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This illustrates a more generic problem with our legal system. When the option for positive action to mitigate a problem exists, we often don't do it because t

This illustrates a more generic problem with our legal system. When the option for positive action to mitigate a problem exists, we often don't do it because the action creates legal liability for any and all negative externalities of the action, even if the negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what would happen doing nothing. We resist permitting prescribed burns because when they cause unintended damage and harm, there's a person to institution to blame, so no one wants to take on that liability. So instead, we let brush grow out of control and eventually a mega fire hits that creates orders of magnitude more destruction and health hazard than the sum of all prescribed burns ever would have. Another example is medical treatment. If you develop cancer and die because you get no treatment, there's no person to blame and no one to sue. It's just an "act of god" so people accept the outcome and move on. But if you get treatment and the doctors make a mistake and their actions cause some unintended harm, then there's someone to blame and sue, even if your statistical outcome was drastically improved by their intervention. The same problem is going to exist trying to mitigate climate change. Positive actions to reverse the problem will create negative externalities that hurt some people, but doing nothing will be drastically worse. I don't know how we solve this problem. To me, the root of the problem seems to be a weakness of the constitution of our society and/or leaders. Collectively, we need to figure out how to balance diffuse statistical risk against acute, dramatic risk, or else we all risk being the frog slowly boiled alive.

jackphilson 3y ago
And this just generalizes to the recurring problem of individualism vs collectivism. Government regulation is the answer, but it's not being applied efficiently here
- vuln 3y ago
  > Government regulation is the answer, but it's not being applied efficiently here Do you have any examples of Government Regulations that are applied efficiently and do not cause harm to any individuals?
  - Analemma_ 3y ago
    You are demonstrating the exact problem the OP is complaining about. "Does not cause harm to any individuals" is an impossible standard to meet, and should not be weighed against "do nothing, and eventually cause a catastrophe for which there is no clear agent to blame".
  - l33t233372 3y ago
    I’m not sure where you make the leap to “do not cause harm to any individuals.” This thread is about managing and reducing harm in places where having “no harm” (whatever that means) isn’t an option.
  - ncallaway 3y ago
    > and do not cause harm to any individuals Your bar for a government regulation is really “not a single individual is harmed”? That’s insane, and almost exactly the problem anonporridge was describing. Almost every government regulation harms someone, in that it almost always is limiting the actions available to someone. To answer your question: no, there is no such regulation, but it’s not relevant, because I think your metric is atrocious.
  - foxyv 3y ago
    > and do not cause harm to any individuals You're moving the bar a little there. There will always be harm to individuals due to the law of unintended consequences. However, government regulation is really good at preventing a "Tragedy of the Commons." For instance, regulations on CFC emissions hurt a lot of individuals. However, they prevented a much greater tragedy. Removing lead from car exhaust marginally hurt an entire generation, while improving the lives of the next by orders of magnitude. Other examples: Building codes, Car Safety, Fair Labor Standards Act, Food and Drug Regulations.
  - c54 3y ago
    Social security (has flaws but basically solved the widespread pre social security problem of poverty amongst the elderly) Food safety, leaded gas and paint, restricted chemicals lists (for safety reason, less of a fan of drug bans). Bank deposit reserve requirements. Obamacare. Antitrust legislation. Seat belts (extremely controversial at the time, people protested the loss of their freedoms etc etc). Alaska’s Permanent Fund. Norway’s government pension fund.
- hcurtiss 3y ago
  I don't think that's it. I think it's more a consequence of democracy versus autocracy. An autocracy could make these trade-offs without political consequence. Of course, autocracies come with other profound challenges. Most I think agree that a benevolent dictator produces the best outcomes. The problem is that human benevolence is fickle, and subject to interpretation -- invariably leading to violence.
  - anonporridge 3y ago
    I think this does hit something. There's a reason by China is having no problem rolling out high speed rail across the entire country on the order of a decade while California can't even roll out a single line in the same time. China can just bulldoze entire villages while the little people have no recourse to resist. That power is incredibly useful for getting things done, but the big problem of succession makes that level of power incredibly dangerous, fickle, and fragile.
    - lazide 3y ago
      1) it’s all good until you’re one of the ‘little people’ 2) succession/plan B is always the problem with dictators/dictatorships. If you’re lucky, the interests of those in power are genuinely aligned with your best interests and they’re competent - (Singapore/PAP, at least historically), but nothing lasts forever.
      - username7282919 3y ago
        Most people in China actually want to be one of the “little people”. They get compensated way more than what they could make in their lifetime. Doing the same in California would be 10-100x more expensive though, people are just cheaper there.
        lazide 3y ago
        It’s way easier to tie everyone up in manipulative bullshit court proceedings in the US, and no one has the incentive/interest in stopping it right now. It isn’t even about 10-100x cost, if it was straightforward cash. It would be resolved in weeks if that was the case. In many of these equivalent situations, it drags out for decades. At that point, it’s a toss up if the project even makes sense anymore, since everyone who needed it when it was voted in/started has moved on (by necessity) to something else. In China, the courts basically just say ‘which way does the CCP want this to go?’ and voila, that happens. For better or worse.
ummonk 3y ago
Another example is how many people advocated for (and how many countries essentially adopted) letting covid spread throughout the population (either like wildfire or via "flatten the curve") to get natural herd immunity because letting a poorly understood (but known to be quite deadly) virus spread through the population was doable but giving out vaccines that hadn't been through phase 2 trials wasn't.
- gotoeleven 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - slaw 3y ago
    Sweden’s Covid death rate among lowest in Europe, despite avoiding strict lockdowns https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/swedens-death-rate-among-lowest-europe-despite-avoiding-strict/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
- throwaway22032 3y ago
  I mean, if anything, it was the other way around. We could point to death statistics and say "hey, that's provable harm". But quantifying the loss of quality of life from spending a year indoors, screwing the labour market and supply chain, messing up kids' socialization etc was harder, so we mostly just kind of ignored it.
- cbsmith 3y ago
  That's not entirely accurate. The case for letting covid spread hinges on whether you have the medical infrastructure to manage the pandemic. If you can handle a "more than flu season" chunk of your population needing medical care then there's no real pandemic threat. Unfortunately, many countries in the developed world reduced the size of their medical infrastructure because they could rely on flu vaccines to minimize the demands of flu season. Sure, you can try to flatten the curve, but COVID-19 proved to be difficult to contain, and initially we had little understanding of how transmissible it was, and what it would take to contain it. This meant you had to plan for a worse that was almost certainly worse than we'd actually face. The thing is, vaccines that haven't been through phase 2 trials can potentially make a pandemic worse. That's why you have to wait for them to resolve.
cbsmith 3y ago
