Great article on why we make mistakes

A friend sent me this and I thought I'd share it with the group:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ad...lls/index.html

Lots of food for thought.

-R

Lots of food for thought.

Indeed, I cannot thank you enough for sharing. Very well written
piece, and very apt to our chosen obsession.

Just another example if I may-

I am in the Selesia region of Poland at the moment. Around here, a
local small town was having a very real problem with accidents- young,
aggressive drivers were either pushing or out and out ignoring the
traffic lights (all of 5 in town), and they were running a half dozen
fatalities per year just within the twelve blocks of the village.

The town mayor, paradoxically, decided to remove all five stoplights
from town and put stop signs back up everywhere. Without the lights
to give people the false sense of security that it was safe to cross
the intersection, people had to take responsibility for crossing
themselves.

The insane driving hasn't stopped I'm afraid (I can' assure you that,
I see it walking to work), but according to everyone I've talked to
here, there hasn't been a fatality in the village since...

This was four years ago.

The flip side is of course, if you are making your population spend
all of their effort protecting themselves, they will have less mental
energy to be creative and productive... there is certainly, however, a
limit at which you _need_ to stop nannying people, because there is no
limit to how incompetent people can become if you give them no
responsibility for their actions.