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Nah I hate that kind of thinking. Someone or some group of people have to be deemed responsible. Here's my thought process with this: So in China, and every co
by liamconnell 11y ago
Nah I hate that kind of thinking. Someone or some group of people have to be deemed responsible. Here's my thought process with this:
So in China, and every country there are a few relevant players. Farmers, farm owners, politicians, and scientists.
Farmers (laborers) have to survive and most work wages so they arent accountable. Farm owners have to compete and if they dont they go out of business and someone will take their place so they're not really accountable. But its the law that makes the rules of the game and so it is the responsibility of the political class to avoid designing "tragedy of the commons" scenarios.
There are at least SOME good-willed politicians who dont want things like antibiotic-apocolypse. The problem is that they have a ton of scientists whispering different things in their ears so they dont know what issues are big threats and which are scientists trying to get funding into their own field of study. Its therefore also the responsibility of the scientific community to effectively communicate with the political class.
See? At least some people out there arent perfectly rational!
- lotyrin 11y agoNo, it's a closed loop of externalized costs. Workers have to try to eat, businesses have to try to compete, voters have to promote their economic interests, politicians have to stay elected. Climate change and antibiotic resistance et al don't cost any of these people anything -- individually. If nobody has to pay for them, and everybody has to compete to take advantage of whatever they can to live and prosper, the rational thing is to fuck everything up. It's a massive scale prisoner's dilemma with high stakes. Government is ostensibly the system that prevents external costs, and imposes rules that skew what's rational for individuals today to be closer to what's rational for society tomorrow, but in practice it fails to do so much of the time.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoExactly. Also, per tradition, let me post a handy reference on coordination problems: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- mikeash 11y agoI don't understand what kind of thinking you're saying you hate. I'm not trying to deflect blame or avoid responsibility. I'm simply saying that this "madness" comes from individual people making completely rational choices. Widespread antibiotic use on farms is both awful and completely sensible for the individuals involved. That doesn't mean there is no responsibility or that we're helpless. It just informs the remedies. It means that attempts to get people to act rationally will fail, because they already are. If you want to change things, then you need to make it so that the rational choice for the individual is also the best choice for society as a whole. And that's typically where the laws come in.