Figure 1 is proffered in the hope of clearing away some unnecessary arguments.
Figure 1
Directly perceptible risks are dealt with using judgement – a combination of instinct intuition and experience. One does not undertake a formal, probabilistic, risk assessment before crossing the road. Crossing the road in the presence of traffic involves prediction based on judgement. One must judge vehicle speeds, the gaps in traffic, one's walking speed, and hope one gets it right, as most of us do most of the time.
Most of the published literature on risk management falls into the category of risk perceived through science. Here one finds not only biological scientists in lab coats peering through microscopes, but physicists, chemists, engineers, doctors, statisticians, actuaries, epidemiologists and numerous other categories of scientist who have helped us to see risks that are invisible to the naked eye. Collectively they have improved enormously our ability to manage risk – as evidenced by the huge increase in average life spans that has coincided with the rise of science and technology.
But where the science is inconclusive we are thrown back on judgement. We are in the realm of virtual risk. These risks are culturally constructed – when the science is inconclusive people are liberated to argue from, and act upon, pre-established beliefs, convictions, prejudices and superstitions. Such risks may or may not be real but they have real consequences. In the presence of virtual risk what we believe depends on whom we believe, and whom we believe depends on whom we trust.
A participant at the conference on terrorism was one of the world's foremost experts on turbulence, notoriously the most intractable problem in science. In the mythology of physics Werner Heisenberg is reported as saying:
When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.
I would trust the physicist I met at the conference to tell me the truth about turbulence, so far as he knew it. But the problems he is studying are simple compared to those of the risk manager, because the clouds do not react to what the weatherman or physicist says about them.
We are all risk managers. Whether buying a house, crossing the road, or considering whether or not to have our child vaccinated, our decisions will be influenced by our judgement about the behaviour of others, and theirs by their judgements about what we might do. The world of the risk manager is infinitely reflexive. In seeking to manage the risks in our lives we are confronted by a form of turbulence unknown to natural science, in which every particle is trying to second guess the behaviour of every other. Will the vendor accept less in a falling market? Will the approaching car yield the right of way? Will enough other parents opt for vaccination so that my child can enjoy the benefits of herd immunity while avoiding the risks of vaccination? And, increasingly, if things go wrong, who might sue me? Or whom can I sue? The risk manager is dealing with particles with attitude.
Another participant at the conference, alert to the strict limits of natural science in the face of such turbulence, warned that we were in danger of becoming the drunk looking for his keys, not in the dark where he dropped them, but under the lamp post where there was light by which to see.
CAclubindia
