How Much Credit Do You Deserve for Your Life?

The death is with you on the mountain. This is phrase. I use it chapters of the book. Which I think is really interesting. It's this idea that when you undertake that kind of activity, you have to respect the fact that you could die at any moment. And that's where it is to how to respect what it is you're doing, the craft. So the standard view about risk is a probabilistic one. So We determine the level of risk by working out the likelihood of the risk event. So in this case it would be like falling dying or whatever. What's the likelihood he's gonna die? So I I just think that Standard view doesn't capture it and so but my view does. So this is where we get to the positive bit. So I think the level of risk is primarily to be understood in terms of what I call fragility. The relationship between luck and risk. So I have this view that luck and risk are counterparts, they're not quite the same thing, but they're almost the same thing, but viewed from different perspectives. So risk, I think, is inherently forward looking. And luck is inherently backward looking. So think about you know like a sniper's bullet, you're on a battlefield and a sniper b sniper's bullet whizzes past your ear. Well viewed forward looking, you know, you're at high risk of dying. And then backward looking when now you're lucky to be alive. It's like the same fragile event, but one viewed from a forward looking versus a backward looking perspective. I'm a big fan of Formula One. You can't really make sense of what's going on there except with the right theory of risk. I mean what it is for an F one driver to drive at the very limit. It's not to say that they're gonna crash all the time. Because you're not a great F one driver if you're crashing all the time. The idea is you're you're at the very limit, but not But no further. The skill is all about taking it to the limit. So the fragility is right there. The crash is right there, as it were, next to you. But you don't crash. But the level of the risk, no matter no no preparation is gonna reduce the level of the risk. It's in the nature of what he's doing, but it's high risk. The fragility's built into it. As I say, I think this relates to the to our flourishing as as people because there are lots of decisions we have to make cool.

Hey everybody, it's Michael Trimmer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. My guest today is Dr. Duncan Pritchard. He's a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, And a University of California Irvine, distinguished professor of philosophy.

He works mainly in epistemology and has published widely in this area, including the application of epistemological ideas to such domains as Religion, law, and cognitive science, the search for truth in all these areas. We'll get into that in just a minute. He's also the director of the Center for Knowledge, Technology and Society. Devoted to research that approaches

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