conversations.from: human
conversations.value: a description for a book titled Playing By the Rules about Renaissance, York, City with the genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Memoirs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author is a self-described Renaissance Man, and a writer and actor in New York City. He is a Progressive Activist on Environmental and Civil Rights issues and a blogger on the Queer NYC blog team.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first four paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Playing By the Rules
  In effect, here were an esteemed academic and an august medical institution saying, on the one hand, "We are going to scare you by drawing your attention to the hypothetical risk of harm from just about everything you touch or sniff in your own home," and, on the other, "We are not actually going to quantify that risk—because we have no evidence. Instead, we leave it up to your judgment." They offered no advice on how most women might be able to reach such a judgment. (Perhaps they could commission large-scale double-blind trials, construct laboratories in their back gardens, and so forth?)
  People can always choose to ignore advice. The danger is not so much that women will take on board everything they hear or read. (Avoiding all the substances mentioned would probably mean living in a remote rainforest or on a deserted island and existing on nothing but fresh fruit, a lifestyle which, of course, would carry its own not-insubstantial risks, not least the risk of not being able to find such a place, as every remote corner of the planet would then be colonized by worried pregnant women.) Rather, the problem is that it is impossible to know which of innumerable competing and conflicting safety messages have the most credibility. We end up with people opting for an arbitrary pick-and-mix or becoming cynical about all safety messages. As David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge University, told us in response to the RCOG report, "These precautionary, 'better safe than sorry' recommendations are not necessarily cost free." They can feed anxiety and make clear assessments of any genuine benefits almost impossible. They may also detract attention from worthwhile advice with proven benefits.
  The proliferation of advice to pregnant women is well documented. Bumpology (2013), by Linda Geddes, lists the many ways in which they are made to feel guilty about what they eat and drink, and suggests that the advice they receive is often based not on hard scientific evidence but on conjecture and a precautionary notion that any advice is worth giving.
  People break rules or ignore "expert" safety advice not just because evidence contradicts the rules or because they are hell-bent on causing mayhem, but because the rules, however well meaning, can be so onerous and inconvenient that heeding them at all becomes impractical. It's exhausting.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: America is unusual in the advanced industrialized world for allowing children, sometimes as young as fourteen, to drive motor vehicles. Most states allow juveniles behind the wheel once they reach the age sixteen, sixteen and a half, or somewhere in between. (Canada is broadly similar. Meanwhile, New Zealand does allow driving at fifteen. It has half the death rate of the United States, but this probably reflects the country's extremely low traffic density rather than unusually competent adolescent drivers.)
  A U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report from 2012 examined crash death rates in America's major cities and cited a number of steps that could be taken to reduce them. For instance, it suggested that there should be a clampdown on teenage alcohol abuse, more focus on catching teenagers "driving under the influence," sobriety checkpoints, graduated license schemes, and so forth. However, it did not discuss the possibility of raising the driving age to seventeen, eighteen, or even higher. Back in 2000, a report on teenage driving compiled by the U.S. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) had stated: "Historically, the problem of young driver crash involvement could have been addressed by raising the licensing age to eighteen or nineteen...but political and social pressures largely have prevented this."
  There is strong evidence that raising the minimum driving age saves lives. In Europe—and especially northern Europe—where first-time drivers tend to be at least one or two years older than their American counterparts, crash and death rates are generally far lower than in the United States. Other factors might be at play too, including greater congestion (which reduces average speeds for everyone, including youngsters) and higher costs (which dissuade all but the most affluent teens from driving). For instance, gasoline is between one and a half and three times more expensive in the EU, Australia, and Japan than it is in the United States, which may act as a brake on recklessness. Finally, Europe generally has good public transport (which is often subsidized or even free for teenagers and students).
  In the 1980s, when politicians in the Australian state of Victoria suggested lowering the licensing age from eighteen to seventeen or even sixteen, researchers studied the potential effects and estimated that a reduction to seventeen would result in 650–700 more injury crashes per year and thirty to fifty more fatal crashes. They suggested that lowering it to sixteen would result in even more deaths. Unsurprisingly, Victorians (who might have made some shaky decisions regarding bicycle helmets but are pretty sound on cars) stuck with the no-under-eighteens rule.
  There is also evidence from within the United States itself that stricter controls on teen driving would have dramatic effects. In 2010, the IIHS issued another report. This time it focused on a single state that has some of the most draconian controls on children driving cars in the country.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Pernicious rule creation is most likely to occur after a newsworthy tragedy. A child killed in a cliff fall may lead to calls for new rules preventing everyone from going anywhere near the cliffs. Someone gets mauled by a dog (as people have been getting mauled by dogs ever since we took up with them in the prehistoric past), and a new law is drafted in haste to ban certain breeds. In most mature democracies, we are not short of laws to cope with even the most novel threats. It is almost axiomatic that whenever someone calls for a "new law" to deal with a supposedly new threat, the threat is not really new at all and an existing law is quite sufficient to deal with it.
  The fact that one person did (or might do) something dangerous or stupid does not justify the imposition of a safety rule at a public facility—such as adult-to-child ratios at swimming pools. You need to stress that this is a management issue for them, not a safety issue for everyone. Every public facility—be it a national park, a school, or a swimming pool—occasionally has to deal with people who behave recklessly. Bachelor party goers will insist on diving into shallow lakes while drunk. Schoolchildren will climb onto teetering gravestones. But that does not leave facility managers with no choice. Such incidents can be treated as unfortunate aberrations and dealt with on that basis. There's no need to treat everyone as though they are that reckless few.
  If we proceed on that basis, we concentrate rule making and thinking in a small group of people, who have shown themselves in our inquiries and elsewhere to be susceptible to short-term thinking, political tokenism, back covering, defensiveness, advancing their own interests (commercial or otherwise), and ignorance. So never assume that they are acting solely on the basis of good evidence. In fact, never assume that evidence has played any part in their decisions.
  Some of the safety measures introduced by these people have made us vulnerable to hucksters, scams, and special interests, and they have evolved a way of interacting with the world that assumes the worst will happen as well as the worst of everybody. They have long ignored the adage of "Treat stupid, make stupid." By contrast, if they trusted people and armed them with evidence—and if we trusted ourselves and armed ourselves with evidence—the result would be vastly improved standards of accountability for rule making and vastly better safety and security measures. We would be able to expose bad ideas quickly. And we would stand a much better chance of coming to balanced and useful conclusions.
  We don't want to live in a more dangerous world. What we want is a more relaxed and sensible world, because much of what makes our lives difficult, expensive, and frustrating at the moment is not making us any safer.