Deaths per day per cause, "sending a message", and "national security". All of these are heuristics, vague approximations, for the thing that we really care abo

Deaths per day per cause, "sending a message", and "national security". All of these are heuristics, vague approximations, for the thing that we really care about: how do we save lives? Or, given that we will probably not be able to save all of the lives with the resources we have: how do we save as many lives as possible? Doctors Schneier and Stallman are closer to this than anybody else I've read so far. They have, to some degree, realized that shutting down an entire city to prevent a few deaths is criminally inefficient. They are using this event, which is so obviously wasteful that even the most casual observers are frantically rationalizing away their horror, to hopefully kick people into gear on more efficient ways to save lives: better highway safety, better disaster preparedness, better disease control, better industrial regulation. That's a goal I can get behind.