Guest post: Understanding risk
Originally a comment by Claire on Expertise.
Sigh. Why aren’t people taught risk better in school? I find that many people outside of STEM (and many within it too) just do not understand risk, nor do they understand the difference between the two models
If the probability that a woman is injured in a tackle from a transwoman is 20-30% (as per World Rugby) then the demoninator is the tackle. In Harper’s formulation, it’s more complicated but the answer may not be what she expects.
Let’s propose an imaginary trans woman who had been a short, weedy man and transition made him lose muscle and even bone density to that of a woman’s (unlikely but this is a thought experiment). He’s still going to represent a risk to the women on the field. Because men’s and women’s rugby is played differently. Female physiology means that the style of play involves fewer head-on tackles and shoulder tackles, and more tackles from the side. This actually increases the risk of concussion in women’s rugby.
Add our imaginary transwoman playing in a male style would be unpredictable to the women on the team because she would not attempt tackles (and other maneuvers) in the same way. And if she learns the style, she’s still a risk because biomechanical factors mean that women have a higher rotational speed of their head during a tackle. Rotational speed is very, very bad, as you might imagine. And all the hormones in the world won’t change that. Nice paper here.
So, yes, the number of transwomen on rugby teams is small right now. Currently the top 30 women in women’s rugby average tens to hundreds of tackles per match. Let’s look at Jess Breach at number 30 in the 2018 Sevens – she made only 60 tackles in that entire tournament. If our imaginary trans woman made a similar number of tackles and taking the low end 20% risk per tackle, that means as many as 12 injuries could result from that tournament. And that is assuming one transwoman in the entire tournament.
Those 12 are excess injuries, i.e. the number of additional injuries incurred by having one transwoman in a tournament who made 60 tackles. The number 1 player by tackles in 2018 was Portia Woodman, who made a whopping 215 tackles. You do the math.
So Harper can go take a long walk off a short pier. Claiming that the risk has to be calculated as a function of number of transwomen in a tournament or league is not helpful to her cause because it underlines the disruption just one transwoman makes to injuries resulting from that tournament.
You’ve heard of ‘fake news’? How about fake women?
Indeed, Omar. You are right. We have conceded too much linguistic ground to them. From now on, if they insist on calling real women ‘cis women’, we must insist on calling them ‘fake women’.
Cis and trans are opposite, but because they are scientific terms, most people don’t understand what people using them are going on about and are fooled. We need to be pro-active in getting out information which equates ‘cis’ with ‘real’ and ‘trans’ with ‘fake’, because no-one would ever accept that ‘real’ and ‘fake’ are equal sub-categories of anything.
From an interview in the Guardian with Dylan Hartley, one-time captain of England, in connexion with his book ‘The Hurt’:
‘Hartley’s love for the game, and his awareness of the toll it exacts, is captured in a line in his startling and compelling new book: “Rugby is great for the soul, but terrible for the body.” Hartley does not want to resemble a victim but his stark testimony is sobering. Anyone who cares about the game, in which he won 97 caps for England and played 250 times for Northampton, should read Hartley’s book or listen when he talks so calmly.
‘“Rugby normalises pain and injuries,” he says. “A young friend of mine who’s 20 and at the Northampton academy went for an operation yesterday. I texted him: ‘Good luck. The first of many.’ It’s the reality.”
‘Hartley looks at me. “If you break your leg, it’s a big rehab process for 18 months. Break your leg in rugby and they’re like: ‘Hmmm, we’ll get you back in so many weeks. You’ll make the Six Nations. Let’s get to work.’ That’s brilliant because you’ve got the people and infrastructure to help you. But you normalise it. Like a gash in training. Vaseline it. Gone. Off you go.”
How does Hartley feel physically today? “Sore,” he admits.
‘Does it hurt walking upstairs? “Walking in general. I stay fit and the Lions and England physio came round the other day. He’s given me things to work on. But it’s not ashtray money if I get weekly soft tissue treatment, osteo and physio, aspiration for the swollen knee, a couple of ostinol jabs for the old hip. Lots of players rely on all that every day – so to suddenly not have it is a shock to the system.”’
