Risk VSI

Normative - descriptive - prescriptive: What should we do? What do we do? How can we improve?

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Risk

One hundred years is 36525 days – 876,600 hours – \(52.6 \times 10^6\) minutes – \(3.2 \times 10^9\) second

• What and how you measure risk reveals a lot about what you care about

• Normative - descriptive - prescriptive

• p26 Starr’s model: risk = deaths per hour of exposure to hazard vs economic benefit from activity (graph); voluntarily vs involuntary risk assumption

• p41

  Risk entails some chance of losing something of value. If people value different outcomes, then they define ‘risk’ differently.

• p43 John Snow, cholera in London, 1854

• Models ignore many features of the problem in order to understand a few features well p57.

Risk analyses are abstractions which often ignore many features of problems in order to understand a few features well.

• Relative risk easier to assess than absolute p63; “members of any community share tacit, mostly unexamined, assumptions about the world”

• Making risk decisions

  • simple rules – expected value
  • utilities – sacred values
  • uncertain values
  • prospect theory – framing
  • heuristic decision rules – Herbert Simon – bounded rationality – approximate optimization – satisficing
  • rule and regulations
  • performance standards (goals) – technical standards (specify solutions) – adaptive management (combines both)
  • conditions for learning: receiving prompt, unambiguous feedback and appropriate rewards
  • Choice integrates beliefs and values

• Risk communications

  • [intelligence] analysts prefer to get numerical predictions and to give verbal ones(!)

  • adequately informed

    people are adequately informed when knowing more would not affect their choices

  • three elements of a decision: facts – values – options

  • Risk analysis, assessment, management p132

    • analyze – assess – manage [how bad is the risk; what is its impact; how should we manage it?]
    • (Not decide – announce – defend !)

• Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger: societies define themselves by how they define and manage risk p135;

  • societies reveal their deepest values in the priorities they set among physical and symbolic risks
  • societies fragment when their constituent groups see dangers too differently (w. Aarfon Wildavksy)

• p148 deep aversion to poorly understood risks

• risk from Italian risicare meaning “to dare” or act in the face of uncertainty

• Risk analysis = intellectual tool for achieving well being by reducing dangers and limiting the role of chance

• framing – definition – revealed beliefs – discover priorities

Deets

• Baruch Fischhoff and John Kadvany
• Volume 270
• Published 2011