Basically, the legal equivalent to the trolley problem. Worth noting that there are solutions in our legal code for this. Good Samaritan laws would be a good example. However, even in a world without such countermeasures, if the negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what would happen doing nothing, it stands to reason that simply paying the price for the negative externalities would still be logical and it would have the advantage that those negatively impacted by those externalities would not feel like they are disproportionately bearing the burden of the action. > But if you get treatment and the doctors make a mistake and their actions cause some unintended harm, then there's someone to blame and sue, even if your statistical outcome was drastically improved by their intervention. Doctors still have a lot of cover, even if they make a mistake, for exactly that reason. The real challenge for doctors is the difficulty preventing the litigation itself. Even if they win in court, the consequences of being subject to so many lawsuits are dramatic. > The same problem is going to exist trying to mitigate climate change. Positive actions to reverse the problem will create negative externalities that hurt some people, but doing nothing will be drastically worse. I think the bigger problem is that mitigating climate change will necessarily change the winners and losers, and the current winners have more power than the current losers.
ncallaway 3y ago
I think this is a good diagnosis of some of our issues, but it’s a really hard problem. When we go the other way, and allow actions that harm people, we have an unfortunate tendency to allow those harms to fall… extremely disproportionately on those with the least burden to bear the harms and the least power to be compensated for those harms. I think, as the other poster noted it really comes down to the individualistic nature in which we try and address some of these collective action problems. We need to acknowledge that the solutions will cause less overall harm than not implementing them, but also recognize that the harms from the solutions may fall unevenly, and find ways to socialize the damage those solutions cause, rather than leave that damage on the powerless.
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  > When we go the other way, and allow actions that harm people, we have an unfortunate tendency to allow those harms to fall… extremely disproportionately on those with the least burden to bear the harms and the least power to be compensated for those harms. I don't think this is true, or at least it is nonobvious. Are prescribed-burns-gone-wrong more likely to harm the most vulnerable, as compared to unprescribed burns? If not, then this objection doesn't really apply.
  - evo 3y ago
    I suspect that they would, if for no other reason that if the direct action is indiscriminate in whom it harms, then the well-heeled will have the resources necessary to seek compensation via litigation while the marginalized will be out of luck.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    In general I'd be in agreement with you, but I think this is one case where the typical argument is quite clearly true. I've lived in regions with slash and burn agriculture, which uses seasonal controlled burns. It is horrible. Air quality levels spike into the hundreds for a period of weeks to months, depending on the specifics of the season. It's difficult to tolerate in my hoity toity life with indoor work, air conditioning, and multiple air purifiers [barely] managing to keep the air breathable. At the same time this is happening, there are countless people working outdoors or in other sorts of conditions where they don't have such luxuries. And the cost is masked because, somewhat like smoking, many of the consequences happen over many years if not decades. And even when you do hit a climax, it may be argued that the bad air contributed, but did not provably cause, e.g. some cardiovascular event. Of course, if you don't burn - then a lightning strike, or a firebug, means you're going to really burn. Clearly we need an army of sheep. Gah, then people would complain about the methane and massive marbled mutton fests. Cripes things are tricky.
modriano 3y ago
I think the root of the problem is that we set erroneously low prices for some behaviors. Actuaries should be able to figure out reasonable values for the probability of some costly outcome (e.g., a massive, uncontrollable wild fire) given specific behaviors or conditions (e.g., letting property grow into being a wildfire risk, vs reducing that risk by clearing overgrowth), and for risks with costs that a person/company can't ever cover (e.g., a massive wildfire), those responsible entities should have to carry insurance, who can incentivize or implement cost-reducing preventative actions in the places with greatest risk. In the climate change context, the price of dumping GHGs into the atmosphere is nowhere near the cost. If we priced that in, economics would rapidly make renewable | nuclear power projects, public transit projects, shifts away from concrete in construction, etc economically obvious choices. But we've messed up the prices, and these messed up prices incentivize people to ignore problems or worse, spend societal quantities of money and labor on growing the problems.
Curvature5868 3y ago
A viable solution might be the creation of an insurance fund to compensate for any unintended damage caused by prescribed burns. This fund, funded by utility companies especially those in wildfire-prone areas, would function similarly to banks' contributions to the FDIC. This could alleviate liability concerns, thereby encouraging proactive wildfire prevention strategies.
- riskable 3y ago
  This is a good idea but it doesn't address the pollution problem. If a prescribed burn will increase pollution beyond the EPA's acceptable limits then the burn will be against the law. We need the EPA's emissions/particulate rules to be adjusted to give priority to prescribed burns by certified firefighters and foresters. They don't do burns often enough that the EPA should be limiting their power to manage fire susceptibility. We also need watchdogs to make sure that regular polluters don't increase output during prescribed burns in order to hide their actual emissions.
  - ROTMetro 3y ago
    Being the devil's advocate, when my mother was dying of cancer there were forest fires here. She had to leave the area and stay at a hotel far away at great cost/physical discomfort (at that point she had a hospital bed at home). There are people who physically can't handle the higher particulate amount, what do you propose we do with them? Let them suffer/die?
    - Filligree 3y ago
      But the burn will happen anyway. It'll just happen at a different time, when it hasn't been prepared for, with less control and more particulates as well as destruction of communities.
      - XorNot 3y ago
        No it won't. It might happen. Or it might go years before happening in that area. Or you might move away before it does. But you don't get to use your perception of inevitability to cause harm and financial damage for someone else.
chaostheory 3y ago
> This illustrates a more generic problem with our legal system. I feel that this better illustrates the downsides of centralized power: centralized decision making won’t be as efficient as decision making done at the nodes, closer to the actual problem because of missing context and data; and maybe even indifference For the record, I am not saying that there are no benefits to centralized planning and control. This is just one of its weaknesses besides corruption
renewiltord 3y ago
That's right. The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics is baked into our legal framework.
- Symmetry 3y ago
