is that if another 9/11-scale attack occurred and the bad guys were in Yemen and the Yemeni government was not extremely helpful in bringing those responsible to heel, that "drones and spies" strategy could never be the limit of our response. It's just not politically practical, not even close. When Schneier talks about the "waste" of a war in Afghanistan, he should remember that the entire time Bush was sticking around trying to nation build, the Democrats were making political hay that Iraq was a sideshow and that we weren't spending enough attention/money/troops on Afghanistan. And indeed when a Democratic president was elected, he proceeded to spend more attention/money/troops on Afghanistan. Once it was established that AQ was responsible for 9/11 and that the Taliban were not going to give them up on our terms, a major military incursion was politically inevitable. It's a little more dicey just how inevitable a long-term occupation was: President Gore presumably doesn't have to deal with an Afghani-Hawks-By-Convenience wing of his own party, and maybe gets out quick. But Schneier doesn't make this distinction: He seems to be imagining a world in which the war never happens at all because we properly measured its risks. I happen to think he's wrong about the risk/reward tradeoff of aggressively rolling up AQ and their support networks, but I'm sure he's being Utopian if he thinks he's in anything but a tiny minority who would be against a massive military response to another 9/11-like event.
- njharman 13y ago
  > U.S. political world in which Afghanistan is not invaded after September 11 Agree and I wish we would have done exactly that instead of conquering Iraq.
r0h1n 13y ago
I'd wager that our increasing reliance on technology in all walks of life - education, anti-terrorism, policing, medicine, health etc. - also plays a role in fanning our fear of risk. I _think_ technology tends to offer us two things: (a) an illusion of meaning, as risks are reduced to a discrete set of numbers in excel sheets or databases, and (b) a false sense of control, because we try all sorts of actions (like the ones Schneier mentions) to reduce some of those risks. Then of course there is the cultural angle. > Risk tolerance is both cultural and dependent on the environment around us. I'm from India and our willingness to tolerate or overlook risk is fairly high (I don't mean that in a good way, because most of the times we are fairly blasé about our personal/collective safety or about taking preventive actions almost to the extent of devaluing individual lives). But, for what it's worth, we are therefore more willing to tolerate violent risks like the ones Schneier mentions for longer. Note: 2011 Schneier reference to a research study analysing risk and culture - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/risk_tolerance.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/risk_toleranc...
newobj 13y ago
Related: at the PARK this weekend, and heard all the following utterances in the span of ten minutes from some parents: "NO RUNNING!" "IT'S DANGEROUS HERE" "YOU'RE GONNA GET HURT" "NO RUNNING!" Talk about instilling fear and creating risk aversion. Sometimes you just have to let a child find out for themselves what's safe and what isn't. What you can get up and dust yourself off from and what you can't. It's hard to do (I say this as a parent of 5 year old boy), but you have to resist the urge to hover over them and caution or approve their every move.
- dalek_cannes 13y ago
  There's also the problem of fear of litigation. I'm from a part of the world that is not as lawsuit-happy as the U.S. Amongst other things, medical treatment is very cheap here and people laugh at labels like "warning: device heats up when in operation" (seen on an iron made in the USA).
  - Florin_Andrei 13y ago
    > I'm from a part of the world that is not as lawsuit-happy as the U.S. This is because the safety net is non-existent here. If something really bad is about to happen, you know you're going to fall all the way down to the bottom. The solution? Sue the hell out of everybody. > Amongst other things, medical treatment is very cheap here Yup. Exactly the opposite in the US. When the hospital bill requires a second mortgage, covering the costs via money awarded in a lawsuit might be the only solution.
  - kyllo 13y ago
    I think the absurdity is not lost on some of the people writing the copy for these safety warnings. For example, after Liebeck v. McDonald's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaur...), companies started printing tautological statements like "WARNING: HOT COFFEE IS HOT" on the cups.
- RougeFemme 13y ago
  I have a co-worker who is so risk-averse, she literally pushes her 4-year-old in the stroller to each piece of playground equipment - so she doesn't have to worry about running; even walking at the playground is forbidden for her child. Yes, I'm a parent, but. . .
ywyrd 13y ago
When you treat adults like children, and children like babies, you get exactly that. And that's why a hundred years ago 14-year olds were captaining their own ships, and today you have 40-year olds who can't do their own laundry or balance a checkbook.
- alayne 13y ago
  I'm sorry, but I'm going to call bullshit unless you can actually cite a reference showing some significant number of 14 year old ship captains in 1913.
  - angersock 13y ago
    If you count fishing and crabbing, and possibly ferrying, I would be unsurprised in the slightest.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    David Farragut comes to mind, although I don't know if the plural (i.e., many 14 year olds) applies.
- SkyMarshal 13y ago
  I also wonder if it's related to decreased birth rates in modern times - parents have fewer children than a century or two ago, so losing a single child to an accident of some sort is much more costly to the family, hence the increased risk aversion.
  - mark-r 13y ago
    I doubt that losing a child has ever been less than awful no matter how many you have.
    - 13y ago
coldcode 13y ago
Bruce is always the voice of reason. Too bad the people in charge are the voices of insanity.
- Fargren 13y ago
