An essay on speeding and it’s potential to be hazarderous
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Answer:
Throughout recorded history people have engaged in hazardous activities, and governments have taken action to control some of those activities in the public interest. But in recent times the hazards of greatest concern, and knowledge about them, have changed in ways that make informed decisions harder to reach. Once the focus was simply on the presence or absence of danger. If a food was “adulterated,” if water was determined to be “impure,” if a bridge or dam was declared “unsafe,” or if a workplace was “dangerous,” action was called for. When people called on government to take action, they wanted simple, clear-cut measures: ban sale of the food, supply pure water, condemn the bridge, eliminate the workplace hazard. But with increased understanding of the nature of the choices, it has become harder to maintain a simple view. Responsible decision makers need to know more about the alternatives than that one of them is hazardous.
In this chapter we outline the many kinds of knowledge a well-informed decision requires and the ways in which this knowledge is often incomplete and uncertain. We show how, under such conditions, the judgments of both experts and nonexperts can be affected by preexisting biases and cognitive limitations and how human values and concerns inevitably enter into the analytic process. These factors often lead experts to disagree with each other and with non-experts about the significance of risks, even when the facts are not in dispute.