  The original "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" blog post: https://web.archive.org/web/20220705105128/https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220705105128/https://blog.jaib... It's nice to have a handy phrase for this effect.
reaperducer 3y ago
While you're not wrong, the issue from the article is about a local issue, not necessarily with the legal system. In some places, proscribed burns are routine. Just not in the place that the article is about. Heck, the Chicago Parks District does proscribed burns in Lincoln Park, which is a very urban location.
- robohoe 3y ago
  Yep. We have them outside of Chicago in IL as well. Pretty common to see them happen every year around here.
derefr 3y ago
The medical analogy here is the DNR order. Doctors don't want to create liability by explicitly assisting in a patient's death, even of someone in a vegetative state. So instead, they avoid this liability while still "accomplishing death", by following an order to intentionally avoid explicitly reversing any sudden "act of god" event that would cause the patient to die without active intervention. Or, to put that another way: instead of controlled burns where you're actively setting the fire, why not just build (and maintain) the firebreaks, wait for a wildfire to happen inside the burn zone, and then just refuse to put it out?
- dllthomas 3y ago
  > why not just build (and maintain) the firebreaks, wait for a wildfire to happen inside the burn zone, and then just refuse to put it out? Per my understanding, part of performing a controlled burn is mustering more resources near the burn (spatially and temporally) than you could reasonably maintain near every possible burn site all the time.
  - toast0 3y ago
    Under the prepare the firebreaks ahead of time doctrine, you'd still be on the hook for mustering resources in response to an unscheduled fire as is the case today, but if the firebreaks are already in place and appropriate for the conditions at the time, the response would be watch and wait, and if all goes well, let it burn out without much additional effort. If conditions aren't appropriate, then you're back to status quo of containing a wildfire; but maybe the firebreaks help somewhat? (Would need the opinion of someone knowledgable in wildfire fighting rather than random internet peeps to know if this approaches a reasonable idea at all though; I'd wonder if it's reasonable to build and maintain general purpose firebreaks in large forests at all; and what effect that would have on the habitability of the forest for its flora and fauna)
  - derefr 3y ago
    The interesting thing about controlled burns is that by doing them, you end up with fewer possible burn sites. So such an approach would get easier over time.
hammock 3y ago
We can start by evaluating and updating regulations, improving training and safety protocols, engaging with local communities, and increasing public awareness about the benefits and risks associated with controlled burns. The goal is to enable the use of controlled burns as a valuable tool for land management and wildfire prevention while adequately addressing concerns related to potential negative externalities.
shagie 3y ago
https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/science-research/2021-10-15/prescribed-burns-in-idaho-require-good-neighbors https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/science-research/2021-... > Heather Heward is a senior instructor at the University of Idaho who teaches about forests and fires. She said it’s not just federal land we need to be thinning and burning, it’s private land, too. > “We have a real lack of (prescribed burn) practitioners, specifically on the private land side, that are able to do this work because – we're scared, honestly. We are scared that something will go wrong and that someone will sue us. I'm scared of that,” she said.
stainablesteel 3y ago
yeah there's no nuance allowed in liability kids grow up without taking enough risks and it affects their brain development we've sacrificed healthy risks for unhealthy fear
theptip 3y ago
Yep, in Ethics this is known as the Act / Omission distinction. (Even if they result in the same consequences, you’re ethically responsible for your acts, and rarely to the same extent your omissions.) It’s common to the main deontological ethical frameworks including the Judeo-Christian models that underpin “western values. The “solution” is to take a Consequentialist approach, though most people fail the trolley problem and find consequentialism repugnant, so I don’t think we will solve this problem any time soon. (Most people are familiar with Mills’ hedonic utilitarianism, but it’s quite simplistic; I’m a big fan of Eudaimonia as your value function, and richer systems like two-level utilitarianism as a way of getting round the “calculate everything all the time” problem with some utilitarian systems.)
jetrink 3y ago
I have another specific example of this to offer: Active vs. passive flood control. One passive control mechanism is the retention basin. This is just a pond connected to a water system. When it rains and the water begins to rise, some water flows into the pond instead of flowing downstream, reducing the effect of the storm. You can improve the retention basin by adding a pump to actively manage the basin's capacity. When there is rain in the forecast, you pump water out of the basin, reducing its water level. When the rain arrives, you turn off the pump and let the basin refill. This increases the amount of water that the basin is able to divert during the storm. I worked with a company that designed such a system and we even installed a demonstration unit for a municipality. It worked as intended and the city engineer advocated for expanding the project to all suitable basins. However, when the municipality's lawyers looked at the project, they argued that if the system failed to activate prior to a storm, the city might be liable any flooding that occurred afterward. Of course, the scenario where the system failed to function was identical to one in which it had never been built in the first place*, but that was not a convincing argument and the project was killed. * I like escalators because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. - Mitch Hedberg
BurningFrog 3y ago
There is a strong, mostly unstated, assumption in this era that doing nothing is always safe. I don't know how to fight that.
m463 3y ago
It's been said that if the automobile or airplane was invented in the present day, regulations would prevent them from coming to market.
robertlagrant 3y ago
The trolley problem[0] is instructive. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
NumberWangMan 3y ago
Haha, it was me, Moloch! https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ In other words, these are situations where the incentives for individuals are not aligned with incentives for the group.
xp84 3y ago
This sounds like a problem to be solved by the insurance industry, who can measure risk because it's their money on the line. Insurers should refuse to renew fire coverage in areas where they can see that the authorities have been derelict in doing prescribed burns. Don't like it? Risk losing your house, or move.

