I refer you “Cancer” by Joe Jackson.

“Everything gives you cancer, there’s no cure, there’s no answer”

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Haven’t heard that one before but am logging in.

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I suspect you would not get very fair treatment in the public health community. Still, it is frustrating to see such vast amounts of bad scholarship out there competing for readership with those few points of light.

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I’m not invested in writing articles for the public health community, but I will be talking to the UConn ARMS Center next month about my views of risk in a webinar. Stay tuned for details.

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Is it great minds or reinventing the wheel? lol. As a generally risk averse person, I am constantly balancing my root desire for safety with my competing desire to live, experience, explore.

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Also, the idea of relative risk v absolute risk goes to your comments about suicide or the “risks”of having a gun in the house, which you discussed on your blog a few years ago (and which I had hoped would be developed into a publishable paper).

I think the bottom line is that doing most anything recklessly, badly, or thoughtlessly leads to bad outcomes up to and including premature death. I learned a long time ago that if I did “stupid things at stupid times with stupid people” on my motorcycle, it might end up sliding down the road with me sliding behind it (been there, done that). I’ve expanded that warning label to guns and alcohol.

Besides, my current motorcycle cost too much for me to want to crash it.

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“No one here gets out alive” – Jim Morrison (or The Doors, generally)

Great minds think alike? Well, this one is easy, though modern Americans don’t like to contemplate it. Memento Mori was once a fairly routine idea to spend time contemplating. Life being limited adds a bit of urgency to the mix

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Also, we must consider individual risk versus social risk. Upon hearing of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the safest thing an individual young man could do would have been to somehow cripple one of his big toes to render himself “4-F” under the draft. But if everyone did that, it would have increased the risk to everyone. (Volunteering for the Marines would have been one of the most individually risky responses.)

That brings up the moral issue of self-defense versus submission. If we prefer to let petty criminals on the street rule over us rather than take the risk of defending ourselves (and being armed to do so), then are we even worthy of benefiting from the risks taken and sacrifices made by our forefathers to secure our freedom?

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