4 ms·
Something about this argument doesn't smell right. I care about the crime rate, or car accident rate, or botched surgery rate, because it tells me the odds tha
by smallnamespace 6y ago
Something about this argument doesn't smell right.
I care about the crime rate, or car accident rate, or botched surgery rate, because it tells me the odds that something bad will happen to me.
Given a stable rate of bad things, population growth alone causes more bad things to happen.
If we took your argument about absolute harm seriously, then we should, say, encourage population reduction until there are only 10k human beings on the planet. That would surely minimize the number of bad things that continue happening to people.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y agoHumans are notorious for under estimating routine hazards, and overestimating things that are rarer. We worry about strangers in deep dark alleys trying to rob/rape/beat/kill us, when in fact, most crime is perpetrated by someone the victim is familiar with.
- tpxl 6y agoIt is trivial to put every criminal to prison: put everyone in prison. It is trivial to ban every spammer: ban everyone. If you ban most spam while significantly harming some of your users, you've done your job poorly.
- pb7 6y agoCan you give some examples of this type of job done flawlessly? i.e. where all bad actors are stopped and no good actors are hurt in the process
- tpxl 6y agoNo, but I can think of a few examples where most of the fraud is stopped while not significantly harming users.
- Nextgrid 6y agoMake fraud impossible through technical means or make "abuse" impossible by just not providing any incentive to do so (for example, make the service paid so that there is no longer any incentive to "abuse" the free service)?
- barnabask 6y agoYour comment calls to mind the paperclip maximizer thought experiment: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer