Comment by AaronFriel
3 years ago
Not a perfect analogy with disease. And maybe it should suggest to you that maybe in fact, the optimal amount of fraud is zero.
With disease, the optimal amount is likely still zero. The immune system we have is not great, its only selection criteria is to keep people alive long enough to have children and keep them alive long enough so they can. We're beginning to understand, like with HPV, that anything from a life threatening case to an asymptomatic one can cause lifelong changes in the immune system and either cause or increase lifelong risk of non-infectious diseases.
And that's setting aside that we can, for example, just eradicate certain diseases if we set ourselves to it. Polio, smallpox, and hopefully malaria.
If we could eliminate certain kinds of fraud - through education, through making it impractical - that seems good, yeah?
But I think you just showed that its really pretty similar.
And my gut reaction to the title of the article is that we really need less fraud and that we're very, very far from optimal right now. Although I'm not very concerned at all about fraud against government programs to help the disenfranchised. I'm more concerned about the endless e-mail, phone scams, door to door scams and all the stuff that prey on the elderly and vulnerable.
Similarly with the immune system it would be interesting to consider wiping out Epstein Barr and maybe eliminate Multiple Sclerosis, along with exterminating the mosquitoes that bite humans and cause disease.
But zero is likely not achievable or a stable optimum, and we're probably not going to cure the common cold or wipe out influenza and we may not want to (at least not without quite a bit of science fiction, global access to medicine and nearly 100% acceptance of vaccination in the population).
I think we're in agreement - the analogy to disease was flawed because eradicating some (perhaps many, all?) kind of disease would have widespread, uniformly positive effects.
The person I replied to seemed to think that exposure to disease helps in youth? Certainly seems like a widespread idea, but I don't know how true it is.