  As Bruce points out, people who are personally responsible for things when they fail are not insane in being risk averse. From their perspective, they are just playing it safe. Maybe we should be finding a way to make no one personally responsible for failures. But this sounds counter-intuitive, as personal responsibility is acknowledged as an effective mechanism to make people do their work right.
  - gioele 13y ago
    > Maybe we should be finding a way to make no one personally responsible for failures. But this sounds counter-intuitive, as personal responsibility is acknowledged as an effective mechanism to make people do their work right. I think that a good middle-ground is what happens with judges in most of EU. In most systems you cannot directly sue a single judge for some misconduct that happened during a process. What you have to do is to sue "the state". Another judge will then judge the matter but then it is you vs the state, not against a single person; it is the state that takes care of all the legal things and legal costs. This gives the judges the freedom they need to be severe but just. Without this protection they will always be afraid of being sued by the losing party, especially when the losing party is a big, rich corporation. Obviously, to counterbalance this exceptionally high degree of defence enjoyed by the judges, the state usually punish the judge with a fine or a suspension. But the intermediation of the state is able to rebalance the risks: if you do something wrong you risk a big fine, but you will not be dragged personally in a 10-year process that will destroy your career and your finances.
  - pdonis 13y ago
    Maybe we should be finding a way to make no one personally responsible for failures. No, we need to stop making a small group of people, namely, the government, responsible for very large failures, by making them responsible for things that have a very large scope. Instead, a much larger group of people--i.e., everyone--need to each be responsible for a much smaller scope, so that no one person, or small group of people, has to bear by themselves the consequences of a large failure.
andypiper 13y ago
Hmm. Read this as "newfound fear of RIAK" - either spent too much time on datastores lately, or need my eyes tested.
daurnimator 13y ago
Anyone else read this as "Our newfound fear of Riak"? I got half way through the article until I re-read the title...
Aloha 13y ago
I've been talking about risk for a couple years now. Kids today have no idea what a reasonable risk is because most of them have not be allowed to make any life choices (or for that matter, any choices at all), so when they hit adulthood, they have no real idea whats a reasonable risk or not. I think we will see this effect odd parts of our society more and more as time goes on.
zeteo 13y ago
It was a lot easier to tolerate risk when people had a common Big Picture. This could be provided by religion, ideology etc. Such attitudes still hold in some places, e.g. Amish communities seem more resilient after school shootings [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_school_shooting#Amish_community_response http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_school_shooting#Amish_com...
- microb 13y ago
  Indeed. Repeated use of scapegoats like "communists" and "terrorists" may make up for our move away from religion as a source of shared ideology [1] [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating#The_.22scapegoat_mechanism.22_in_philosophical_anthropology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating#The_.22scapegoat_m...
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago
  And when the Big Picture is fractured, trust disappears. I see the anti-vax craze as primarily an issue of trust and control. "I don't trust Those People (the doctors)" or along the lines of "I need to control everything, including my vaccine schedule".
  - smacktoward 13y ago
    Or perhaps, "I can't control nearly anything anymore, so I'm going to get super focused on those few things I still can control, like my child's vaccine schedule." People have spent decades now having their lives turned upside down by forces they're told they can't control: market movements, giant corporations, unresponsive political systems. Rather than pushing back and trying to assert some control over those things, which would require collective action, they focus inward instead on those things in their lives that they know they can control. It almost doesn't matter if their interventions there make things better or worse; it's more about giving the feeling of being In Charge. It's like the CEO of the failing company who spends all his time micromanaging the colors on the company Web site home page. He can't give an order that will turn the business around, but he can give an order to change those colors. Which makes him feel like he still has some control over the future, even though he really doesn't.
XorNot 13y ago
I found this article trite. It's merging 3 disparate concepts which have complex explanations, and deciding instead it's to do with risk. Militarization of the police force is a big one for example - that has practically nothing to do with risk and everything to do with politics and budgeting. It's "tough on crime" writ large, with people then demanding to see the results of all the money being spent which isn't needed - so enter military surplus and suddenly every small town has an APC and a SWAT team but absolutely no need for one (and usually insufficient training). And once you have those things, every problem starts to look like it needs a SWAT response since you've got to justify having them. Of course that's just one facet of it, there are others but it's totally disingenuous to pretend its some irrational fear of risk driving any of this.
- ryguytilidie 13y ago
  Militarization of the police force is a big one for example - that has practically nothing to do with risk and everything to do with politics and budgeting. It's "tough on crime" writ large, This seems like a contradiction. It has nothing to do with risk, yet the people who want it are the "tough on crime" type. Don't you think that those people see NOT being tough on crime as a risk?
- emiliobumachar 13y ago