jackphilson 3y ago

And this just generalizes to the recurring problem of individualism vs collectivism. Government regulation is the answer, but it's not being applied efficiently here

vuln 3y ago
> Government regulation is the answer, but it's not being applied efficiently here Do you have any examples of Government Regulations that are applied efficiently and do not cause harm to any individuals?
- Analemma_ 3y ago
  You are demonstrating the exact problem the OP is complaining about. "Does not cause harm to any individuals" is an impossible standard to meet, and should not be weighed against "do nothing, and eventually cause a catastrophe for which there is no clear agent to blame".
- l33t233372 3y ago
  I’m not sure where you make the leap to “do not cause harm to any individuals.” This thread is about managing and reducing harm in places where having “no harm” (whatever that means) isn’t an option.
- ncallaway 3y ago
  > and do not cause harm to any individuals Your bar for a government regulation is really “not a single individual is harmed”? That’s insane, and almost exactly the problem anonporridge was describing. Almost every government regulation harms someone, in that it almost always is limiting the actions available to someone. To answer your question: no, there is no such regulation, but it’s not relevant, because I think your metric is atrocious.
- foxyv 3y ago
  > and do not cause harm to any individuals You're moving the bar a little there. There will always be harm to individuals due to the law of unintended consequences. However, government regulation is really good at preventing a "Tragedy of the Commons." For instance, regulations on CFC emissions hurt a lot of individuals. However, they prevented a much greater tragedy. Removing lead from car exhaust marginally hurt an entire generation, while improving the lives of the next by orders of magnitude. Other examples: Building codes, Car Safety, Fair Labor Standards Act, Food and Drug Regulations.
- c54 3y ago
  Social security (has flaws but basically solved the widespread pre social security problem of poverty amongst the elderly) Food safety, leaded gas and paint, restricted chemicals lists (for safety reason, less of a fan of drug bans). Bank deposit reserve requirements. Obamacare. Antitrust legislation. Seat belts (extremely controversial at the time, people protested the loss of their freedoms etc etc). Alaska’s Permanent Fund. Norway’s government pension fund.
hcurtiss 3y ago
I don't think that's it. I think it's more a consequence of democracy versus autocracy. An autocracy could make these trade-offs without political consequence. Of course, autocracies come with other profound challenges. Most I think agree that a benevolent dictator produces the best outcomes. The problem is that human benevolence is fickle, and subject to interpretation -- invariably leading to violence.
- anonporridge 3y ago
  I think this does hit something. There's a reason by China is having no problem rolling out high speed rail across the entire country on the order of a decade while California can't even roll out a single line in the same time. China can just bulldoze entire villages while the little people have no recourse to resist. That power is incredibly useful for getting things done, but the big problem of succession makes that level of power incredibly dangerous, fickle, and fragile.
  - lazide 3y ago
    1) it’s all good until you’re one of the ‘little people’ 2) succession/plan B is always the problem with dictators/dictatorships. If you’re lucky, the interests of those in power are genuinely aligned with your best interests and they’re competent - (Singapore/PAP, at least historically), but nothing lasts forever.
    - username7282919 3y ago
      Most people in China actually want to be one of the “little people”. They get compensated way more than what they could make in their lifetime. Doing the same in California would be 10-100x more expensive though, people are just cheaper there.
      - lazide 3y ago
        It’s way easier to tie everyone up in manipulative bullshit court proceedings in the US, and no one has the incentive/interest in stopping it right now. It isn’t even about 10-100x cost, if it was straightforward cash. It would be resolved in weeks if that was the case. In many of these equivalent situations, it drags out for decades. At that point, it’s a toss up if the project even makes sense anymore, since everyone who needed it when it was voted in/started has moved on (by necessity) to something else. In China, the courts basically just say ‘which way does the CCP want this to go?’ and voila, that happens. For better or worse.

