Risky Business

Who is so dense as to maintain…that all their witchcraft and injuries are phantastic and imaginary, when the contrary is evident to the senses of everybody?

—Malleus Maleficarum, 1487

There is a really excellent paper on risk called Witches, Floods and Wonder Drugs:  Historical Perspectives on Risk Management (pdf) by William C. Clark.  It was written some time ago (1980) but is still highly entertaining and edifying.

In the "witches" part of the paper, Clark discusses how, prior to the 15^th century, being a witch was considered a privatized risk:  "Well, if she wants to skip church, talk to her cats and read chicken entrails, it's her own immortal soul on the line."  It was punishable by, perhaps, a day in the stocks.  With the publication of Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) in 1487, witches became a socialized risk. Witches were responsible for crop failures, bad weather and high crime rates.  Witches were everybody's problem. 

Clark discusses the “stopping rule.”  During the Inquisition, their was only two possible outcomes of an interrogation.  Either the hapless victim confessed and was a witch, or she hadn’t yet confessed.  Guilt could be proven, but not innocence.  If the rack and other engines of torture were applied long enough, it was only a matter of time before confession. There was no “stopping rule.”  Thus, since almost everyone interrogated turned out to be a witch, witches proliferated as did the ruthless arm of the church responsible for hunting them down.

We see the same approach being used today. Torture the data long enough and it'll confess to anything.  It doesn't matter what the chemical, contaminant or drug is, given enough tests eventually some harm will be found.  And even if no harm is found, that doesn't mean it's "safe."  It just means that they haven't found the harm yet.  There's no stopping rule.

The science of risk has exploded: risk assessment, risk management, risk reduction, risk communication.  Risk assessments for sites contaminated with industrial chemicals easily reach thousands of pages.  We tests massive doses of chemicals on animals to infer effects of minuscule doses to human beings.

Environmental impact assessments that are required for new projects such as mines and oil pipelines are supposed to be, in essence, a quantification of risk.  Yet they've morphed into unwieldy behemoths that run for years, have a cast of thousands and cost millions. 

And yet, at the end of it all, the scientific risk, the quantitative risk, is not really what matters.  What matters is the perception of risk by people. 

Marijuana is a good example.  Here is a drug that has been widely used in the west for over fifty years, and in the east for eons, to little overall effect.   Every major study ever conducted on pot has more or less concluded that its use is overwhelmingly a personal risk and not a social one. People don't die from it and they don't kill for it. 

The problem that prohibitionists have with marijuana is a moral one, not a technical one.  Recreational use of a mind altering-substance is abuse.  It's immoral.  It's not good.  But immorality, like witchcraft is a privatized risk, and so, to force action by the state, they have to socialize it.  They have to make it everybody's problem.  They need to blow the risk vastly out of proportion.  Now who would be good at doing that?  Oh, I know—cue the media.  Next thing you know, Walt the postman is getting random urine inspections, and we have an entire industry of professionals whose job it is to watch you pee in a cup.

At one point, if you were dumb enough not to wear a seat belt, then that was social Darwinism at work.  That risk was socialized.  Crime.  Despite ample evidence that violent crime is decreasing and has been for centuries, we have to build a bunch of new prisons in Canada.  And the US, with 5% of the world's population, has 25% of the world's incarcerated population. 

Helmets.  Diving boards.  Alcohol.  Butter.  Trans-fats.  Second-hand smoke. Terrorists.  Carbon dioxide. Saccharine.   And those are just the risks we know about.  With all these deadly risks, most of them unknown to us a generation ago, how is it that we manage to worry our way to a historically high life expectancy of 85 years?