And I don't believe that to be a justification for removing those safety protections entirely. This ain't some data science problem to be solved; this is ethics and morality, and there is precisely nothing ethical or moral about demanding that your employees make themselves less safe and then having the gall to pretend that this somehow makes them safer.
> I don’t feel like shouting that you’d tell your employer to eat a bag of dicks really contributes much here.
You're right: all employees telling their employers to eat an OSHA-sized bag of dicks if they try prohibiting basic safety equipment would contribute far more greatly to society than just one. But we gotta start somewhere.
Crazy. I suspect you are actually reasoning from your thought that people are more likely to die without helmets and ignoring the premise of the question, or at least I hope that is what you are doing.
That ain't what was argued. The commenter above argued that helmets encourage people to take more risks. Even assuming that to be true, the sane answer is to train people to ride safely even when wearing helmets, not to ban helmets.
> it would be a statistical certainty your omission of action is basically causing people's deaths
1. "statistical certainty" is an oxymoron.
2. correlation != causation
2. Yes, this is why we have RCTs.
claiming you're removing safety equipment to reduce risky behavior is the tail wagging the dog. there are other ways to reduce risky behavior which do not have such tragic consequences as side effects to them.
Let's say you do an A/B test on this policy and find 15 more people die with the helmet allowed policy, but in the other side, one person died who if they had chosen a helmet they likely wouldn't have. You're saying it is unconscionable to pick the policy where the 15 wouldn't have died?
Do the other things to reduce risky behavior, certainly, but if this is an uncorrelated improvement I don't see why that wouldn't be worth taking.
Note, I doubt that this is actually true, but I wanted to highlight your moral apriori claims as ridiculous.
You failed to do that:
You didn’t address the agency problem where the 15 chose to engage in risky behavior while that 1 was coerced into dying — and ignoring the role of agency in the Trolley Problem is amateur hour. The helmets didn’t kill anyone, their following choices while wearing helmets did; which is in contrast to mandating no helmet, that is directly responsible for a death.
What you did was make a ridiculous argument that ignored the crux of the issue and pretend that the other person was wrong.
All I can say is I am glad that the actual people making decisions seem to also prefer fewer people dying over non-coercion.
Despite this bare denial, I believe "coerced into dying" to be an accurate description of someone coerced into not wearing a helmet dying of head injuries from an unavoidable accident
sorry, that's not a coercion I'm willing to make. First, do no harm. Come back when you've tried safer ways to reduce risky behavior.
> if even 1 incident occurs which was unavoidable by an unhelmeted cyclist which harms them more than they would have been harmed wearing a helmet, then the policy is unconscionable
if you can think of a scenario in which what I described as unconscionable happens, then I would find that scenario unconscionable.
> Do the other things to reduce risky behavior, certainly, but if this is an uncorrelated improvement I don't see why that wouldn't be worth taking.
whereas I DO see why such a helmet ban would be a risk not worth taking, it is at the top of this post.
“In sum, this systematic review found little to no support for the hypothesis bicycle helmet use is associated with engaging in risky behaviour.”
[1] https://www.cyclist.co.uk/in-depth/1365/is-it-safer-to-wear-...
Those are safest rides, they are good for your health and the ones that drop first.