Our Newfound Fear of Risk • Hacker News Board

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#11

Post by newobj » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 2:05 PM UTC

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.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#12

Post by alan_cx » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 2:08 PM UTC

twoodfin wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#13

Post by Amadou » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 2:13 PM UTC

newobj wrote: post #11

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…

Free Range Kids is a good resource for helping parents feel like good parents when they fight the urge to hover and over-protect.

http://www.freerangekids.com/

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#14

Post by rwmj » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 2:15 PM UTC

twoodfin wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#15

Post by lambda » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 2:29 PM UTC

twoodfin wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#16

Post by hef19898 » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 2:30 PM UTC

newobj wrote: post #11

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…

Sounds familiar. The most scaring part is that one moment you rant and laogh at parents telling their children to carefull. And then you turn around, see you kid something you don't like and guess what you do? Exactly the same thing.

Only speaking for myself, but more often then not I just don't have the patience to NOT say it. But I try most of the time at least.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#17

Post by jerf » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 2:32 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #14

twoodfin wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#18

Post by omegant » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 2:33 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #7

twoodfin wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#19

Post by SkyMarshal » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 2:34 PM UTC

_mvuc wrote: post #9

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.

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.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#20

Post by Fargren » Tue, Sep 03, 2013, 2:38 PM UTC

coldcode wrote: post #10

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

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.