ummonk 3y ago

Another example is how many people advocated for (and how many countries essentially adopted) letting covid spread throughout the population (either like wildfire or via "flatten the curve") to get natural herd immunity because letting a poorly understood (but known to be quite deadly) virus spread through the population was doable but giving out vaccines that hadn't been through phase 2 trials wasn't.

gotoeleven 3y ago
[flagged]
- slaw 3y ago
  Sweden’s Covid death rate among lowest in Europe, despite avoiding strict lockdowns https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/swedens-death-rate-among-lowest-europe-despite-avoiding-strict/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
throwaway22032 3y ago
I mean, if anything, it was the other way around. We could point to death statistics and say "hey, that's provable harm". But quantifying the loss of quality of life from spending a year indoors, screwing the labour market and supply chain, messing up kids' socialization etc was harder, so we mostly just kind of ignored it.
cbsmith 3y ago
That's not entirely accurate. The case for letting covid spread hinges on whether you have the medical infrastructure to manage the pandemic. If you can handle a "more than flu season" chunk of your population needing medical care then there's no real pandemic threat. Unfortunately, many countries in the developed world reduced the size of their medical infrastructure because they could rely on flu vaccines to minimize the demands of flu season. Sure, you can try to flatten the curve, but COVID-19 proved to be difficult to contain, and initially we had little understanding of how transmissible it was, and what it would take to contain it. This meant you had to plan for a worse that was almost certainly worse than we'd actually face. The thing is, vaccines that haven't been through phase 2 trials can potentially make a pandemic worse. That's why you have to wait for them to resolve.

cbsmith 3y ago

Basically, the legal equivalent to the trolley problem. Worth noting that there are solutions in our legal code for this. Good Samaritan laws would be a good example. However, even in a world without such countermeasures, if the negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what would happen doing nothing, it stands to reason that simply paying the price for the negative externalities would still be logical and it would have the advantage that those negatively impacted by those externalities would not feel like they are disproportionately bearing the burden of the action. > But if you get treatment and the doctors make a mistake and their actions cause some unintended harm, then there's someone to blame and sue, even if your statistical outcome was drastically improved by their intervention. Doctors still have a lot of cover, even if they make a mistake, for exactly that reason. The real challenge for doctors is the difficulty preventing the litigation itself. Even if they win in court, the consequences of being subject to so many lawsuits are dramatic. > The same problem is going to exist trying to mitigate climate change. Positive actions to reverse the problem will create negative externalities that hurt some people, but doing nothing will be drastically worse. I think the bigger problem is that mitigating climate change will necessarily change the winners and losers, and the current winners have more power than the current losers.

ncallaway 3y ago

I think this is a good diagnosis of some of our issues, but it’s a really hard problem. When we go the other way, and allow actions that harm people, we have an unfortunate tendency to allow those harms to fall… extremely disproportionately on those with the least burden to bear the harms and the least power to be compensated for those harms. I think, as the other poster noted it really comes down to the individualistic nature in which we try and address some of these collective action problems. We need to acknowledge that the solutions will cause less overall harm than not implementing them, but also recognize that the harms from the solutions may fall unevenly, and find ways to socialize the damage those solutions cause, rather than leave that damage on the powerless.

Analemma_ 3y ago
> When we go the other way, and allow actions that harm people, we have an unfortunate tendency to allow those harms to fall… extremely disproportionately on those with the least burden to bear the harms and the least power to be compensated for those harms. I don't think this is true, or at least it is nonobvious. Are prescribed-burns-gone-wrong more likely to harm the most vulnerable, as compared to unprescribed burns? If not, then this objection doesn't really apply.
- evo 3y ago
  I suspect that they would, if for no other reason that if the direct action is indiscriminate in whom it harms, then the well-heeled will have the resources necessary to seek compensation via litigation while the marginalized will be out of luck.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  In general I'd be in agreement with you, but I think this is one case where the typical argument is quite clearly true. I've lived in regions with slash and burn agriculture, which uses seasonal controlled burns. It is horrible. Air quality levels spike into the hundreds for a period of weeks to months, depending on the specifics of the season. It's difficult to tolerate in my hoity toity life with indoor work, air conditioning, and multiple air purifiers [barely] managing to keep the air breathable. At the same time this is happening, there are countless people working outdoors or in other sorts of conditions where they don't have such luxuries. And the cost is masked because, somewhat like smoking, many of the consequences happen over many years if not decades. And even when you do hit a climax, it may be argued that the bad air contributed, but did not provably cause, e.g. some cardiovascular event. Of course, if you don't burn - then a lightning strike, or a firebug, means you're going to really burn. Clearly we need an army of sheep. Gah, then people would complain about the methane and massive marbled mutton fests. Cripes things are tricky.