***
Watching elderly and not so elderly former rugby players hobbling stiff-legged about, often with a stick, is salutary.
Reminiscent of US football, which leaves too many players with severe brain damage.
For most of my life all I knew about Rugby was that my uncle who died from a sudden blood clot* when he was ~30 played it a lot (I was 10 or so at the time). I got the impression that it was a dumb brutal game just because of that. I only recently watched full games during the most recent Olympics and discovered that it looks like a hell of a lot of fun! No wonder he loved it so much, I would too if I wasn’t already over 50.
* or rather stroke or what happens when it breaks loose and ends up where you really don’t want it to end up.
Well, I loved it in my now distant youth, and sill enjoy watching it, though I’m not all that fond of the modern game, which is far more (legally) brutal than it used to be – though it was always dangerous.
I’m forced to ask that question a lot too, in some of my work on privacy and security. Part of it is related to the fact that we’re all terrible at understanding probability, even if we’re trained in its use. Part is that we’re bad at abstraction, too, so we tend to understand complex situations poorly, conflate and decouple the wrong influences and dramatically over- and under-estimate the effects of change in an environment. On top of that, we cling to preconceptions in flagrant disregard or outright rejection of evidence and steadfastly refuse to learn from the past. I thought I despaired in 2000 when the Y2K problem didn’t lay waste to the world and pundits concluded that it must never have been a threat in the first place rather than it being due to enormous industry efforts to prevent problems. I despair even more to see the same arguments being used to dismiss COVID, while we’re still in the middle of the pandemic, with no end in sight!
This sort of thing is why we find security theatre so comforting but spending money on actual security so difficult. Security is quite easy to sell to bosses as a concept early on in a project and the trick is to spend the money as quickly as you possibly can because it’s always the second thing that gets ripped with extreme prejudice from the budget (the first is the closely-related testing). It becomes less and less of a priority as the inevitable vast underestimates in all the other development costs become apparent. Bosses very quickly decide that security can be added on later on someone else’s budget, despite the facts that:
1. Security is famously not something that can be added later, and
2. It isn’t always something that can be built in from the ground up, either.
A large part of building secure systems is controlling expectations and…well, see above. It’s about controlling the expectations of people and organisations whose perceptions of risk are both flawed and change dramatically depending on how much is left in the dev budget.
Operational security is harder still because everyone undervalues the risk of breaking procedure and good practice for slight increases in convenience. Additionally, because of all of the above, most security systems are fundamentally broken and/or unfit for purpose anyway. This means that more often than not, workers need to fight the security system just to get their jobs done, unwittingly creating further problems. I’ve seen this kind of thing even in systems for things like emergency services deployment and air traffic control as well as less immediately life-threatening stuff.
People are exactly as good at understanding risk when it comes to privacy, as well, and this is a trait everyone including governments (home, friendly and hostile), social media giants and other criminals are keen to exploit and are very successful at doing so. The idea that “if I have nothing to hide then I have nothing to fear” is 100% wrong on both counts but it’s the overriding factor guiding most people’s intuition about… well, about exactly what it is they have to hide and what they have to fear and how to behave accordingly.
In fairness, training people to better understand risk is difficult. It involves changing some of the fundamental ways we develop and evaluate the intuitions that guide us through the world. I’m with Claire, though. I think it’s vital that we learn this sort of thing at a young age. And we should re-enforce that training throughout our lives.
I see this a lot. People assume any probability means it is happening, if they want it to happen. A low probability means it couldn’t possibly happen if they don’t want it to happen (my students honestly think a 1 in 1 million chance of someone dying from something means no one will die). A choice between two things means it is 50/50, because they don’t understand prior probability at all. For instance, one of my friends was saying that there is a 50/50 chance someone is a serial rapist, because they either are or they aren’t. I tried to explain that doesn’t work that way, that the probability would look at the percentage of people in a population that actually are serial rapists, but he still doesn’t grasp the concept.
I discovered this early in my teaching. I think it’s why my students struggle so much with the unit on Ecology, which seems dreadfully easy to me. A lot of that is abstract concepts, and a lot is based on statistical probability, so they get a double whammy.