Originally Posted by
Steve Demuth
Mark,
Two things here that I would disagree with in the context of this thread:
1. "an acceptable level of risk" is a statement about probability and statistics, so saying we should move away from that is an oxymoron. Risk is always a probability of undesirable outcome, not an absolute certainty of undesirable outcome. So, no, repeating an operation 10 times without incident and concluding that it will never bite you isn't a valid conclusion. It should increase your confidence that your original analysis of the operation as safe was valid, but it does not provide certainty. Using "safe" techniques lowers the probability of an undesirable outcome, using "unsafe" techniques raises it. But it's always about probability.
I work in a hospital that is absolutely dedicated to patient safety. We are by any reckoning among the best in the world. Yet even entirely preventable "accidents" - things that are never intended and which in theory can only happen due to a mistake by a highly focused professional team - occur in roughly 1 of 100,000 surgeries. All of our training and practice hasn't made the probability zero, but a strict attention to following every safety practice does make it very small. (It's worth noting, that a large fraction of surgeons initially rejected the safety protocols we used to achieve those results, because they "didn't need them" and "understood their own skills and limitations well enough to know they didn't.")
2. "Because after all it's your fingers" is true only if you DON"T post it on Youtube. Once you make a "how to" video and share it with every woodworker looking for answers via a Youtube video, it's no longer just your fingers. This is the real crux of this whole thread. Taking personal responsibility for what you do means, to me at least, being aware of how it will be used by others. Youtube videos are used by people who are not expert to learn. We should all take responsibility for what we're teaching them, understanding they may not have the skills and background we do. Would you take a 15 year old aspiring woodworker into your shop and teach them that ripping a severely cupped board on a table saw resulting in binding the saw to the point of jamming, and severe burning of the cut is a good use of tools? I doubt it. I think you're much more of a pro than that. But that's what that Youtube video that started this thread is doing (among other, to me even more hair-raising, things).