This is a post arguing against the widespread adoption of safety standards. It's tangentially related to the Ben Franklin maxim - "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" - and society's current obsession with safety vis a vis the pandemic. Obsession with safety has spread to, or is spread by, government and large corporate standards organizations pushing global compliance with safety standards. --- Safety standards in product development and manufacturing are quickly becoming compulsory across the developed world (best consumer-facing example I can think of - ISO 26262). My arguments against this are laid out point by point below. 1. Adherence to safety standards often do not make things safe. They are riddled from start to finish with the kind of half-hearted inconsistencies that come from committee authorship. Full of watered-down phrases like "including but not limited to" and "highly recommended" which leave compliance open for interpretation. Left with an indefinite standard, engineers put undue focus on compliance instead of actual safety. Compliance with a safety standard is not equivalent with safety. 2. Overly stringent standards act as a deterrent to competition and barrier to marketplace entry. My example is from personal experience - It's often stated with only a little jest that safety standard compliance adds $10 million to the development costs for every control module in a car. The theory is that European automakers are using safety standards as a leg up on the US, and to give them the perceived "moral high ground", arguing for safety in contract negotiations. Large corporations, faced with an onerous standard, end up pooling resources to the detriment of smaller companies. 3. Again starting in Europe, these standards are seen legally as "state of the art"; corporations can use this as a legal defense against injury claims in court. This not theory - it is clearly stated in public training material for many standards. This amounts to additional legal protection for large corporations and less legal recourse for consumers. 4. The widespread adoption of a single standard is inherently stifling. Without the freedom to innovate, safety development will stagnate and match pace with an ISO commitee that meets once a year. Different groups are not permitted to have different views on what they consider "safe". --- I welcome any feedback. I originally started thinking about this when everyone started saying "stay safe" instead of "bye" at the end of meetings, and I thought, what does that even mean? Fear is paralyzing, "staying safe" is being immobilized by irrational fear.