  To re-state sibling ryguytilidie's point: risk aversion is the root cause. Risk aversion is the reason why voters favor politicians perceived to be "tough on crime", feeding the whole process you described.
cyanoacry 13y ago
I recently started a job in the aerospace industry, and it's still taking me a little bit of time to get used to the concept of risk, simply because it: 1) is rarely addressed in education (nowhere in sciences nor humanitites) 2) is an extremely "scary" word 3) is difficult to visualize. The combination of all three of these factors means that people don't realize that risk is an everyday thing: there are probabilities and outcomes that you need to weigh in order to make the decisions properly. Risk management is big if you're managing multi-million dollar contracts or huge rockets, but it seems to never filter down into the common psyche, which is disturbing. Humans have successfully managed risk to fly planes and go into space, so we have the models to make these decisions, yet we don't seem to be able to properly apply it on the ground. Is the solution more education? I think so, but in a different light: people need to accept that bad things happen, and that you can model the probabilities and work out for yourself what tradeoffs you're making. Rarely is it all good and bad, and by estimating the expected value, you get the opportunity to say "no, this costs too much" in response to all-out "safety" measures.
decasteve 13y ago
Our fear of risk associated with exploration comes to mind. Why haven't we sent someone to the Moon (again) or Mars? Compared to early sailors, mountaineers, and polar explorers we seem to have lost the tolerance for dangerous exploration. Otherwise we should have by now sent a person on a (potentially) one-way trip to Mars.
lazyjones 13y ago
If risk-aversion is the central issue here, there should be a higher risk involved with a) shooting or otherwise harming civilians when you're law enforcement, and b) taking away liberties when you're the lawmaker. But with a dysfunctional justice system and a voting system that cements the broken 2-party regime, this won't ever be the case.
jcromartie 13y ago
My greatest fear is that it will never get better.
- mathgladiator 13y ago
  I think it can get better, but it's going to require a collapse of the whole system.
acabal 13y ago
I think it's become a cultural thing, unfortunately. I've spent the last few years seeing the world, and the difference in attitudes between the people of many other countries and Americans at home is striking. We've become a fear-based culture. I have an anecdote from a month or two ago. My girlfriend--she's German--and I were in Boston's central park, where there's a wading pool for children. The place was extremely busy with families and children everywhere--and also crawling with police. As the mother next to us ushered their 9-year-old into the pool, the mother loudly told her, "If anyone touches you, you scream!" My girlfriend laughed out loud at the silliness of it (the child was within eyeshot, in a pool filled with other children and families, in broad daylight, and surrounded by police) and commented to me about how afraid Americans are of everything. Now that's just an anecdote. But we're seeing bits and pieces of this everywhere. Parents fearful of pedophiles around every corner. TV commercials about new drugs, scaring us into thinking we have some painful disease. ("If you've had chicken pox, the shingles virus is already inside you..."). People like the Free-Range Parenting blogger getting harassed and hounded. The ballooning security and surveillance apparatus. The militarization of our police, and draconian and unfathomable laws and sentencing requirements. The TSA, which is pure theater in service of fear. Bits and pieces. I find myself increasingly thinking that the fear-based environment in the US is not a place I would want my children to grow up in. It breeds a dangerous us-vs-them (the brown people, the druggies, your neighbor) mentality and leads to suspicion and hatred. Unfortunately I don't know what to do about it other than move to a different, more emotionally stable country. Culture is hard to change and takes a generation.
- indefatigable 13y ago
  Yet Germany has institutionalized the same mentality on a more abstract level. "Global warming might be happening, shut down the energy industry!" "We can't use nuclear power, someone might get cancer! Keep mining coal and etching solar panels!"
  - pavs 13y ago
    They are not even remotely the same thing.
  - 13y ago
ape4 13y ago
Maybe people drove after 9/11 to avoid the TSA -- not because they thought planes were riskier.
- emiliobumachar 13y ago
  The TSA is an aberration of risk aversion, so Schneider's point still stands.
JshWright 13y ago
I'm currently sitting in JFK. I found this article interesting (as I do most of Schneier's writing) and almost read parts of it aloud to my wife who is sitting across from me. It then occurred to me that discussing rational responses to terrorism while sitting in an airport would likely be ill-advised...
- ISL 13y ago
  It's probably the ideal forum.
ixacto 13y ago
This new trend of a kinderocracy is troubling to say the least. If we are not able to accurately assess risk, how will society at large manage social norms and not turn into a police state? One of the main things that parents fail to realize is that most of the child abusers are actually not pedos in the park with slr cameras. "about 60% of perpetrators are non-relative acquaintances, such as a friend of the family, babysitter, or neighbor. About 30% of those who sexually abuse children are relatives of the child, such as fathers, uncles, or cousins. Strangers are perpetrators in only about 10% of child sexual abuse cases." -VA.gov http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/pages/child_sexual_abuse.asp http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/pages/child_sexual_abuse... My guess why society at large has actively been ignoring the reality of child is abuse is that we as humans and families obviously want to be able to "do something" to protect their children. Saying that non-relative acquaintances are the most likely to be abusers is not going to go over well, but hell I could be wrong.
j_m_b 13y ago
The pussification of America is not new.

