Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 17:16:10 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-TH: risks, again


j laari wrote:

>Doug H wrote:
>
>" What drives these perceptions of risk? I'd say there are several
>things. One is that there really are real risks out there, for real.
>BSE is a danger. AIDS is a danger. Radiation is a danger. Toxic waste
>in drinking water is a danger. People may exaggerate these dangers,
>but that's in part understandable. (...) So while the fear seems out
>of all proportion to the actual risk, the perception among the public
>isn't of risk but of true, unquantifiable uncertainty (which is
>irrational by definition). "
>
>Do you mean sort of 'scienticized urban legends'?

No. I mean that the things that people are afraid of - like AIDS and
environmental catastrophe - can have consequences so dire that the normal
calculus of quantifiable risk (in the statistical sense of deviation from
an expected outcome) doesn't apply. With cigarettes, we pretty much know
what your chance of heart disease or lung cancer is as a function of "pack
years" of smoking experience. With ecological disaster, who knows what
could happen and when? This is where things cross over into what Keynes
famously called true uncertainty (in a passage written when 1970 was 33
years in the future):

"By 'uncertain' knowledge, let me explain, I do not mean merely to
distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The game
of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty; nor is the
prospect of a victory bond being drawn.... Even the weather is only
moderately uncertain. The sense in which I am using the term is that in
which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper
and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new
invention, or the position of private wealth-owners in the social system in
1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any
calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know."

Doug





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