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> Meanwhile the makers of the alarms have an incentive to be overly sensitive because a false positive is much less dangerous than a false negative. I wonder w
by piotrkaminski 10y ago
> Meanwhile the makers of the alarms have an incentive to be overly sensitive because a false positive is much less dangerous than a false negative.
I wonder whether this is actually statistically true, if false positives cause true positives to be ignored by some non-trivial proportion of the population? I think it's just as likely this is legal CYA from the alarm makers -- they can only get sued for false negatives, after all.
- saulrh 10y agoTo them a false negative is worse than a false positive, for precisely the reason you describe: it simply doesn't matter how many false positives you have, but the very first false negative destroys your company. Their optimization function is not fire safety. It's making money, which is only mostly associated with fire safety.
- piotrkaminski 10y agoRight, so I wonder how we could change the incentives so their optimization function is a little more socially responsible? Perhaps a law that allows civil lawsuits for false positive alarms would help, but I'd be afraid of unexpected side-effects.
- colanderman 10y agoIt's the topic of one of Aesop's fables, so it's at least a widely observed phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf