> If you watch an expert arborist (tree man) at work, you’ll notice that they’ve removed every single safety guard from their chainsaws.

You can say that about everything that has some form of guardrails. It goes faster without them. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the right decision to remove them. People tend to change their minds after they have an accident, which to me is an indication that they can't seem to properly assess the risk and the outcome beforehand.

It might alternatively be an indication that they can't properly assess the risk and the outcome afterwards....

(More likely both: we are as a species absolutely terrible about assessing low-probability risks.)

A couple of years ago we bought a 50-year-old-house and gutted it. We had professionals do the stuff that required expertise or a lot of time / skills (electricians, plumbers, plasterers, etc), and did most other things ourselves.

At some point I'd come in to do something within my remit while the electricians were here. I'd put in earplugs to do some masonry drilling, because I've only got one set of ears and I'd like to be able to hear things when I'm 80. One of the electrician's assistants, probably in his late 20's commented on it, something like, "Got your ear condoms on, huh?" I'm at a stage in my life where I don't really care about that sort of thing, so just blew it off.

A few months later, that same guy came in to do the final wiring on something. He'd lost the end of his thumb -- had an accident with some tool or other and cut it off.

It's hard for me not to think that his attitude toward earplugs and his accident were related. Nobody deserves to be maimed for life, but we live in a universe which can be pretty unforgiving.

I've repeatedly heard the anecdote (to the point that I suspect it's now data) that inexperienced users of chainsaws are terrified of them, experienced users are comfortable with them, and very experienced users are even more terrified of them.

Opinions like yours are wildly popular on the white collar internet because they "feel good" to people who are far removed from actual danger and productivity. But if you go to a part of the internet where many are self employed such naïve and un-nuanced opinions will be laughed at and ridiculed because they completely ignore the benefit side of the equation.

We all only get so much time on this earth and on some level quality and quantity are fungible, if inefficiently and imprecisely with some element of chance.

How much is a life worth? What's a finger worth? What's a crippling accident worth? And so on and so on. Once you define these terms numbers can be crunched and it can be determined whether you are right or wrong in any given case, and I assure you, there will be cases where your attitude computes so poorly it is farcical.

Is the retired carpenter with 10 fingers really better off than the one with 7? Sure the guy with 7 wished he'd not made that foolish mistake but the lifetime productivity gains of habitually moving fast likely show in his quality of life.

More complex benefit calculations simply make the problem more complex, but they do not change the fundamental nature of the tradeoff.

Depending on what an injury is worth, the compensation structure, etc, etc, it may very well be the right decision to disable all the safeties on everything and work fast for 10yr before losing a finger and moving on to something else because the faster man can command the higher labor rate, etc, etc.

Likewise, often times it's more valuable to write crap software in a week that solves a transient need for a year rather than spending 7mo spec'ing out and developing the arc of the goddamn covenant. Yeah it might shit all over your production database but if you're smart about the details it won't be much more likely to do that than "good" software and you can be on to the next value producing task.