modriano 3y ago

I think the root of the problem is that we set erroneously low prices for some behaviors. Actuaries should be able to figure out reasonable values for the probability of some costly outcome (e.g., a massive, uncontrollable wild fire) given specific behaviors or conditions (e.g., letting property grow into being a wildfire risk, vs reducing that risk by clearing overgrowth), and for risks with costs that a person/company can't ever cover (e.g., a massive wildfire), those responsible entities should have to carry insurance, who can incentivize or implement cost-reducing preventative actions in the places with greatest risk. In the climate change context, the price of dumping GHGs into the atmosphere is nowhere near the cost. If we priced that in, economics would rapidly make renewable | nuclear power projects, public transit projects, shifts away from concrete in construction, etc economically obvious choices. But we've messed up the prices, and these messed up prices incentivize people to ignore problems or worse, spend societal quantities of money and labor on growing the problems.

Curvature5868 3y ago

A viable solution might be the creation of an insurance fund to compensate for any unintended damage caused by prescribed burns. This fund, funded by utility companies especially those in wildfire-prone areas, would function similarly to banks' contributions to the FDIC. This could alleviate liability concerns, thereby encouraging proactive wildfire prevention strategies.

riskable 3y ago
This is a good idea but it doesn't address the pollution problem. If a prescribed burn will increase pollution beyond the EPA's acceptable limits then the burn will be against the law. We need the EPA's emissions/particulate rules to be adjusted to give priority to prescribed burns by certified firefighters and foresters. They don't do burns often enough that the EPA should be limiting their power to manage fire susceptibility. We also need watchdogs to make sure that regular polluters don't increase output during prescribed burns in order to hide their actual emissions.
- ROTMetro 3y ago
  Being the devil's advocate, when my mother was dying of cancer there were forest fires here. She had to leave the area and stay at a hotel far away at great cost/physical discomfort (at that point she had a hospital bed at home). There are people who physically can't handle the higher particulate amount, what do you propose we do with them? Let them suffer/die?
  - Filligree 3y ago
    But the burn will happen anyway. It'll just happen at a different time, when it hasn't been prepared for, with less control and more particulates as well as destruction of communities.
    - XorNot 3y ago
      No it won't. It might happen. Or it might go years before happening in that area. Or you might move away before it does. But you don't get to use your perception of inevitability to cause harm and financial damage for someone else.

chaostheory 3y ago

> This illustrates a more generic problem with our legal system. I feel that this better illustrates the downsides of centralized power: centralized decision making won’t be as efficient as decision making done at the nodes, closer to the actual problem because of missing context and data; and maybe even indifference For the record, I am not saying that there are no benefits to centralized planning and control. This is just one of its weaknesses besides corruption

renewiltord 3y ago

That's right. The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics is baked into our legal framework.

Symmetry 3y ago
The original "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" blog post: https://web.archive.org/web/20220705105128/https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220705105128/https://blog.jaib... It's nice to have a handy phrase for this effect.

reaperducer 3y ago

While you're not wrong, the issue from the article is about a local issue, not necessarily with the legal system. In some places, proscribed burns are routine. Just not in the place that the article is about. Heck, the Chicago Parks District does proscribed burns in Lincoln Park, which is a very urban location.

robohoe 3y ago
Yep. We have them outside of Chicago in IL as well. Pretty common to see them happen every year around here.

derefr 3y ago

The medical analogy here is the DNR order. Doctors don't want to create liability by explicitly assisting in a patient's death, even of someone in a vegetative state. So instead, they avoid this liability while still "accomplishing death", by following an order to intentionally avoid explicitly reversing any sudden "act of god" event that would cause the patient to die without active intervention. Or, to put that another way: instead of controlled burns where you're actively setting the fire, why not just build (and maintain) the firebreaks, wait for a wildfire to happen inside the burn zone, and then just refuse to put it out?

