> When you add to this the claim that people who wear helmets
> are likely to take more risks because they think themselves
> safer, it may indeed be a wash.
Isn't this just the standard problem of Statistics, the so-called Mean Dead Rabbit?
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2008/2008-February/002801.html
The question, to me, isn't one of overall effectiveness -- finding the root cause of accidents is difficult. The question is whether wearing a helmet in and of itself is a risk mitigation strategy; and conversely, is actively choosing to not wear a helmet a risk-aggravating action.
> several people in these threads seem to make a rather different,
> more counterintiutive argument, which is that drivers respond
> with more trepidation to bikers who don't wear helmets.
I can say for myself that when I see a person on a cycle without a helmet, I watch them more carefully than others in traffic -- and I am usually rewarded with at best extra-risky and at worst anti-social behavior. It's like seeing someone drive for many blocks with a turn signal on: they require extra attention during the scan, because they basically aren't paying attention to the task at hand.
[ other, good stuff snipped ]
> If it was discovered, for instance, that riding without a
> helmet wasn't actually all that risky after all, it would
> ruin all the fun. It is better to ride that razor's edge
> between individual assertions of liberty no matter the risk,
> and the pretention of being more reasonable and informed
> about the ACTUAL risk than all the people who claim you are
> taking that risk.
This issue always reminds me of seat belts. It will crush our liberty-luvin' spirit to be forced by the nanny state to wear seat belts, and so we must introduce them slowly, over more than a decade, so that one day we will find that an entire generation of children has grown up tricked into largely wearing seat belts everytime they get in the car. Later we can do the math and find out that most people didn't really have all that much resistence to wearing seat belts, and had they been introduced more quickly, *hundreds of thousands* of lives would have been saved.
/jordan