4 ms·

Coding hard cut-offs like this into legislation, regulation or policies seems crazy almost to the point of negligence, incompetence or malice. Especially when i

Coding hard cut-offs like this into legislation, regulation or policies seems crazy almost to the point of negligence, incompetence or malice. Especially when it's so obvious such cliffs will incentivize behavior certain to cause negative or perverse outcomes. It's even more incomprehensible when implementing graduated thresholds is so well understood. A related common failure mode is baking in fixed, absolute thresholds for dynamic domains sure to evolve instead of linking thresholds to dynamic metrics (such as inflation, cost of living, etc).

nerdponx 3y ago
It's often said that the cruelty is the point.
- thfuran 3y ago
  If it were, why would they offer welfare programs at all? Surely an "indolence tax" assessed on anyone with income below a certain threshold would be more cruel.
  - immibis 3y ago
    What do you think poor people would do if there were no welfare programs?
    - _carbyau_ 3y ago
      This is what I find perplexing. Welfare programs are not for the poor. They are so the poor doesn't "eat the rich". (For those playing at home this is a slogan tossed around with connotations of society wide rebellion - which would not be a comfortable outcome for rich people.)
  - AgentOrange1234 3y ago
    It's frankly amazing that we still have welfare, social security, etc., at all. The pro-cruelty folks have been diligently working to discredit them since FDR enacted them during the great depression.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Don’t give them any ideas. Roughly half of US politicians would probably support that. Without constitutional safeguards, a shocking number of them would support turning their opponents into Soylent Green.
padolsey 3y ago
This unthinking encoding of thresholds feels like a 'Systems' problem that percolates into almost every part of life, whether its income brackets or hard limits on how many books you can borrow from the library. Some make more sense than others, just out of the sheer complexity and cost of implementing continuous (e.g. tapering) systems in the real world. A particularly troublesome example I encountered, entirely unrelated to finance, was when working on a renal ward in hospital, we had to count respiration rate and input it into the obs machine, but if you inputted over 16, it would increase their sepsis score (or "acute deterioration"), meaning there'd be additional work to be done. It was rarely the case that they were actually producing symptoms of sepsis, but because of the hard threshold, to my horror, nurses would often just enter 16 on the mark, and juniors like me were told to do the same. I'm sure there are literally tonnes of examples of these discontinuities and the bad incentives they produce across every industry and government function. In addition to laziness and inertia, I feel a general problem is that lack of curve/distribution/continuous-thinking in our schooling, as opposed to the easier discrete thinking. All systems are fundamentally analog in nature. If only we just taught things this way...
creer 3y ago
How can it be blamed to negligence? It's not like these disincentives and dangerous gotchas are not obvious when these rules are written?

nerdponx 3y ago

It's often said that the cruelty is the point.

thfuran 3y ago
If it were, why would they offer welfare programs at all? Surely an "indolence tax" assessed on anyone with income below a certain threshold would be more cruel.
- immibis 3y ago
  What do you think poor people would do if there were no welfare programs?
  - _carbyau_ 3y ago
    This is what I find perplexing. Welfare programs are not for the poor. They are so the poor doesn't "eat the rich". (For those playing at home this is a slogan tossed around with connotations of society wide rebellion - which would not be a comfortable outcome for rich people.)
- AgentOrange1234 3y ago
  It's frankly amazing that we still have welfare, social security, etc., at all. The pro-cruelty folks have been diligently working to discredit them since FDR enacted them during the great depression.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Don’t give them any ideas. Roughly half of US politicians would probably support that. Without constitutional safeguards, a shocking number of them would support turning their opponents into Soylent Green.

padolsey 3y ago

This unthinking encoding of thresholds feels like a 'Systems' problem that percolates into almost every part of life, whether its income brackets or hard limits on how many books you can borrow from the library. Some make more sense than others, just out of the sheer complexity and cost of implementing continuous (e.g. tapering) systems in the real world. A particularly troublesome example I encountered, entirely unrelated to finance, was when working on a renal ward in hospital, we had to count respiration rate and input it into the obs machine, but if you inputted over 16, it would increase their sepsis score (or "acute deterioration"), meaning there'd be additional work to be done. It was rarely the case that they were actually producing symptoms of sepsis, but because of the hard threshold, to my horror, nurses would often just enter 16 on the mark, and juniors like me were told to do the same. I'm sure there are literally tonnes of examples of these discontinuities and the bad incentives they produce across every industry and government function. In addition to laziness and inertia, I feel a general problem is that lack of curve/distribution/continuous-thinking in our schooling, as opposed to the easier discrete thinking. All systems are fundamentally analog in nature. If only we just taught things this way...

creer 3y ago

How can it be blamed to negligence? It's not like these disincentives and dangerous gotchas are not obvious when these rules are written?