The Precautionary Principle: Better Safe Than Sorry? | Hacker News Reader

The Precautionary Principle: Better Safe Than Sorry?

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26 pointsheadalgorithm12 comments

>Also known as the Precautionary Approach or Precautionary Action, the Precautionary Principle is a concept best summed up by the proverb “better safe than sorry” or the medical maxim to “first do no harm.”

Also the folklore, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".

PP is best applied to situations with the potential, not necessarily the guarantee, of widespread systemic harm and/or catastrophic failure from which recovery is exceedingly technically difficult, prohibitively expensive, or downright impossible - for example, nuclear war, climate catastrophe, global financial crisis, global pandemic of a novel and not-well-understood pathogen.

The "not necessarily the guarantee" is the hard part. Human judgement tends to be biased toward discounting both the odds and impact of occurrence of systemic risks that have less than 100% chance of occurring, but significant impact if they do occur. Especially when there are immediate costs to avoiding them, or immediate financial benefit to avoiding/externalizing them.

Thus it is often politically difficult for society and political leaders to apply PP to any particular systemic risk, until after it's happened and the odds of occurrence become 100% and the impact widely felt. Both the Great Depression and the Global/Great Financial Crisis are examples of this - prevention measures put in place after the fact. COVID19 as well.

> Also the folklore, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".

No, that's not what the precautionary principle says. The precautionary principle says that you should not take actions that could have negative consequences, even if you're not sure those negative consequences will happen.

Prevention is an action. If prevention has no possible negative consequences, then the precautionary principle is irrelevant to it. If prevention does have possible negative consequences (and most "prevention" actions do), then the precautionary principle says you should not do it.

In other words, the precautionary principle is not the same as risk-benefit analysis, which weighs the risks and benefits of various possible choices, in order to make the choice that has the best risk-benefit balance all things considered.

The proverb you cite, however, is about risk-benefit analysis: it is basically telling you that, if you do such an analysis, you will find that the risk-benefit tradeoff of prevention (doing something in advance to prevent a bad thing from happening, and paying the costs of prevention up front) is very often much better than the risk-benefit tradeoff of cure (waiting for the bad thing to happen and then paying the costs of fixing it if it does happen).

Btw, this means that the article, to the extent it talks about weighing risks vs. benefits of various choices (which is quite a bit), is not about the precautionary principle, despite its title.

Well said. Perhaps the proverb should be “an ounce of prevention is worth a one-sixteenth chance of a pound of cure” :)

Also checkout Taleb's paper on Precautionary Principle https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf

"If an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain, the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety."

> If an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain, the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety.

I have heard that we are using the precautionary principle regarding covid. Yet we applied lockdowns, masks and various other measures that the WHO had declared likely to cause more harm than benefit (2019 Pandemic guideline) for a disease that has had a worldwide mortality rate of 0.05% worldwide.

I must admit I never fully understand PP. I get you need to be cautious in cases of asymmetric risk where say 99.9% of the time the outcome is good and 0.1% catastrophically, unrecoverably bad. Especially when the distribution isn't even known.

But this is everything in life! Every time you get in car, cross the street, climb the kitchen stairs. So there is a tradeoff somewhere, but we don't know where, almost by definition. Which makes this principle rather unprincipled.

If only we could know when we don't know.

I often see pp keep people poor and stuck. Its interesting they hate where they are in life but refuse to do anything different because perceived risk, and that its better to do nothing.

you should save money poor: it doesn't grow fast enough, inflation risk

you should invest poor: don't want to loose money, risk

you should go to school poor: what if I end stuck with student loan debt, cant find a job, what will the world look like in 4 years?

there is not a lot of opportunity in your area, you should move poor: I wont know the place or anyone there, how will I <insert what ever>

this literally happened, Home prices are going down and interest rates are low, you should buy a house. you dont even need a down payment as you can get 15k for it from wells fargo FREE poor: I dont want to buy a house now, it might go down.

5 years later... poor: home prices are so high, I can't afford

Yes, people are often hiding behind the PP.

But often the biggest risk is to not take any risk.

The distribution of car accidents etc. is known though. I think the point is to determine when you are operating in mediocristan, and when you are possibly operating in extremistan.

Great article, I'd like to see several pairs of pen and paper RPG groups with identical characters attempt the same pre-built adventure with one group employing the strategy outlined and see which group is more successful.

Alternatively, I see this as an anti-rulebook for GMs.

Many players will be actively trying to minimize risk, so the GM needs to make the PP a losing proposition at least some of the time to keep things interesting:

> When the costs of waiting are low.

Add some form of urgency. This is particularly important in systems like D&D 5e where the party can restore limited resources by literally doing nothing (short and long rests). If there is no urgency, the party has no rational reason to not spend 8 hours resting after every encounter.

> When preserving optionality is a priority.

Not sure how to apply this one...

[edit] Maybe if you convince the party they are "safe" they will think it's okay to use up their stock of a renewable resource.

> When the potential costs of a risk are far greater than the cost of preventative action.

It needs to cost some amount of resources that the party cares about to take precautionary measures, or else they will prepare for everything. In D&D style worlds, characters with a large bag of holding and a king's ransom in treasure will invest in many niche preventative measures. Even worse, many groups will not pay much attention to the encumbrance rules, making the bag-of-holding unnecessary.

> When alternatives are available.

You don't need to railroad groups to make alternatives unavailable. Putting obstacles in their paths that require either risk or using up a limited resource will circumscribe options. They can try to bluff their way past a chokepoint (risk), fight through it (risk), call in a favor (resource) or teleport past it (resource).

The Precautionary Principle is a religious principal.

You see it championed the most by religious organisations like the environmental movement.

This article doesn't quite get the religious framework. These are not the Precautionary Principle -

> medical maxim to “first do no harm.”

> For example, if one person per year dies from an allergic reaction to a guinea pig bite, it’s probably not worth banning pet guinea pigs.

A very good example of breaking the The Precautionary Principle is rolling out covid-19 vaccines. If it's dangerous it could kill humanity.

[edit] Prob not the authors intent but the Hippocratic oath forbids abortions. Which under the Precautionary Principle would be illegal, it could be a conscious human so we should never take the chance.

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