People in general are bad at judging risks, worse still at trying to judge the risk of head trauma decades down the road from now, especially with the number of people involved loudly pitching for their views to take sway.
I've no doubt some of them have the training and understanding to examine the data (math majors in college - must be some, I'm sure), run the statistics and pick out noise from signal, which I expect wouldn't be an easy thing given the long stretches of time and the many confounding factors involved, but I expect few of those capable of it even try, so the majority are left with the same vox-pops and media segments everyone else has on the subject.
Couple that with the macho attitudes and self-image in the sport, and that the entertainment needs to keep working for the sport to keep making money (nothing entertaining about permanent head trauma), and that the people having to judge these risks are young males being offered life-changing opportunities and sums of money, and it seems that the default position here should be that we consider football players incapable of weighing the risks (much as we should, by default, consider people bad at judging risks).
Why would we think they are somehow especially capable of judging the risks?
I've no doubt some of them have the training and understanding to examine the data (math majors in college - must be some, I'm sure), run the statistics and pick out noise from signal, which I expect wouldn't be an easy thing given the long stretches of time and the many confounding factors involved, but I expect few of those capable of it even try, so the majority are left with the same vox-pops and media segments everyone else has on the subject.
Couple that with the macho attitudes and self-image in the sport, and that the entertainment needs to keep working for the sport to keep making money (nothing entertaining about permanent head trauma), and that the people having to judge these risks are young males being offered life-changing opportunities and sums of money, and it seems that the default position here should be that we consider football players incapable of weighing the risks (much as we should, by default, consider people bad at judging risks).
Why would we think they are somehow especially capable of judging the risks?