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Our Newfound Fear of Risk

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Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#31

Post by dspillett »

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…

Conversely I once genuinely heard this streaked by someone to the kids they were herding around a supermarket: "if you two want to run around and make noise, go do it in the car park". Perhaps she was too far the other way...

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#32

Post by rayiner »

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…

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.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#33

Post by mikeash »

hef19898 wrote: post #16
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.

I think there's a huge difference between "be careful" and "don't do that". The former is just reminding the child to be mindful of their actions, which is a good thing. The latter is saying to avoid anything that could get you hurt even a little bit, which is very much not.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#34

Post by mikeash »

Vivtek wrote: post #6
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.

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 a…

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.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#35

Post by 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.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#36

Post by rdl »

omegant wrote: post #18
rdl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.)

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#37

Post by HPLovecraft »

alan_cx wrote: post #12
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.

link to US government funding? Or are you referring to private funding by US citizens?

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#38

Post by kbenson »

rayiner wrote: post #32
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…

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…

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.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#39

Post by snowwrestler »

rayiner wrote: post #32
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…

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…

I became a parent later in life, and I do think that is a factor. In addition to how hard it is to have a kid, I personally have a much greater sense of my own mortality now then I did in the early 20s. It's hard not to let this color the way I parent.

Re: Our Newfound Fear of Risk

#40

Post by alayne »

_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'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.
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