338 points by fejr 13y ago

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." - FDR

twoodfin 13y ago

Sorry, but there is no remotely possible U.S. political world in which Afghanistan is not invaded after September 11. If avoiding military action after an attack on that scale is your standard for a "smart about risk" society, you'll be waiting a long, long time.

001sky 13y ago
The interesting question is to turn this point on its head. The conventional wisdom (before 9/11) was it was "too risky" to fight back against hostage takers on an airplane. That bit of social engineering led to a huge force multiplier when trained pilots turned civivian aircraft into cruise missles. So, the origins of 9/11 have to do with mis-understanding the real risks we face. The opposite of ignorance is education, however. Its not per-se a totalalitarian police state. Which is where we seemed to have ended up.
- VLM 13y ago
  "That bit of social engineering led to a huge force multiplier" Its possible to use this technique to predict the next set of attacks: 1) High levels of security theater mean long entrance lines in front of (perceived) high value targets. Therefore instead of attacking the high value target the security theater is protecting, the line of people waiting to enter gets attacked. I get nervous waiting in lines knowing any terrorist who isn't an idiot has their sights on me. 2) Whats the prevailing wisdom for suspected violence in a school? Lockdown, shelter in place, sometimes for hours. Perfect target conditions for a poison gas attack and/or arson. Yeah yeah I know what I'm told, but under actual attack I would have no desire to die so rather than shelter in place I'd GTFO as soon as the cattle herders start yelling. The safest armor against a weapon is being well out of its range, not a cheap door lock. I would predict the odds of both of the above as near 100% in the near future. Its just logical. The next step would be to identify the perpetrators as mostly Saudi citizens (yet again) and therefore invade Iran. Or Syria. Or whoever else needs an excuse right now, while the bubbas back home wave flags to support the troops.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    1) High levels of security theater mean long entrance lines in front of (perceived) high value targets. Therefore instead of attacking the high value target the security theater is protecting, the line of people waiting to enter gets attacked. I get nervous waiting in lines knowing any terrorist who isn't an idiot has their sights on me. This isn't going to happen because a bunch of people in line at an airport isn't a high-value target. I mean it would suck, of course, but 'bunch of people get blown up at an airport' isn't nearly as worrying as 'large plane falls/is steered out of the sky and into downtown.' It doesn't have much value to terrorists because it's not as scary and it won't generate vast numbers of photographs. Yeah, it seems obvious, but it's wrong. Because killing people is not the whole goal on terrorism. Making people panic is. We have lots of mass shooting incidents in the US, but there's relatively little political will to change the gun culture here because people are rarely (ie never) confronted with pictures of the aftermath. Similarly, if a line of people at an airport were killed, all the public would see would be ambulances and body bags. They would feel sorry for you but would not actually care that much on an emotional level. What made the 9-11 attack so clever, and devastating, was that the attacks were staggered in time so that you had people flying planes into some of the world's most famous buildings on live television. The last time anyone saw large amounts of stuff getting blown up for real on TV was during the first Gulf War. Yeah yeah I know what I'm told, but under actual attack I would have no desire to die so rather than shelter in place I'd GTFO as soon as the cattle herders start yelling. We have enough school shootings that we have some data on this. If you are running around trying to escape then a) you're an easily noticeable target and b) you're probably going to be in the way of law enforcement firing back at the shooter. I don't find your approach any more sensible than suggestions that everyone should be armed and that the possibility of a gun battle will be a sufficient deterrent. Given the number of people who engage in shootouts with the police, this is plainly not the case. Looking to sneak out makes sense, departing in a disordered GTFO fashion is just panic.
    - angersock 13y ago
      At risk of never flying unmolested again--you do realize that you've identified the lacking qualities in the aforementioned attack plan, and that those can be readily addressed by such simple actions as hitting more places at once over a longer period of time? The entire point of the article is that that sort of a analysis is ongoing, is that when you try to deal with an opponent you are dealing with something actively exploring a solution space. That's what makes the security theater so annoying--it's clear that there are a dozen ways to stage a successful attack were one so inclined, none of which would be stopped or even slowed by our current (or any forseeable) measure. I think people need to realize that the number of Bad People in the world is really small, and that they shouldn't give up freedoms in hopes of somehow decreasing their exposure. Large state and private groups are much more harmful, especially because they turn Not Bad People into Annoyingly Inconvenient And Impersonally Malicious People.
- RougeFemme 13y ago
  Prior to 9/11, at least in the U.S., hijackers typically "simply" wanted money or to be flown elsewhere. As long as those demands were met, there were no casualties. So it wasn't that it was "too risky" to fight back - it was that hijacking was generally not considered life-threatening. The original reactions on 9/11 were not due solely to "social engineering", but to prior experience.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    So it wasn't that it was "too risky" to fight back - it was that hijacking was generally not considered life-threatening. ==What about the risk of <operating from the wrong premise>?
  - jessaustin 13y ago
    That high-pitched noise you heard was the point, zinging swiftly over your head. All the pre-9/11 "experts" who told us to bend over and let the goat enthusiasts have their wicked way with us, didn't do so in a nuanced, situationally-aware fashion. They said, "always cooperate with hijackers." The fact that organizations existed the purposes of which were to kill Americans and destroy American resources, was blithely ignored by the "experts". Only through long conditioning did they cow the general public enough that four or five dudes with really short knives could hijack a plane. While the last plane was still in the air, the general public realized what bullshit that had been. When "experts" talk about "risk", it's never "things are pretty good and getting better". (I.e., it's never the truth.) They always want us to fear more, and as a result pay more. It's not different now.
    - RougeFemme 13y ago
      No, didn't miss the point - just didn't agree. Pre 9/11, we didn't have a plethora of "risk" experts telling us what to do. Most people listened to news - good, bad, or indifferent - parsed it for themselves and acted accordingly - not according to what the seldom-heard-from experts said.
      - jessaustin 13y ago
alan_cx 13y ago
In 1984, the US funded IRA bombed the entire UK government, nearly killed them all. The UK did not invade Northern Ireland or Ireland. The police investigated, made arrests and people were convicted. Acting humanely is not that hard.
- HPLovecraft 13y ago
  link to US government funding? Or are you referring to private funding by US citizens?
  - graeme 13y ago
    Private funding. It's well known the ira raised funds from easy coast cities.
    - HPLovecraft 13y ago
      "It is known." Yea im aware of that... The comment I was replying to gave the impression that it was the USG specifically doing the funding.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  It did not 'nearly kill them all.' It killed five people, none of whom where in the cabinet although they were senior party members. The UK didn't have to invade Northern Ireland because Northern Ireland was (and is) UK territory and there was already a substantial active military presence. For about 25 years the British army sent fresh soldiers off to do a tour in NI to toughen them up. In short, you have no idea what you're talking about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_hotel_bombing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles
