3 holiday blogs on Cross Cultural Risk Comparison, Assessment.
Risk Comparison and Assessment. Sometimes society gets it right. Sometimes, though, we miscalculate risk, and misdiagnose. Environmental regulations are the response to environmental risks, which may or may not be a direct risk to human health. If our subjective responses to direct risk to our own lives vary, by demographic, how good is our derivative judgement of the more indirect risk to the environment? And to the indirect risk to an environment physically distant?Our opinions on world risk are like an army of rubber bands. When enough of them are used together, they can create energy, a movement, or an obstacle.
"Risk" generates aversion, and aversion is energy to be harvested, either by capitalists, or by command-and-control economies. Risk aversion, and the externalized risk aversion (which arises genetically from the impulse to nurture), are winds we can direct towards or away from our windmills and sails by conjure. The force which conjures these winds is journalism, or wiki-editing, or other social media.
Now that I've lost nearly everybody (a Thanksgiving long-bomb hail Mary blog tradition), let's use e-waste policy, again, as a lens to measure how media plays on society's cognitive risk (personal threat avoidance, or nurture to protect "others", or true ecosystem challenges) to stir policies worth billions of dollars. In our families, our religions, our work, and our lives we must weigh different derivatives of risk and benefit. But our actions and decisions and votes seem like rubberbands. They are capable of holding small things together, or inflicting a snap of pain. But the rubber band cannot hold back a landslide. We direct the energy and elasticity we have to the things we can cognitively manage. That image is a way of introducing my theory of how we care about the pictures of little kids in Africa and Asia.
