Understanding Risk Management

Discussions of technological risks and their management by corporations and society are ubiquitous and often acrimonious. Equally ubiquitous are several important misconceptions of key risk questions. This paper (i) argues that serious epistemological confusion pervades much of the scientific basis for risk assessment, especially confusion among objective, subjective, and perceived risk, and between facts and ethical values; and (ii) asserts that this confusion combines with psychological aspects of risk perception to produce a confused risk debate, a societal management of risks often based on diffuse or contradictory objectives, and consequently mismanagement of resource allocation to risk reduction.