The Wiki Man

28 February 2009

A fortnightly column on technology and the web

David Young’s Spectator article ‘Health’n’safety everywhere, except in banking’ (14 February) was inspired. He might have added that bankers are occasionally made to pay for their excesses. Unlike regulators. For years the Food Standards Agency warned we should eat no more than three eggs a week. It now emerges that this figure had no evidential basis at all: there is no reason a normal person should not eat two eggs every day.

I think we should sue. After all, for 50 million Britons to forgo 11 eggs every week seems a heavy loss of net human happiness. A gain in weight, too, since recent trials in Baton Rouge suggest women who eat two eggs for breakfast consume many fewer calories in the course of each day than those who start with bagels.

We won’t get an apology, of course. In fact you’re on safe ground cautioning against any human practice that’s enjoyable. It is an example of the ‘hair-shirt fallacy’ — the unwritten rule which states that, when in doubt, you should recommend whatever course of action involves the most self-denial. Hair-shirtism is a safe bet: people are instinctively Manichaean and easily persuaded that physical pleasures are bad. Also, while experts are routinely sued for negligence, no one gets punished for excessive caution. The Millennium Bug computer scare is widely believed by many commentators to have been a glitch inflated by scaremongers to apocalyptic status; yet who was sued for failing to downplay the problem?

Adam Smith spotted this bias when he remarked that ‘Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.’ Reactions to climate change illustrate this well; even if the doomsayers are right, we should be on guard for people who instinctively want to tackle problems in the most self-punishing way possible.

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