4 ms·

Just like everything. The optimal amount of crime, unemployment, accidents, deaths, etc... is not zero. For example, when building a road, there is a certain c

by GuB-42 3y ago

Just like everything. The optimal amount of crime, unemployment, accidents, deaths, etc... is not zero. For example, when building a road, there is a certain chance that an accident will happen, that some people will die, and that could have been prevented. For example, by installing a guard rail, enforcing speed limits, or by taking a different path. But installing that guard rail for a one in a million chance that something bad happens is money better spent elsewhere, like improving safety where it matters more, and people tend to dislike the resulting taxes. Enforcing speed limits have a cost too, that can be recovered from the fines that result from it. But the goal is not to bankrupt your citizens with fines, and constant surveillance is not very popular. And the different path you are planning may go though people homes, relocating people is also expensive, and usually not very popular for the people in question. So, we tolerate a few accidents and deaths over a dystopian society.

mlyle 3y ago
> But installing that guard rail for a one in a million chance that something bad happens is money better spent elsewhere Just for clarity -- guard rails, where we choose to place them, probably cost $500k to $2M per life saved over their lifetime, while the value of a statistical life in the US is >$10M. This comparison ignores costs of non-fatal outcomes (injuries, disability). It seems like we should be deploying more guardrails, even though their marginal return would be less than our current average.
- kevindamm 3y ago
  The problem the article poses is actually not one of diverting costs, despite how GP's metaphor would indicate... It's that with fraud, only the most draconian systems can be effective at stopping all fraud. In the above metaphor, it's more like guard rails are already in place, the speed limit is 1/10th a reasonably safe velocity, and the only way you can stop the remaining death-every-decade is to make everyone walk the road instead of driving it, and guarded so that you don't encounter any strangers along the way either. Very safe. But now nobody even wants to take this road. But it's so safe! Zero deaths, no injuries, ever. Sure, the expenses/value argument can be made, too, but that's not ultimately what makes it nonzero. Even if you had limitless resources to apply to the anti-fraud, the only way you're getting nonzero fraud is if a large amount of legitimate customers are inconvenienced or outright denied as well. This is due to how easily fraudsters can still find processes and marks to make it worth their time, and regulations + policies are ever evolving to keep up, but a lot of it comes down to a cost/benefit analysis by the business. The internet just scales this up by several orders of magnitude too.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    Sure, I was commenting just on guard rails. If you want to know what I think about the topic of the article, my earlier comment is more informative. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906842
- yardstick 3y ago
  > while the value of a statistical life in the US is >$10M Take the wealthiest top 10,000 Americans out of the equation, and what’s the value of a statistical life in the US? $10M seems to be a weird number in my mind. Edit: Well that was a fascinating rabbit hole: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#:~:text=In%20Western%20countries%20and%20other,US%247.5%20million%20in%202020 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#:~:text=In%20W....
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > Take the wealthiest top 10,000 Americans out of the equation They are much less likely to be the recipient of all the money spent on entitlements, no? A giant bucket of money is spent on regular Americans.
    - bigger_inside 3y ago
      what? no. Government money is a direct pipe to transnational corporations and the billionaires that run it. Welfare payments are peanuts compared to it.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        You're confusing two things. If the government pays for healthcare, that is for people, but goes to organisations to implement what's being paid for.
        bigger_inside 3y ago
        like trillion dollar bank bailouts, subsidies awarded through ruinous competition among jurisdictions, trillions and trillions of dollars of defense spending for which the government will invent endless wars.. like that?
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        If you like, you can look at the data[0] I'm looking at. 15% on defence; 67% on health and related; education; social security; etc. [0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
- concordDance 3y ago
  I would like to emphasise that the parent has said "where we choose to place them", so they're not contradicting the grandparents metaphor, just giving an interesting FYI.
gwern 3y ago
End-to-end principle in action. You could try to make every stage super-reliable and fraudproof... but that yields a terrible overall system compared to a much lighter touch and going after complete transactions which turn out bad.
tgv 3y ago
> The optimal amount of [...] deaths [...] is not zero. That's not true. It assumes that there is an objective, known price for a life. Since you can't have e.g. 0.1 deaths, there's no guarantee that the optimal amount is at least 1. It's more that it's the outcome of haggling, politics, and the willingness to turn a blind eye to the consequences of stupidity.
- concordDance 3y ago
  There's a price for life in a given society though. Due to resources being finite and wellbeing mattering. In the UK I believe NICE uses £30k/QALY as the price.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Yep, although short term end of life years are deemed more valuable (e.g. if you have 3 months to live and we can get you another 3 months, we'll pay more for those 3 months)[0]. And the number is a bit flexible based on other factors, I think. [0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14737167.2017.1330152 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14737167.2017.1...
  - tremon 3y ago
    £30k/QALY nit: pretty sure that should be £30k * QALY.
    - concordDance 3y ago
      Imagine 10 km/h, the more hours you have drive the more kilometers you've driven. Similarly, with £/QALY the more QALYs you've paid for the more £ it will have cost.
- nox101 3y ago
  Maybe that's a poor way of stating the problem. In a zero tradeoff world, 0 deaths would be optimal. We don't live in that world though. For example, flying is supposedly safer than driving. Airplane crashes happen. We could demand zero deaths from the planes which would drive the costs up, causing more people to choose to drive, causing more deaths. So, in relation to airplanes, we can't choose zero deaths in the real world. We have to choose some imperfect trade off, otherwise we'll cause more deaths.
ncruces 3y ago
You could totally avoid that accident by not building the road in the first place, which typically is the first level of paralysis we need to overcome.
konschubert 3y ago
That being said: GPS based speed limiters are cheap, effective and not dystopian as long as they don't send telemetry back home. > But the goal is not to bankrupt your citizens with fines, There is this one crazy trick to avoid speeding tickets. Cops hate it.
- thworp 3y ago
  > GPS based speed limiters are cheap, effective [...] While this is technically true (the devices themselves are cheap and effective), the data required for them to work well doesn't exist. If the data exists at all, it is usually horribly out of date. So in practice there will be many cases where these devices limit you to the 30mph from last year's big construction project. Then you get rear-ended because nobody expects you to slow down 50mph for no reason at all.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    Okay, then let's just ignore construction projects and other temporary speed reductions. Maybe let's start with residential streets only, using the residential speed limit. And let's say only those residential streets that are at least 100m away from a faster street. I'm sure it will be possible to find a solution that eliminates false positives. And in the worst case - it's just about acceleration. It's not like the car would abruptly break.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    > Then you get rear-ended because nobody expects you to slow down 50mph for no reason at all. Even in this rare fictional scenario, I don't agree that the costs outweigh the benefits. There are many vehicles that cannot go above 30 kmh and somehow they don't get rear-ended either. Plus, mid-term, the other cars will also have the speed limiter installed.
  - JeremyNT 3y ago
    I feel like this "bad data" problem would disappear immediately if there were real world consequences for it being incorrect. Which is to say, if you were to build out a system that limits speed based on some authoritative database of speed limits, then suddenly there's an incentive to make sure that database is actually correct (where there was no such incentive before).

