SafetyInsights.org

Criminal that this interview with Drew Rae on the The Circus of Safety of Safety doesn’t have more hits.

Link: https://youtu.be/PA_K-XrfWHo?si=Lhcf2g7RXGELOkP5

If you work in ‘safety’, or similar fields, it’s worth the 39:55 of your life.

Some transcript extracts:

·        Use of recordables can mask judgements “recordable and how much that term hides what we’re actually doing with safety statistics”

·        There’s a false objectivity with TRIFR etc., “recordable is not even a like objective thing it’s a decision that we make a binary decision about”

·        Standardising ‘good ideas’ can corrupt their value – “good ideas the moment we try to put them down on paper and standardize them and put a formula to them become bad ideas”

·        Why rates can reduce meaning, “why turn it from a raw number into a rate except to try to make it look good”

·        And on ratios and decimals, “you’ve lost information when you try to turn that into a ratio and put decimal points behind it”

·        What measurement should look like “ask the question first and then go and get the data that matches that particular question”

·        Many new-comers to statistics miss “the idea of variability… numbers go up and down without reasons”

·        And why a number going down doesn’t necessarily mean better, “when a number goes down that might not have any reason behind it at all it’s just like rolling a dice”

·        On ‘statistically significant, meaning “if something’s not statistically significant that means that the change you’re seeing is not real