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Bicycling & Risk

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While everyone else is talking about APT, I want to talk about risk thinking versus outcome thinking.

I have a lot of colleagues who I respect who like to think about risk in some fascinating ways. For example, there’s the Risk Hose and SIRA folks.
I’m inspired by
To Encourage Biking, Cities Lose the Helmets:

In the United States the notion that bike helmets promote health and safety by preventing head injuries is taken as pretty near God’s truth. Un-helmeted cyclists are regarded as irresponsible, like people who smoke. Cities are aggressive in helmet promotion.

But many European health experts have taken a very different view: Yes, there are studies that show that if you fall off a bicycle at a certain speed and hit your head, a helmet can reduce your risk of serious head injury. But such falls off bikes are rare — exceedingly so in mature urban cycling systems.

On the other hand, many researchers say, if you force or pressure people to wear helmets, you discourage them from riding bicycles. That means more obesity, heart disease and diabetes. And — Catch-22 — a result is fewer ordinary cyclists on the road, which makes it harder to develop a safe bicycling network. The safest biking cities are places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where middle-aged commuters are mainstay riders and the fraction of adults in helmets is minuscule.

“Pushing helmets really kills cycling and bike-sharing in particular because it promotes a sense of danger that just isn’t justified.

Given that we don’t have statistics about infosec analogs to head injuries, nor obesity, I’m curious where can we make the best infosec analogy to bicycling and helmets? Where are our outcomes potentially worse because we focus on every little risk?

My favorite example is password change policies, where we absorb substantial amounts of everyone’s time without evidence that they’ll improve our outcomes.

What’s yours?


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