Comment by aaron695
4 years ago
Incoherent.
How can there be a levee paradox.
You can see the water it holds back.
More people build because there are less floods.
No idea what they are talking about with Fukushima
The Millennial Bug is a good prospect. But that's a debate in itself.
Good point about the levee issue. Apparently there's a little wikiwar going on with that one already.
I couldn't follow their logic with Fukushima either. The wording was a little strange.
The Year 2000 scenario and covid scenarios are great examples IMO. The problem is that any great example is intrinsically going to be controversial, and that seems to be the paradox itself.
For a real world example, you can look to the hole in the ozone layer. This conservative commentator and roughly 42k twitter users agree that we "suddenly just stopped talking about it", when in reality governments implemented bans on CFCs that mostly solved the problem.
https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog/status/1549713211188027394
This examples can be made up arbitrarily. For any situation. You can always say that if it weren't for x, y would be even worse.
"If people didn't carry guns, there would be more violence."
"If we didn't start climate talks , climate change would be even worse."
etc...
> How can there be a levee paradox.
> You can see the water it holds back.
> More people build because there are less floods.
And then because of that, when the levee breaks, more damage is done than it the levee wasn't there in the first place. The paradox is that trying to be safe can cause more harm.
This has also been described as risk compensation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation