Zanda wrote: As technology is applied to road-use, does the level of threat within the system balance out, absorbing new ‘safety benefits’ through social feedback and modified expectations?
This is precisely Adams' point, the benefits of safety devices will tend to be taken as improvements in performance rather than improvement in safety. (Rather like improvements in productivity get consumed as increased wealth, rather than reduced working hours.) Adams argues that you improve safety by persuading people to reduce their tolerance of risk. This would amount to a readjustment of 'B' in my feedback analogy.
That said, Adams starts his book by looking at the way all risk management manuals are written on the premise that it is both possible and desirable to eliminate risk. It is neither, and here's why:
Risk is just another name for uncertainty, but one persons decision of free will is another's uncertainty. No risk means no free will. The further you get toward eliminating risk, the more it will be resisted. Each person has their own tolerance to risk, and expectations of free will, and thus spends their entire life trying to rearrange the world such that reality conforms to their expectations. But it never does of course, because everybody's expectations are different.
Horizon: Adams also defines four basic positions from which people contribute to a risk debate. They are each debating rationally, but from a different premise or world view, hence the debate continues in perpetuity without ever being resolved. This is what Adams refers to as plural rationalities. He also explains the way people falsely believe that science will resolve the problem. Each side commissions more and more research, and throws more and more data at one another in the mistaken belief that it will make a difference. It won't. It never will.
The real solution to the risk debate lies in learning to accept these facts, and learning to live with risk.
For anybody who is interested, there's another good book on risk: Reckoning with Risk by Gerd Gigerenzer.
Like Adams, it is a book about risk in general, but with yet another perspective. Gigerenzer is a psychology professor who specialises in ways to communcate risk and statistics such that people will best understand them. He covers a variety of subjects from court evidence to medical decisions to fun examples such as the Monty Hall problem. Particularly damning is his analysis of the way many women are needlessly mutlilated by mastectomies, because oncologists don't understand the breast cancer statistics themselves, let alone how to communicate them to others.