  - mietek 13y ago
    > It did not 'nearly kill them all.' It killed five people, none of whom where in the cabinet although they were senior party members. The article you quote says 5 were killed and 31 were injured...
rwmj 13y ago
There's also no risk of the US being invaded by Afghanistan. The risk to the US was and is always very minor, akin to a tiny fraction of the number of people killed by cars or going to be killed by climate change. The US didn't have to spend trillions mitigating that risk, even if you assume those trillions did mitigate the risk.
- jerf 13y ago
  The direct military risk was small. The risk to global stability and the markets via the risk to the price of oil as part of a complex of destabilizing elements was much larger than that, though whether you judge it as large or small itself depends on various opinions and definitions. However, if you're the sort of person who's going to talk about risks in terms of things like "killed by cars", it should be pointed out that taking action to protect the price of oil is not immediately obviously wrong. Raising the price of oil substantially affects millions, if not billions, of poorer people a lot, and could prevent entire economies from raising themselves out of poverty. Which suggests that if you want to end the US's involvement in the Middle East, you should probably be vigorously supporting shale oil, even if you believe it may have some negative environmental impacts. If they no longer have a knife to the jugular of civilization as we know it, it's a lot easier to ignore them.
Vivtek 13y ago
And did that invasion change anything? Were the Taliban or al Qaeda eliminated by that invasion? Did you notice that the exact same justification was used to attack neighboring Iraq? Sorry, but I happen to have lived through that year and the years following, and I know that given an America that lived up to its own hype, an invasion was easily avoidable. It's just that such an America doesn't exist. Too bad for us all.
- mikeash 13y ago
  Even if the invasion was required, nothing required us to occupy the place for a decade and counting, turning it into a perpetual war. Hook up with the Northern Alliance, bomb the hell out of their enemies, set them up, leave. They can't hold on to power? Oh well. The point has been made. The country returns to dictatorship and chaos? Well, that happened anyway.
  - icegreentea 13y ago
    You may recall the last time something like that happened to Afghanistan, it led to the whole civil war that resulted in the rise of the Taliban and AQ in the first place.
    - mikeash 13y ago
      As opposed to this time, which is leading to a whole civil war that's probably going to result in the rise of the Taliban again?
    - jessaustin 13y ago
      Yes "adverse" consequences always occur in countries we don't understand and don't particularly care about, no matter what awful things we do to them. (Next door in Iran, how did that Mosaddegh coup turn out?) The only real argument is over how much wealth will be transferred to our military-industrial complex, and how many Senators will get to go on another junket as a result? On those questions, I vote "less" and "fewer".
rdl 13y ago
I really liked how the US responded in Afghanistan in September-November 2001: sending in CIA and special operations forces to ally with anti-AQ and anti-Taliban forces, on a hundreds of millions of dollars total budget. That had almost all of the upside and virtually none of the downside of a big invasion.
- omegant 13y ago
  A very good account of that part of the war is "First in: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan " by Schroen, Gary. He was the chief of the first CIA team to operate inside Afghanistan. A great read, just not what you´ll expect of a CIA operation, everything is donne in a much more "common sense" way than you may think.
  - rdl 13y ago
    Yeah, one of my favorite books. Eric Blehm's "The Only Thing Worth Dying For" covers the same time from the perspective of the ODAs rather than CIA. (The thing I still don't understand is what moron at Group decided to let the battalion leadership deploy to the field, rather than remaining behind. They caused a bunch of friendly fire incidents and generally lost the initiative CIA and the ODA/ODBs had gained. It seems like it was just a bunch of useless 1990s-military senior officers who wanted to have cool stories to tell.)
    - omegant 13y ago
      Thanks for the heads up. I am going to buy it today.
lambda 13y ago
The U.S. could have participated only in targeted strikes against Al Qaeda, leaving the rest to local forces as a local matter that isn't our business, and not tried to occupy the country and engage in nation-building. If they had done just a targeted strike against Al Qaeda, larger in scope but similar to what they did against Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, we probably could have gotten Bin Laden years earlier and not spent more than a decade trying in the morass that is Afghanistan. Our mistake was deciding that we needed to get rid of the Taliban and build a democratic nation from what was left after they were gone. There was never any hope of that; the Taliban just fled to the hills, to Pakistan, or just blend in with the local population because many of them are the local population. We have failed at building a nation that can take care of itself after we leave; within a year or two, the Taliban will be in power again.
- icegreentea 13y ago
  Overthrowing the Taliban was almost a prerequisite for those types of strikes. The initial strikes and action in Afghanistan by special forces and CIA were almost completely reliant on assistance from the Northern Alliance - for which over throwing the Taliban was always the goal. The initial air strikes (unguided from the ground) were totally useless. It wasn't until they got SF/CIA on the ground working with the Northern Alliance that they could get it working. In any case, it would never have been as simple as 'leave it to the local forces'.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  The U.S. could have participated only in targeted strikes against Al Qaeda, leaving the rest to local forces as a local matter that isn't our business, and not tried to occupy the country and engage in nation-building. This is more or less our current counterterrorism strategy in the wilds of Pakistan or Yemen. While I'm skeptical that such a strategy could have seriously damaged 2001-era AQ's ability to operate inside Afghanistan, I also don't think I'm qualified to debate its merits today. But that's not my point. My point is that if another 9/11-scale attack occurred and the bad guys were in Yemen and the Yemeni government was not extremely helpful in bringing those responsible to heel, that "drones and spies" strategy could never be the limit of our response. It's just not politically practical, not even close. When Schneier talks about the "waste" of a war in Afghanistan, he should remember that the entire time Bush was sticking around trying to nation build, the Democrats were making political hay that Iraq was a sideshow and that we weren't spending enough attention/money/troops on Afghanistan. And indeed when a Democratic president was elected, he proceeded to spend more attention/money/troops on Afghanistan. Once it was established that AQ was responsible for 9/11 and that the Taliban were not going to give them up on our terms, a major military incursion was politically inevitable. It's a little more dicey just how inevitable a long-term occupation was: President Gore presumably doesn't have to deal with an Afghani-Hawks-By-Convenience wing of his own party, and maybe gets out quick. But Schneier doesn't make this distinction: He seems to be imagining a world in which the war never happens at all because we properly measured its risks. I happen to think he's wrong about the risk/reward tradeoff of aggressively rolling up AQ and their support networks, but I'm sure he's being Utopian if he thinks he's in anything but a tiny minority who would be against a massive military response to another 9/11-like event.
njharman 13y ago
> U.S. political world in which Afghanistan is not invaded after September 11 Agree and I wish we would have done exactly that instead of conquering Iraq.