by GuB-42 3y ago

mlyle 3y ago

> But installing that guard rail for a one in a million chance that something bad happens is money better spent elsewhere Just for clarity -- guard rails, where we choose to place them, probably cost $500k to $2M per life saved over their lifetime, while the value of a statistical life in the US is >$10M. This comparison ignores costs of non-fatal outcomes (injuries, disability). It seems like we should be deploying more guardrails, even though their marginal return would be less than our current average.

kevindamm 3y ago
The problem the article poses is actually not one of diverting costs, despite how GP's metaphor would indicate... It's that with fraud, only the most draconian systems can be effective at stopping all fraud. In the above metaphor, it's more like guard rails are already in place, the speed limit is 1/10th a reasonably safe velocity, and the only way you can stop the remaining death-every-decade is to make everyone walk the road instead of driving it, and guarded so that you don't encounter any strangers along the way either. Very safe. But now nobody even wants to take this road. But it's so safe! Zero deaths, no injuries, ever. Sure, the expenses/value argument can be made, too, but that's not ultimately what makes it nonzero. Even if you had limitless resources to apply to the anti-fraud, the only way you're getting nonzero fraud is if a large amount of legitimate customers are inconvenienced or outright denied as well. This is due to how easily fraudsters can still find processes and marks to make it worth their time, and regulations + policies are ever evolving to keep up, but a lot of it comes down to a cost/benefit analysis by the business. The internet just scales this up by several orders of magnitude too.
- mlyle 3y ago
  Sure, I was commenting just on guard rails. If you want to know what I think about the topic of the article, my earlier comment is more informative. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906842
yardstick 3y ago
> while the value of a statistical life in the US is >$10M Take the wealthiest top 10,000 Americans out of the equation, and what’s the value of a statistical life in the US? $10M seems to be a weird number in my mind. Edit: Well that was a fascinating rabbit hole: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#:~:text=In%20Western%20countries%20and%20other,US%247.5%20million%20in%202020 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#:~:text=In%20W....
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > Take the wealthiest top 10,000 Americans out of the equation They are much less likely to be the recipient of all the money spent on entitlements, no? A giant bucket of money is spent on regular Americans.
  - bigger_inside 3y ago
    what? no. Government money is a direct pipe to transnational corporations and the billionaires that run it. Welfare payments are peanuts compared to it.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      You're confusing two things. If the government pays for healthcare, that is for people, but goes to organisations to implement what's being paid for.
      - bigger_inside 3y ago
        like trillion dollar bank bailouts, subsidies awarded through ruinous competition among jurisdictions, trillions and trillions of dollars of defense spending for which the government will invent endless wars.. like that?
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        If you like, you can look at the data[0] I'm looking at. 15% on defence; 67% on health and related; education; social security; etc. [0] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
concordDance 3y ago
I would like to emphasise that the parent has said "where we choose to place them", so they're not contradicting the grandparents metaphor, just giving an interesting FYI.

