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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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I just saw "child safety guidelines" from a pediatrician visit which said not to allow your child out to play from 11AM to 3PM, because of the sun.

Didn't anti-sunlight safetyism peak years ago? Why has the advice continued to get crazier? Is this pediatrician a lone vampire groomer, or is the whole AMA like this?

It wouldn't make me so angry if the children in question weren't pasty obese maggots who desperately need sun and exercise. The doc made a choice to ask "so, are they being exposed to the evils of natural light? Oh, they sit inside and play Minecraft, eating Totino's™ Pizza Rolls™ all day? Good, good, check that health problem off the list. Now, are there any guns or motorcycles in the house? Because they can lead to dangers like going outside and doing things."

I'm not a parent, but everything I've seen of education and child-raising recently has been throwing up giant red flags. How are motte parents dealing with this stuff?

The CDC remains batshit insane on the matter:

When possible, wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants and skirts, which can provide protection from UV rays. If wearing this type of clothing isn’t practical, try to wear a T-shirt or a beach cover-up. Clothes made from tightly woven fabric offer the best protection. A wet T-shirt offers much less UV protection than a dry one, and darker colors may offer more protection than lighter colors. Some clothing is certified under international standards as offering UV protection.

Personally, I'll be continuing to run without a shirt all summer. Since 2020, my position has become that the safetyists are wrong about basically everything.

Even Australian safetyists?

Especially Australian safetyists -- their COVID response was intensely dumb, why should one believe them on their longstanding crusades against similarly low-risk 'threats'?

To be clear, if you are white and will be spending all day in the sun, rashguards, broad brimmed hats, and sun blocking sleeves are a very good idea even with sunscreen.

Overall I fully agree with the posters above that safety guidelines regarding the dangers of outdoor activity are fantastically wrong, but you too have a point. You can get an awful lot of skin cancer from the sun, though may take decades for it to show. How serious a problem it is varies from person to person; some can get away with a lifetime of sizzling, others will regret not covering up a little.

I compromise and wear a floppy hat. That's my safety right there.

Am very white, can work up to a tan such that I can indeed spend all day outside without any accessories and not burn. Some SPF-15 for the first couple of weeks and it's all good. I honestly can't imagine living in such fear that one feels one needs a bunch of crap to safely go outside four months of the year.

Basically.

In Australia, you can spend 15 minutes unprotected in the sun over Summer as a white person and not get sunburned.

That said, SPF 15 sunscreen/moisturiser is great for general daily regular use. I use it in Winter too if I think I'll be spending more than 15 minutes at a time outside.

Australia is not the world though.

‘Take measures to reduce UV exposure when in the sun’ is actually one of the more reasonable things the CDC has said- as anyone who works outside in Texas(or Australia) can tell you, ‘not taking your shirt off for hours on end in direct sunlight in the summer’ is well worth being mildly more uncomfortable to avoid sunburn.

Hell, blacks who work outside in Texas advise broad brimmed hats and tattoo covers(the local name for detachable sleeves), and they’re the least susceptible to sunburn of anyone. Sunburn and skin cancer are reasonable things to be concerned about and there are reasonable measures to take to reduce them.

Even seatbelts?

Yes. Seatbelts are an excellent idea and I wear mine. Demanding that everyone do so is stupid and intrusive.

Opposing safetyism doesn’t mean ignoring risk-benefit, it means that you’re against treating safety as an overriding priority in all cases.

But majority of people are too stupid to make a balanced and informed choice to stop wearing seatbelts. Developed countries generally adopted humanism as the guiding philosophy and if you need to slightly restrict personal freedom to do fentanyl or drive without seatbelt to reduce deaths it is worth it.

The safetyists say that you should wear a seatbelt, you agree, and yet claim.they are wrong about everything.

Pareto. 80% of the improvement in auto safety over the last 40 years comes from seatbelts, first-gen airbags, and crumple zones. The first two were cheap, but the third one was not (if you crash/are crashed into- it's not really more expensive to make a car that accordions if you hit something, but a modern car is more likely to be a total loss from that event).

There isn't much of a difference between survivability of a crash in 2010 (average car on the road has airbags) and 2024 (average car on the road has... more airbags), but the cost of a car has doubled and pedestrians now get killed more often because visibility is the cost of that safety.

Safetyists are demonstrably utility monsters. It's like the car seat thing: massive improvements for a very small cost is fine, marginal improvements for a very large cost are not, and people who are incapable of differentiating between the two because they're stuck on the baseline risk treadmill (exactly like the hedonic treadmill, but for neurotics) will feed literally every scrap of productivity to the machine if they're not slapped down by the people who actually have to pay for it.

  1. My understanding is pedestrian deaths are driven at least partially by trucks becoming bigger for gas consumption standards.

  2. I drive a Tesla. The safety on it is pretty amazing and helped my wife avoid an accident already.

I don't even disagree about the utility monsters point but I think you are wrong about other points.

Used car prices were flat until the pandemic and have not recovered, but are way less than 2x before: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA02

So no, car prices didn't double in 14 years, even including until today (yes, these are used cars, but if new cars became significantly more expensive demand would increase for used cars and drive up the price).

Front blind zones are driven mostly by aesthetics and rules lawyering around emissions regulations (CAFE) as far as I can tell.

I don't have an index of car features off the top of my head, but electronic stability control (mandated since 2011) has probably prevented some accidents (although it's hard to get a smoking gun here, unlike seatbelts or airbags or crumple zones).

I still wear mine. But I'll never forget a woman in my highschool. Her family was on vacation, got into a car accident, and she was the only survivor. She was thrown from the vehicle because she wasn't wearing her seatbelt.

Still ended up paralyzed from the neck down and an orphan.

Tragic, but that really illustrates why being thrown clear is not a good thing.

There's a lot of safetyist excesses but people don't remember that until the 70s you'd be impaled by the steering column in case of a crash. There's been a tremendous amount of actually useful improvements by the safetyists that nobody notices or thinks about anymore because they've become the air we breathe.

The problem is the safetyists have no brakes. Nothing's ever "safe enough".

Clearly we need meta-safetyists to invent safetyist brakes. Of course then we will need meta-meta safetyists..and so ad inifinitum.

Clearly we need meta-safetyists to invent safetyist brakes.

This is generally called "the enemy tribe". The fact that, all else being equal, they'll outcompete you if they take more calculated risks is why safety cannot be first.

External enemies are the ultimate check against internal risk aversity, and when they stop existing that begins to spiral out of control. I don't see any external enemies around right now and life is generally better than it's ever been, so people just pay the toll and suffer the loss of dignity/productivity quietly since the bill will never come due... right?

I don't see any external enemies around right now and life is generally better than it's ever been,

Which suggests that in a climate without external threats safetyism does lead to (or contributes to) life being better than it has ever been? If there is no-one to compete against then your people don't need to be taking calculated risks (which will presumably lead to greater levels of injury/death).

In other words you only need to pull the goalie when you are losing. If you are winning, play safe.

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I think it's more likely that safetyism suffers from evaporative cooling. Most people who decry safetyism today still wear seatbelts (see this very thread), which was the safetyist perspective a hundred years ago (and remains the safetyist perspective in many countries today). Indeed there are some people who are never satisfied.

Okay, but in the meantime, cars keep getting safer?

Hard to say. Not a lot of movement since 2009, but there's a lot of confounding factors. But we keep getting more and more expensive features added in the name of safety.