r0h1n 13y ago

I'd wager that our increasing reliance on technology in all walks of life - education, anti-terrorism, policing, medicine, health etc. - also plays a role in fanning our fear of risk. I _think_ technology tends to offer us two things: (a) an illusion of meaning, as risks are reduced to a discrete set of numbers in excel sheets or databases, and (b) a false sense of control, because we try all sorts of actions (like the ones Schneier mentions) to reduce some of those risks. Then of course there is the cultural angle. > Risk tolerance is both cultural and dependent on the environment around us. I'm from India and our willingness to tolerate or overlook risk is fairly high (I don't mean that in a good way, because most of the times we are fairly blasé about our personal/collective safety or about taking preventive actions almost to the extent of devaluing individual lives). But, for what it's worth, we are therefore more willing to tolerate violent risks like the ones Schneier mentions for longer. Note: 2011 Schneier reference to a research study analysing risk and culture - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/risk_tolerance.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/risk_toleranc...

newobj 13y ago

Related: at the PARK this weekend, and heard all the following utterances in the span of ten minutes from some parents: "NO RUNNING!" "IT'S DANGEROUS HERE" "YOU'RE GONNA GET HURT" "NO RUNNING!" Talk about instilling fear and creating risk aversion. Sometimes you just have to let a child find out for themselves what's safe and what isn't. What you can get up and dust yourself off from and what you can't. It's hard to do (I say this as a parent of 5 year old boy), but you have to resist the urge to hover over them and caution or approve their every move.

dalek_cannes 13y ago
There's also the problem of fear of litigation. I'm from a part of the world that is not as lawsuit-happy as the U.S. Amongst other things, medical treatment is very cheap here and people laugh at labels like "warning: device heats up when in operation" (seen on an iron made in the USA).
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago
  > I'm from a part of the world that is not as lawsuit-happy as the U.S. This is because the safety net is non-existent here. If something really bad is about to happen, you know you're going to fall all the way down to the bottom. The solution? Sue the hell out of everybody. > Amongst other things, medical treatment is very cheap here Yup. Exactly the opposite in the US. When the hospital bill requires a second mortgage, covering the costs via money awarded in a lawsuit might be the only solution.
- kyllo 13y ago
  I think the absurdity is not lost on some of the people writing the copy for these safety warnings. For example, after Liebeck v. McDonald's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaur...), companies started printing tautological statements like "WARNING: HOT COFFEE IS HOT" on the cups.
RougeFemme 13y ago
I have a co-worker who is so risk-averse, she literally pushes her 4-year-old in the stroller to each piece of playground equipment - so she doesn't have to worry about running; even walking at the playground is forbidden for her child. Yes, I'm a parent, but. . .

ywyrd 13y ago

When you treat adults like children, and children like babies, you get exactly that. And that's why a hundred years ago 14-year olds were captaining their own ships, and today you have 40-year olds who can't do their own laundry or balance a checkbook.

alayne 13y ago
I'm sorry, but I'm going to call bullshit unless you can actually cite a reference showing some significant number of 14 year old ship captains in 1913.
- angersock 13y ago
  If you count fishing and crabbing, and possibly ferrying, I would be unsurprised in the slightest.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  David Farragut comes to mind, although I don't know if the plural (i.e., many 14 year olds) applies.
SkyMarshal 13y ago
I also wonder if it's related to decreased birth rates in modern times - parents have fewer children than a century or two ago, so losing a single child to an accident of some sort is much more costly to the family, hence the increased risk aversion.
- mark-r 13y ago
  I doubt that losing a child has ever been less than awful no matter how many you have.
  - 13y ago

coldcode 13y ago

Bruce is always the voice of reason. Too bad the people in charge are the voices of insanity.

