Every now and then, you hear someone say something you have been wrestling with so well it just crystallises. Well, David Spiegelhalter was interviewed by Robyn Williams on ABC Radio National (see link below) about risks. David is the Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge, so would know a lot about risk, but importantly can explain it.
I could try and summarise the whole interview, but it is better (and easier for me) to let his words say it:
"So saying, I think you could say that there has been in this country (and I'm sure in many other places) far too much of a concentration on trying to say, well, something bad has happened, we've got to stop it ever happening again. And this of course is nonsense. Things will always happen, bad things will happen, but there comes a point when actually it's not worth doing any more because the harms of trying to reduce that risk might easily outweigh the benefits. And the natural area of this of course is in terms of child safety. There comes a point where we must say that we can't protect our children from everything bad that might happen to them, and sadly this means that on occasions, very rarely, a bad thing will happen to a child.
On the other side of that of course is that if you do try to protect them too much, what other harms are you doing to them in terms of reducing their feeling of adventure, the possibility of learning from failures, of essentially being able to pick themselves up and start again when things go wrong? We can't protect people and actually it's not doing them any good to try to protect them too much."
He has said in two paragraphs basically what I had been bumbling over in my fat kids should ride bikes without helmets post.
We can and should take precautions, but the blind application of the precautionary principle to risky situations can and will have repercussions
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2010/3044567.htm
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