gwern 3y ago

End-to-end principle in action. You could try to make every stage super-reliable and fraudproof... but that yields a terrible overall system compared to a much lighter touch and going after complete transactions which turn out bad.

tgv 3y ago

> The optimal amount of [...] deaths [...] is not zero. That's not true. It assumes that there is an objective, known price for a life. Since you can't have e.g. 0.1 deaths, there's no guarantee that the optimal amount is at least 1. It's more that it's the outcome of haggling, politics, and the willingness to turn a blind eye to the consequences of stupidity.

concordDance 3y ago
There's a price for life in a given society though. Due to resources being finite and wellbeing mattering. In the UK I believe NICE uses £30k/QALY as the price.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Yep, although short term end of life years are deemed more valuable (e.g. if you have 3 months to live and we can get you another 3 months, we'll pay more for those 3 months)[0]. And the number is a bit flexible based on other factors, I think. [0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14737167.2017.1330152 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14737167.2017.1...
- tremon 3y ago
  £30k/QALY nit: pretty sure that should be £30k * QALY.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    Imagine 10 km/h, the more hours you have drive the more kilometers you've driven. Similarly, with £/QALY the more QALYs you've paid for the more £ it will have cost.
nox101 3y ago
Maybe that's a poor way of stating the problem. In a zero tradeoff world, 0 deaths would be optimal. We don't live in that world though. For example, flying is supposedly safer than driving. Airplane crashes happen. We could demand zero deaths from the planes which would drive the costs up, causing more people to choose to drive, causing more deaths. So, in relation to airplanes, we can't choose zero deaths in the real world. We have to choose some imperfect trade off, otherwise we'll cause more deaths.

ncruces 3y ago

You could totally avoid that accident by not building the road in the first place, which typically is the first level of paralysis we need to overcome.

konschubert 3y ago

That being said: GPS based speed limiters are cheap, effective and not dystopian as long as they don't send telemetry back home. > But the goal is not to bankrupt your citizens with fines, There is this one crazy trick to avoid speeding tickets. Cops hate it.

thworp 3y ago
> GPS based speed limiters are cheap, effective [...] While this is technically true (the devices themselves are cheap and effective), the data required for them to work well doesn't exist. If the data exists at all, it is usually horribly out of date. So in practice there will be many cases where these devices limit you to the 30mph from last year's big construction project. Then you get rear-ended because nobody expects you to slow down 50mph for no reason at all.
- konschubert 3y ago
  Okay, then let's just ignore construction projects and other temporary speed reductions. Maybe let's start with residential streets only, using the residential speed limit. And let's say only those residential streets that are at least 100m away from a faster street. I'm sure it will be possible to find a solution that eliminates false positives. And in the worst case - it's just about acceleration. It's not like the car would abruptly break.
- konschubert 3y ago
  > Then you get rear-ended because nobody expects you to slow down 50mph for no reason at all. Even in this rare fictional scenario, I don't agree that the costs outweigh the benefits. There are many vehicles that cannot go above 30 kmh and somehow they don't get rear-ended either. Plus, mid-term, the other cars will also have the speed limiter installed.
- JeremyNT 3y ago
  I feel like this "bad data" problem would disappear immediately if there were real world consequences for it being incorrect. Which is to say, if you were to build out a system that limits speed based on some authoritative database of speed limits, then suddenly there's an incentive to make sure that database is actually correct (where there was no such incentive before).