dllthomas 3y ago
> why not just build (and maintain) the firebreaks, wait for a wildfire to happen inside the burn zone, and then just refuse to put it out? Per my understanding, part of performing a controlled burn is mustering more resources near the burn (spatially and temporally) than you could reasonably maintain near every possible burn site all the time.
- toast0 3y ago
  Under the prepare the firebreaks ahead of time doctrine, you'd still be on the hook for mustering resources in response to an unscheduled fire as is the case today, but if the firebreaks are already in place and appropriate for the conditions at the time, the response would be watch and wait, and if all goes well, let it burn out without much additional effort. If conditions aren't appropriate, then you're back to status quo of containing a wildfire; but maybe the firebreaks help somewhat? (Would need the opinion of someone knowledgable in wildfire fighting rather than random internet peeps to know if this approaches a reasonable idea at all though; I'd wonder if it's reasonable to build and maintain general purpose firebreaks in large forests at all; and what effect that would have on the habitability of the forest for its flora and fauna)
- derefr 3y ago
  The interesting thing about controlled burns is that by doing them, you end up with fewer possible burn sites. So such an approach would get easier over time.

hammock 3y ago

We can start by evaluating and updating regulations, improving training and safety protocols, engaging with local communities, and increasing public awareness about the benefits and risks associated with controlled burns. The goal is to enable the use of controlled burns as a valuable tool for land management and wildfire prevention while adequately addressing concerns related to potential negative externalities.

shagie 3y ago

https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/science-research/2021-10-15/prescribed-burns-in-idaho-require-good-neighbors https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/science-research/2021-... > Heather Heward is a senior instructor at the University of Idaho who teaches about forests and fires. She said it’s not just federal land we need to be thinning and burning, it’s private land, too. > “We have a real lack of (prescribed burn) practitioners, specifically on the private land side, that are able to do this work because – we're scared, honestly. We are scared that something will go wrong and that someone will sue us. I'm scared of that,” she said.

stainablesteel 3y ago

yeah there's no nuance allowed in liability kids grow up without taking enough risks and it affects their brain development we've sacrificed healthy risks for unhealthy fear

theptip 3y ago

Yep, in Ethics this is known as the Act / Omission distinction. (Even if they result in the same consequences, you’re ethically responsible for your acts, and rarely to the same extent your omissions.) It’s common to the main deontological ethical frameworks including the Judeo-Christian models that underpin “western values. The “solution” is to take a Consequentialist approach, though most people fail the trolley problem and find consequentialism repugnant, so I don’t think we will solve this problem any time soon. (Most people are familiar with Mills’ hedonic utilitarianism, but it’s quite simplistic; I’m a big fan of Eudaimonia as your value function, and richer systems like two-level utilitarianism as a way of getting round the “calculate everything all the time” problem with some utilitarian systems.)

jetrink 3y ago

I have another specific example of this to offer: Active vs. passive flood control. One passive control mechanism is the retention basin. This is just a pond connected to a water system. When it rains and the water begins to rise, some water flows into the pond instead of flowing downstream, reducing the effect of the storm. You can improve the retention basin by adding a pump to actively manage the basin's capacity. When there is rain in the forecast, you pump water out of the basin, reducing its water level. When the rain arrives, you turn off the pump and let the basin refill. This increases the amount of water that the basin is able to divert during the storm. I worked with a company that designed such a system and we even installed a demonstration unit for a municipality. It worked as intended and the city engineer advocated for expanding the project to all suitable basins. However, when the municipality's lawyers looked at the project, they argued that if the system failed to activate prior to a storm, the city might be liable any flooding that occurred afterward. Of course, the scenario where the system failed to function was identical to one in which it had never been built in the first place*, but that was not a convincing argument and the project was killed. * I like escalators because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. - Mitch Hedberg

BurningFrog 3y ago

There is a strong, mostly unstated, assumption in this era that doing nothing is always safe. I don't know how to fight that.

m463 3y ago

It's been said that if the automobile or airplane was invented in the present day, regulations would prevent them from coming to market.

robertlagrant 3y ago

The trolley problem[0] is instructive. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

NumberWangMan 3y ago

Haha, it was me, Moloch! https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ In other words, these are situations where the incentives for individuals are not aligned with incentives for the group.

xp84 3y ago

This sounds like a problem to be solved by the insurance industry, who can measure risk because it's their money on the line. Insurers should refuse to renew fire coverage in areas where they can see that the authorities have been derelict in doing prescribed burns. Don't like it? Risk losing your house, or move.