
Our Newfound Fear of Risk - fejr
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/our_newfound_fe.html
======
acabal
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.

~~~
petervandijck
Which leads to a culture where everyone is afraid of touching kids that are
not their own. It's really sad.

~~~
a3n
When my own kid was very young I was paranoid about touching him in public. It
didn't stop me, but I was mindful of it, and I would occasionally feel I was
getting extra scrutiny by some parent; a man not at work in the daytime,
holding a young boy's hand.

Feh.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
This strikes me as odd. As a parent (dad) of two, I wouldn't ever dream of
feeling odd about holding either of my kids' hands - or even for that matter
chasing them down when they run away screaming (which happens often).

Just a counter data point here.

~~~
a3n
I didn't feel odd for the act, I felt uncomfortable with the assumptions or
speculation implied by the scrutiny. No one likes to be distrusted, regardless
of the context.

------
newobj
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.

~~~
rayiner
I'd bet that much of the issue stems from the decline in birth rates among
middle/upper middle class parents relative to the days of yore. When you only
manage to pop out one or two kids, at great career sacrifice and monetary
expense, each one seems to matter more than they did back in the day.

Also, paradoxically, the safer things get the more people worry about the
dangers that remain. This is rational. Say doing this or that during pregnancy
results in 1 in 10,000 women dying during child birth. If 1 in 100 women die
during child birth anyway, it's not a big deal. But if improvements in medical
technology gets the base rate down to 1 in 10,000, then suddenly you're
talking about doubling your risk.

~~~
kbenson
I would say it's got less to do with the perceived (even subconsciously) value
of the children, and more the experience of the parents. For the first child,
you're often hyper-conscious of threats and problems. With later children
you've better assessed what's important to pay attention to and what isn't.

~~~
graeme
In case anyone didn't notice the implied point here: a far greater percentage
of children are now the first child.

------
ywyrd
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.

~~~
SkyMarshal
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
I doubt that losing a child has ever been less than awful no matter how many
you have.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Certainly no less emotionally awful, but less economically consequential to
the family. Incentives matter.

------
XorNot
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
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?

------
zeteo
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_com...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_school_shooting#Amish_community_response)

~~~
Florin_Andrei
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
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.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
I like your version better.

After all, in modern society we delegate an awful lot of stuff. Shoe making to
shoe makers, security to police and military, health care to doctors, teaching
to teachers, etc. etc. etc. The stuff we delegate is so close to 100% of our
lives, the actual difference is lost in the noise.

On top of that, the little that most people do control is meaningless to their
own lives. You do customer support at Big Widget Factory Inc. How is that
relevant to _you_?

Probably home schooling is also an offshoot of this phenomenon.

------
r0h1n
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_toleranc...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/09/risk_tolerance.html)

------
twoodfin
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.

~~~
lambda
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
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'.

------
JshWright
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
It's probably the ideal forum.

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

------
cyanoacry
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.

------
rayj
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...](http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/pages/child_sexual_abuse.asp)

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.

------
Aloha
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.

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

~~~
Fargren
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
> 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.

------
decasteve
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.

------
jcromartie
My greatest fear is that it will _never_ get better.

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

------
ape4
Maybe people drove after 9/11 to avoid the TSA -- not because they thought
planes were riskier.

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

------
j_m_b
The pussification of America is not new.

------
lazyjones
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.

------
daurnimator
Anyone else read this as "Our newfound fear of Riak"?

I got half way through the article until I re-read the title...

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

