Comment by pksebben

Don't like it. There are systemic problems with nanny-state thinking - you either solve all cases of danger at once, or you make the problem worse.

I was close to a story recently about a kid in a climbing gym who mistied their harness. Competent climber, but got careless and no one caught the faulty safety loop and they fell 40 feet on descent. Nothing broken, in a turn of miracle, but could have been fatal for them and others had there been someone underneath at the time.

Now, I'm sure that this will garner some conversation, but IMO this is an example of the Safe Playground Effect; that is, because we put soft corners on everything we deem to be risky, we implicitly teach people that the world has been made safe for them. Without the risk of mild harm (on the playground) we don't develop the sense to be cautious with major harm (like at the climbing gym). The unconscious, innate instinct is "it can't be that bad, I've existed for X years sort of carelessly and I've never gotten hurt".

Problematically, this is the sort of effect that is nearly impossible to analyze with any reliability. Too many connected, confounding factors even in the most controlled environments. I think it's fairly intuitive, but there's a lot of room for me to be wrong and I'd be the first to admit it.

IF this is the case, however, then what we are effectively doing by adding these mandated safety measures piecemeal, is lowering the personal shelf of responsibility whilst leaving other risks at the same level of probability and effect, making them that much worse because now people as a whole are less vigilant re: their own safety.

One actual example I can think of to back this stuff up is the Burning Man festival. It's a city of 75,000 with precious little in the way of medical resources in an extreme climate peppered with dangerous art made of metal and splintered wood and fire, and yet the injury rate is far lower than that of a normal municipality of the same size (in the past decade, there have been 2 fatalities IIRC, which is way lower than the national average per pop.) My (admittedly hand-wavy) guess about the why is this: people who go there know that there are risks, and despite being largely chemically altered this awareness translates to a lower risk of injury even considering the added risk factors.

But, you know, that's just like, my opinion, man.