Fargren 13y ago
As Bruce points out, people who are personally responsible for things when they fail are not insane in being risk averse. From their perspective, they are just playing it safe. Maybe we should be finding a way to make no one personally responsible for failures. But this sounds counter-intuitive, as personal responsibility is acknowledged as an effective mechanism to make people do their work right.
- gioele 13y ago
  > Maybe we should be finding a way to make no one personally responsible for failures. But this sounds counter-intuitive, as personal responsibility is acknowledged as an effective mechanism to make people do their work right. I think that a good middle-ground is what happens with judges in most of EU. In most systems you cannot directly sue a single judge for some misconduct that happened during a process. What you have to do is to sue "the state". Another judge will then judge the matter but then it is you vs the state, not against a single person; it is the state that takes care of all the legal things and legal costs. This gives the judges the freedom they need to be severe but just. Without this protection they will always be afraid of being sued by the losing party, especially when the losing party is a big, rich corporation. Obviously, to counterbalance this exceptionally high degree of defence enjoyed by the judges, the state usually punish the judge with a fine or a suspension. But the intermediation of the state is able to rebalance the risks: if you do something wrong you risk a big fine, but you will not be dragged personally in a 10-year process that will destroy your career and your finances.
- pdonis 13y ago
  Maybe we should be finding a way to make no one personally responsible for failures. No, we need to stop making a small group of people, namely, the government, responsible for very large failures, by making them responsible for things that have a very large scope. Instead, a much larger group of people--i.e., everyone--need to each be responsible for a much smaller scope, so that no one person, or small group of people, has to bear by themselves the consequences of a large failure.

andypiper 13y ago

Hmm. Read this as "newfound fear of RIAK" - either spent too much time on datastores lately, or need my eyes tested.

daurnimator 13y ago

Anyone else read this as "Our newfound fear of Riak"? I got half way through the article until I re-read the title...

Aloha 13y ago

I've been talking about risk for a couple years now. Kids today have no idea what a reasonable risk is because most of them have not be allowed to make any life choices (or for that matter, any choices at all), so when they hit adulthood, they have no real idea whats a reasonable risk or not. I think we will see this effect odd parts of our society more and more as time goes on.

zeteo 13y ago

It was a lot easier to tolerate risk when people had a common Big Picture. This could be provided by religion, ideology etc. Such attitudes still hold in some places, e.g. Amish communities seem more resilient after school shootings [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_school_shooting#Amish_community_response http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_school_shooting#Amish_com...

microb 13y ago
Indeed. Repeated use of scapegoats like "communists" and "terrorists" may make up for our move away from religion as a source of shared ideology [1] [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating#The_.22scapegoat_mechanism.22_in_philosophical_anthropology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating#The_.22scapegoat_m...
Florin_Andrei 13y ago
And when the Big Picture is fractured, trust disappears. I see the anti-vax craze as primarily an issue of trust and control. "I don't trust Those People (the doctors)" or along the lines of "I need to control everything, including my vaccine schedule".
- smacktoward 13y ago
  Or perhaps, "I can't control nearly anything anymore, so I'm going to get super focused on those few things I still can control, like my child's vaccine schedule." People have spent decades now having their lives turned upside down by forces they're told they can't control: market movements, giant corporations, unresponsive political systems. Rather than pushing back and trying to assert some control over those things, which would require collective action, they focus inward instead on those things in their lives that they know they can control. It almost doesn't matter if their interventions there make things better or worse; it's more about giving the feeling of being In Charge. It's like the CEO of the failing company who spends all his time micromanaging the colors on the company Web site home page. He can't give an order that will turn the business around, but he can give an order to change those colors. Which makes him feel like he still has some control over the future, even though he really doesn't.

XorNot 13y ago

I found this article trite. It's merging 3 disparate concepts which have complex explanations, and deciding instead it's to do with risk. Militarization of the police force is a big one for example - that has practically nothing to do with risk and everything to do with politics and budgeting. It's "tough on crime" writ large, with people then demanding to see the results of all the money being spent which isn't needed - so enter military surplus and suddenly every small town has an APC and a SWAT team but absolutely no need for one (and usually insufficient training). And once you have those things, every problem starts to look like it needs a SWAT response since you've got to justify having them. Of course that's just one facet of it, there are others but it's totally disingenuous to pretend its some irrational fear of risk driving any of this.

