I was not suggesting you were flaming anyone. I was pointing out how one can prevent flaming and other online negative outcomes by abstaining from posting. We can prevent car accidents by never driving. We can prevent heartbreak by never asking someone out. We can prevent a huge number of head injuries by always wearing a helmet. We can prevent skin cancer to a great degree by never exposing any of our skin to the sun. IOW I notice how people do not abstain in a wide variety of contexts despite the fact that this can lead to problems. So they must have values in addition to wanting to avoid certain outcomes. They must want to live and love and have certain kinds of intimacy and experiences, despite possible outcomes. Abstinence as a simple solution seems not to understand this. It is as if all of this did not exist and they were stupid.
You're talking about risk analysis and risk management. Balancing the reward from an activity (the nearly certain positive impact) against the risk (the less likely but still possible negative impact). It requires evaluating the negative impact in some objective way AND estimating the probability of its occurrence.
This is a skill at which Americans, in particular, are abysmally poor.
The example I usually cite is terrorism vs. drunk driving. In the past ten years, 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists. We have spent roughly one trillion dollars in an attempt to eliminate terrorism. Assuming for the sake of argument that we have succeeded, that's $300,000,000 per life saved. We have reams of actuarial data from which we can calculate the average dollar value that Americans assign to their lives--life insurance premiums, wrongful death settlements, etc.--and it's actually in the five to ten million range. So this expenditure appears to be wildly irrational, especially during a crippling recession. And even more so, considering the likelihood of actual success as well as the calamitous second-order effects of the war in the Middle East; a proper risk management program must take all of these variables into account.
During the same ten years, 120,000 Americans were killed by drunk drivers--forty times as many. This figure could be reduced to two or three digits by installing a breathalyzer ignition interlock in every car at the factory. It would cost no more than a couple of hundred bucks per car (much less than retrofitting, as is done today), and 99% of our fleet turns over in ten years. This comes out to around fifty billion dollars for the entire fleet, and drunk driving is moved into the same risk category as lightning and bee stings. That's only
half a million dollars per life saved--with a very high probability of success and very few second-order effects (putting some bars out of business as people decide to get snokkered at home).
A no-brainer, right? Who would possibly argue against saving 150,000 lives vs. 3,000, at a fraction of the cost? Let's siphon off an almost insignificant portion of the funding for the War on Islam and use it to almost completely eliminate deaths due to drunk driving.
So why aren't we doing it? Because Americans are really shitty at risk analysis and management. After all, these are the same people who bought sub-prime mortgages. My people appear to have no sense of numeracy, despite getting university degrees in record numbers.
So don't expect them to be any better about risks in their personal lives that aren't so easily analyzed, such as balancing pleasure vs. pregnancy.
