#precautionaryprinciple

[redsaxguy]

Perfect love expells

Our fear for fear is torment

Precautions balloon

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[toxicseminar]

“Laura Potts argues that the precautionary principle is a more proactive alternative to the scientific proof principle, while still remaining rooted in the traditional epidemiological or public health paradigm. It does not propose unscientific methods for determining public health risk, but rather it changes the measure by which might be seen as having provided accurate data to warrant action. Within this framework, “sufficient evidence” rather proof is required to act on the environment”(pg, 215).  

“The precautionary principle attempts to anticipate problems, takes account of future generations and seeks to generate a guarantee for the future through particular actions in the present”(pg, 215). 

Quote Source : Breast Cancer on Long Island: The Emergence of a New Object Through Mapping Practices by Lisa Diedrich and Emily Boyce.

Image Source: Painting by Ricardo Levins Morales

https://www.rlmartstudio.com/product/precautionary-principle/

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[neverendingaudit]

On the Law of Unintended Consequence

Robinson,

I’m sorry if you believe that “ignorance” is a pejorative term. It really is the technical term that has currency in the fields under consideration now. The problem with conflating ignorance with “lack of information” is that knowledge is not the same thing as holding information. Denial, for instance, is a phenomenon whereby a person holds an information but ignores it, knowingly or not.

Interestingly, we can point out that the term “law of unintended consequences” most of the times is formulated in a way to hide two symmetries.

The first one is to insist on adverse consequences, and not on the beneficial ones. Unless I am mistaken, this is incidently why Merton was talking about a “law”, a law that has never really be well defined nor confirmed.

The second one is to insist that action leads to more bad consequences than non-action. Since most of the interesting problems in policy-making belong to domains of partial information, this argues implicitely towards non-action. This is kinda irrational, as there is always a good reason to do something, unless you’re dead. If you’re not sure you’re machine ain’t broken, you might still wish to oil it from time to time.

In any case, the most important matter that you are discussing is underlied by the expression “understanding not well enough.” It would be interesting to know how this gets decided, by whom, and for what reasons. Setting an ad hoc criteria as what counts as sufficient information certainly would look like cherry picking. This is not something one should do unless you’re a cherry-picker, of course.