One thought on “Ropeik: The Messy (and Risky) Ways That Governments Try to Manage Risks”
A better definition: risk is the expected value of a negative consequence. Ropeik’s article omits any quantitative measure of the consequence and concentrates only on probability of occurrence. A more useful formulation defines risk as the product of the probability of occurrence and the quantitative estimate of the negative consequence.
I agree that often the subjective estimate of risk puts too heavy an emphasis on the emotional response to a hazard. But, there are also many situations in which emotional responses actually contribute to losses; e.g., widespread emotional responses to the events of 9-11 contributed to secondary economic losses ; or the chilling effect that emotional response to the idea of increased use of nuclear power has on our further development and deployment of this technology.
Leave a Reply
Discover more from JunkScience.com
Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.
A better definition: risk is the expected value of a negative consequence. Ropeik’s article omits any quantitative measure of the consequence and concentrates only on probability of occurrence. A more useful formulation defines risk as the product of the probability of occurrence and the quantitative estimate of the negative consequence.
I agree that often the subjective estimate of risk puts too heavy an emphasis on the emotional response to a hazard. But, there are also many situations in which emotional responses actually contribute to losses; e.g., widespread emotional responses to the events of 9-11 contributed to secondary economic losses ; or the chilling effect that emotional response to the idea of increased use of nuclear power has on our further development and deployment of this technology.