The Precautionary Principle in Decision Making

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Scientism has blinded people to er itis. I form of reasoning that is effectively more rigorous in science, because yo, no haven a symetry. You may die if you're wrong, and if you're right, the payoff may be very small. And this is what e' fryng to avoid. Nie nine percent things we do are based on precautionary principles in our daily lives. But there's something much deeper. There is that as people are getting more and more into techniques of risk management, they tend to forget that most of the risks we are taking are of non evidential nature. In other worlds, scientific knowledge has not been sufficient in establishing a clear cut answer

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile, Black Swan, and Fooled by Randomness, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about a recent co-authored paper on the risks of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the use of the Precautionary Principle. Taleb contrasts harm with ruin and explains how the differences imply different rules of behavior when dealing with the risk of each. Taleb argues that when considering the riskiness of GMOs, the right understanding of statistics is more valuable than expertise in biology or genetics. The central issue that pervades the conversation is how to cope with a small non-negligible risk of catastrophe.