ryguytilidie 13y ago
Militarization of the police force is a big one for example - that has practically nothing to do with risk and everything to do with politics and budgeting. It's "tough on crime" writ large, This seems like a contradiction. It has nothing to do with risk, yet the people who want it are the "tough on crime" type. Don't you think that those people see NOT being tough on crime as a risk?
emiliobumachar 13y ago
To re-state sibling ryguytilidie's point: risk aversion is the root cause. Risk aversion is the reason why voters favor politicians perceived to be "tough on crime", feeding the whole process you described.

cyanoacry 13y ago

I recently started a job in the aerospace industry, and it's still taking me a little bit of time to get used to the concept of risk, simply because it: 1) is rarely addressed in education (nowhere in sciences nor humanitites) 2) is an extremely "scary" word 3) is difficult to visualize. The combination of all three of these factors means that people don't realize that risk is an everyday thing: there are probabilities and outcomes that you need to weigh in order to make the decisions properly. Risk management is big if you're managing multi-million dollar contracts or huge rockets, but it seems to never filter down into the common psyche, which is disturbing. Humans have successfully managed risk to fly planes and go into space, so we have the models to make these decisions, yet we don't seem to be able to properly apply it on the ground. Is the solution more education? I think so, but in a different light: people need to accept that bad things happen, and that you can model the probabilities and work out for yourself what tradeoffs you're making. Rarely is it all good and bad, and by estimating the expected value, you get the opportunity to say "no, this costs too much" in response to all-out "safety" measures.

decasteve 13y ago

Our fear of risk associated with exploration comes to mind. Why haven't we sent someone to the Moon (again) or Mars? Compared to early sailors, mountaineers, and polar explorers we seem to have lost the tolerance for dangerous exploration. Otherwise we should have by now sent a person on a (potentially) one-way trip to Mars.

lazyjones 13y ago

If risk-aversion is the central issue here, there should be a higher risk involved with a) shooting or otherwise harming civilians when you're law enforcement, and b) taking away liberties when you're the lawmaker. But with a dysfunctional justice system and a voting system that cements the broken 2-party regime, this won't ever be the case.

jcromartie 13y ago

My greatest fear is that it will never get better.

mathgladiator 13y ago
I think it can get better, but it's going to require a collapse of the whole system.

acabal 13y ago

I think it's become a cultural thing, unfortunately. I've spent the last few years seeing the world, and the difference in attitudes between the people of many other countries and Americans at home is striking. We've become a fear-based culture. I have an anecdote from a month or two ago. My girlfriend--she's German--and I were in Boston's central park, where there's a wading pool for children. The place was extremely busy with families and children everywhere--and also crawling with police. As the mother next to us ushered their 9-year-old into the pool, the mother loudly told her, "If anyone touches you, you scream!" My girlfriend laughed out loud at the silliness of it (the child was within eyeshot, in a pool filled with other children and families, in broad daylight, and surrounded by police) and commented to me about how afraid Americans are of everything. Now that's just an anecdote. But we're seeing bits and pieces of this everywhere. Parents fearful of pedophiles around every corner. TV commercials about new drugs, scaring us into thinking we have some painful disease. ("If you've had chicken pox, the shingles virus is already inside you..."). People like the Free-Range Parenting blogger getting harassed and hounded. The ballooning security and surveillance apparatus. The militarization of our police, and draconian and unfathomable laws and sentencing requirements. The TSA, which is pure theater in service of fear. Bits and pieces. I find myself increasingly thinking that the fear-based environment in the US is not a place I would want my children to grow up in. It breeds a dangerous us-vs-them (the brown people, the druggies, your neighbor) mentality and leads to suspicion and hatred. Unfortunately I don't know what to do about it other than move to a different, more emotionally stable country. Culture is hard to change and takes a generation.

indefatigable 13y ago
Yet Germany has institutionalized the same mentality on a more abstract level. "Global warming might be happening, shut down the energy industry!" "We can't use nuclear power, someone might get cancer! Keep mining coal and etching solar panels!"
- pavs 13y ago
  They are not even remotely the same thing.
- 13y ago

ape4 13y ago

Maybe people drove after 9/11 to avoid the TSA -- not because they thought planes were riskier.

emiliobumachar 13y ago
The TSA is an aberration of risk aversion, so Schneider's point still stands.

JshWright 13y ago

I'm currently sitting in JFK. I found this article interesting (as I do most of Schneier's writing) and almost read parts of it aloud to my wife who is sitting across from me. It then occurred to me that discussing rational responses to terrorism while sitting in an airport would likely be ill-advised...

ISL 13y ago
It's probably the ideal forum.

ixacto 13y ago

This new trend of a kinderocracy is troubling to say the least. If we are not able to accurately assess risk, how will society at large manage social norms and not turn into a police state? One of the main things that parents fail to realize is that most of the child abusers are actually not pedos in the park with slr cameras. "about 60% of perpetrators are non-relative acquaintances, such as a friend of the family, babysitter, or neighbor. About 30% of those who sexually abuse children are relatives of the child, such as fathers, uncles, or cousins. Strangers are perpetrators in only about 10% of child sexual abuse cases." -VA.gov http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/pages/child_sexual_abuse.asp http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/pages/child_sexual_abuse... My guess why society at large has actively been ignoring the reality of child is abuse is that we as humans and families obviously want to be able to "do something" to protect their children. Saying that non-relative acquaintances are the most likely to be abusers is not going to go over well, but hell I could be wrong.

j_m_b 13y ago

The pussification of America is not new.