Re:Bruce Schneier: Drawing the wrong lessons from horrific e...
by morsch on Wednesday August 01, 2012 @10:56AM
(#4323202)
That's the kind of argument I had in mind but I didn't want to elaborate on yet another incidental issue. Societal attention is a finite resource (which goes largely wasted). On the other hand, many of these questions don't rise to the level of public discussion, just think of all the safety regulations involved in engineering and manufacturing.
Arguably? How many separate things are there in the world that kill 5 or more people in the US each year? An awful lot. IIRC the number of people killed in newspaper related accidents in the UK is about that high.
Society only has so much attention, people only spend so much time learning about the world every day, and people only have so much capacity for worry. To the extent that we use up our worry on things that aren't important we lose the ability to worry about the things that are. I don't expect all the ink spilled on this shooting to save a single life, but if a similar amount of popular attention was devoted to teaching people what drowning really looked like it would probably save about 50 lives every year[1].
If you're going to cross the street it doesn't make sense to split your attention between looking to either side for oncoming cars and looking up for falling objects. Falling objects are very rare, and to the extent that you waste time worrying about them you're more likely to get run over.
[1]http://mariovittone.com/2010/05/154/