Our reliance on it has destroyed our ability to manage risk.
Gee, someone should write a book about that. It applies to climate as well. And more related links.
7 thoughts on “The Precautionary Principle”
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Our reliance on it has destroyed our ability to manage risk.
Gee, someone should write a book about that. It applies to climate as well. And more related links.
Comments are closed.
I used to manage employees in an industrial setting. Identifying, measuring and managing risk was paramount. That being said, we recognized that risk can never be eliminated. Attempting to do so would have made production impossible.
Essentially I think the Wikipedia article on the Precautionary Principle nails it on the head near the end. To paraphrase:
In its weak form, it is a trivial truism, in its strong form, paralytic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
Good read, and a great explanation of where the nanny state came from.
One of the inherent problems IMHO is that we often cause larger risks via attempting to eliminate small ones. A great example of this might be in spacecraft; creating a do-everything LAS that can eliminate almost all risk in an abort could well more than offset itself in overall risk by increasing risk in a nominal mission. (such as, a LAS that can blow up the capsule, such as we saw with the Dragon 2 kaboom).
Indeed, someone should write a book on this. And now, with many of us having loads of free time, would be a great time to read it if you haven’t.
https://www.amazon.com/Safe-Not-Option-Rand-Simberg/dp/0989135519
The other thought I had is that reliance on it (the Precautionary Principle) leads to settling for local minima that only mitigate an issue (sometimes at great cost and higher risk) than allowing an expanded envelope that would actually solve an issue or render it moot.
Kat and I did our weekend shopping this morning, starting at Costco. Their website listed 9:30 am as the opening time, but when we arrived at 9:25, there were already people streaming out with their shopping done. Entry was managed in order to keep the number density of people inside low enough to assure 6 foot spacing, with the bottleneck being checkout. Employees stationed at typically high-density spots had a quick, concise, well-practiced spiel encouraging people to maintain 6 foot spacing.
They did an astonishingly good job of keeping a steady flow of customers going through. We had about a 30 minute wait to get in, but that was amazing to me given the number of cars in the parking lot.
My wife had wisely deduced that getting there early, coupled with Costco’s stupendous volume of food purchase for sale, gave us good odds of getting any meat we needed. A whiteboard at the entrance listed items out of stock. The only meat I saw was lamb. Given the demographics of this store’s customer base, and the religious holidays going on, that was not a surprise. I got a four-pack of very nice ribeye steaks, and a four-pack of cold-water lobster tails with no problems.
Toilet paper was still available, though paper towels were not. It has been gratifying to see that produce of all kinds is available in almost unlimited quantities (true at every grocery outlet we visited today). It tells me that people in general maintain a virtuous disdain of fruits and vegetables, giving me hope for humanity.
That Costco had developed this system – and it is a genuine system – so quickly and competently should be a lesson to everyone on how smart people in the private sector can keep things going while reducing health risks to the public. Governments everywhere could learn something from them.
And, yes, I trust my fellow sovereign individual to safeguard himself, and will do what it takes to safeguard myself and wife – but without stopping living. I’ve seen it in spades today (we did a lot of shopping).
The Precautionary Principle isn’t a principle, it’s a rationalization.