[HN Gopher] The Precautionary Principle: Better Safe Than Sorry?
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The Precautionary Principle: Better Safe Than Sorry?
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 23 points
Date : 2021-06-21 13:28 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fs.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (fs.blog)
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> Also known as the Precautionary Approach or Precautionary
| Action, the Precautionary Principle is a concept best summed up
| by the proverb "better safe than sorry" or the medical maxim to
| "first do no harm."_
|
| Also the folklore, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
| cure".
|
| PP is best applied to situations with the potential, not
| necessarily the guarantee, of widespread systemic harm and/or
| catastrophic failure from which recovery is exceedingly
| technically difficult, prohibitively expensive, or downright
| impossible - for example, nuclear war, climate catastrophe,
| global financial crisis, global pandemic of a novel and not-well-
| understood pathogen.
|
| The "not necessarily the guarantee" is the hard part. Human
| judgement tends to be biased toward discounting both the odds and
| impact of occurrence of systemic risks that have less than 100%
| chance of occurring, but significant impact if they do occur.
| Especially when there are immediate costs to avoiding them, or
| immediate financial benefit to avoiding/externalizing them.
|
| Thus it is often politically difficult for society and political
| leaders to apply PP to any particular systemic risk, until after
| it's happened and the odds of occurrence become 100% and the
| impact widely felt. Both the Great Depression and the
| Global/Great Financial Crisis are examples of this - prevention
| measures put in place after the fact. COVID19 as well.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Also the folklore, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound
| of cure"._
|
| No, that's not what the precautionary principle says. The
| precautionary principle says that you should not take actions
| that could have negative consequences, even if you're not sure
| those negative consequences will happen.
|
| Prevention is an action. If prevention has no possible negative
| consequences, then the precautionary principle is irrelevant to
| it. If prevention _does_ have possible negative consequences
| (and most "prevention" actions do), then the precautionary
| principle says you should _not_ do it.
|
| In other words, the precautionary principle is _not_ the same
| as risk-benefit analysis, which weighs the risks and benefits
| of various possible choices, in order to make the choice that
| has the best risk-benefit balance all things considered.
|
| The proverb you cite, however, _is_ about risk-benefit
| analysis: it is basically telling you that, if you do such an
| analysis, you will find that the risk-benefit tradeoff of
| prevention (doing something in advance to prevent a bad thing
| from happening, and paying the costs of prevention up front) is
| very often much better than the risk-benefit tradeoff of cure
| (waiting for the bad thing to happen and then paying the costs
| of fixing it if it does happen).
|
| Btw, this means that the article, to the extent it talks about
| weighing risks vs. benefits of various choices (which is quite
| a bit), is _not_ about the precautionary principle, despite its
| title.
| dandelany wrote:
| Well said. Perhaps the proverb should be "an ounce of
| prevention is worth a one-sixteenth chance of a pound of cure"
| :)
| hargup wrote:
| Also checkout Taleb's paper on Precautionary Principle
| https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf
|
| "If an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing severe
| harm to the public domain, the action should not be taken in the
| absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety."
| aaron695 wrote:
| The Precautionary Principle is a religious principal.
|
| You see it championed the most by religious organisations like
| the environmental movement.
|
| This article doesn't quite get the religious framework. These are
| not the Precautionary Principle -
|
| > medical maxim to "first do no harm."
|
| > For example, if one person per year dies from an allergic
| reaction to a guinea pig bite, it's probably not worth banning
| pet guinea pigs.
|
| A very good example of breaking the The Precautionary Principle
| is rolling out covid-19 vaccines. If it's dangerous it could kill
| humanity.
| literallyaduck wrote:
| Great article, I'd like to see several pairs of pen and paper RPG
| groups with identical characters attempt the same pre-built
| adventure with one group employing the strategy outlined and see
| which group is more successful.
| sfvisser wrote:
| I must admit I never fully understand PP. I get you need to be
| cautious in cases of asymmetric risk where say 99.9% of the time
| the outcome is good and 0.1% catastrophically, unrecoverably bad.
| Especially when the distribution isn't even known.
|
| But this is everything in life! Every time you get in car, cross
| the street, climb the kitchen stairs. So there is a tradeoff
| somewhere, but we don't know where, almost by definition. Which
| makes this principle rather unprincipled.
|
| If only we could know when we don't know.
| autokad wrote:
| I often see pp keep people poor and stuck. Its interesting they
| hate where they are in life but refuse to do anything different
| because perceived risk, and that its better to do nothing.
|
| you should save money poor: it doesn't grow fast enough,
| inflation risk
|
| you should invest poor: don't want to loose money, risk
|
| you should go to school poor: what if I end stuck with student
| loan debt, cant find a job, what will the world look like in 4
| years?
|
| there is not a lot of opportunity in your area, you should move
| poor: I wont know the place or anyone there, how will I <insert
| what ever>
|
| this literally happened, Home prices are going down and
| interest rates are low, you should buy a house. you dont even
| need a down payment as you can get 15k for it from wells fargo
| FREE poor: I dont want to buy a house now, it might go down.
|
| 5 years later... poor: home prices are so high, I can't afford
| gbin wrote:
| Yes, people are often hiding behind the PP.
|
| But often the biggest risk is to not take _any_ risk.
| Tycho wrote:
| The distribution of car accidents etc. is known though. I think
| the point is to determine when you are operating in
| mediocristan, and when you are possibly operating in
| extremistan.
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