You started a hellish flamewar and perpetuated it. That's not ok, and since you've been abusing HN in other places and with other accounts, I've banned this account. Continuing to do this will get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
> It is not socially efficient to spend massive amounts of resources accommodating a small number of people with allergies.
It is also not socially efficient to have a society where you have to worry about if your particular issue will be "efficient" enough for other people to care about. That basically sounds like a very low-trust society. And the economic consequences of having a low-trust society are so much worse.
Federal laws mandating absurdly costly subsidies of very small minorities is not what "high-trust society" means.
You're right in one sense - living in a low-trust society is very socially inefficient. I just don't think you have a working model of why we're becoming low-trust. It certainly has nothing to do with accommodating rare allergies.
> it is not "socially efficient" to make any accommodations to disability
More or less. The overwhelming majority of legally mandated disability subsidies in the US are horrendously anti-utilitarian.
> It would be "socially efficient" to euthanize our elderly
This type of absurd claim is a crystal clear indicator of someone who's stuck on a zeroth-order approximation of utilitarianism and isn't factoring in any higher-order terms like people's responses to incentives.
If we started killing old people, would that result in a net decrease in pro-social behavior? Obviously.
If we stopped wasting huge quantities of marginal resources on infrastructure due to e.g. ADA requirements, would that result in a net decrease in pro-social behavior? It would not.
> We have, as a society, decided that we value human life and dignity more than any of that kind of "social efficiency"
Another common refrain of the economically illiterate - claiming to "value human life" while simultaneously working against policies that would actually improve human flourishing. It's also very generous to describe the outcome of selectorate mechanics and lobbying as "we, as a society, decided..."
Spoken like someone who neither knows anyone with disabilities, nor realizes that they, themselves will likely be disabled at some point in their lives, and will both want and need accommodation at that point.
I'm the parent of a school aged child. Due to the high occurrence of nut allergies they have eliminated nuts from all school lunch items. For example instead of peanut butter sandwiches they now offer sunflower butter sandwiches. My child is allergic to sunflowers.
No it's not, but it's a good sniff test for people who have a zeroth-order model of utilitarianism and aren't thinking about things like incentives.
> It’s increasing, for some reason.
I agree - my suspicion is that accommodating the 0.1% of kids with peanut allergies means that another 0.5% of kids (or whatever, made up fractions) never get enough exposure to peanut allergens to develop a tolerance, so the problem is self-reinforcing.
I assume based on this comment that you would be happy to personally explain to parents of someone killed due to an allergic reaction, why their death was an acceptable trade-off for "social efficiency"? I assume that you would also be personally happy with inflicting an allergy based death, or serious injury, on those that you love?
One of the frustrating aspects of arguments like this, is that proponents of "social efficiency" aren't personally impacted their proposed policies. They're quite happy to push for policies that negatively impact others, but it seems unlikely they would pursue a utilitarian policy with such zeal if it personally impacted themselves, or those they love. The impacts of utilitarianism are for others to deal with, proponents almost universally only benefit from their policies.
> I assume based on this comment that you would be happy to personally explain to parents of someone killed due to an allergic reaction, why their death was an acceptable trade-off for "social efficiency"
What would you say to the parent of a child killed by a drunk driver? According to this line of thinking alchool should be banned because some drink and drive and kill innocent people.
Or driving cars should be banned because sometimes people fall asleep at the wheel.
Said otherwise: accidents do happen, trying to make them illegal will have massive "social efficiency" costs, which will affect the ones the banning tried to protect.
Just like here - introduce strong anti-allergy laws and now you get even more allergenic food.
> What would you say to the parent of a child killed by a drunk driver? According to this line of thinking alchool should be banned because some drink and drive and kill innocent people.
Drink driving is banned in most of the world, and most of the world doesn’t suffer from the US drink driving problem because other countries don’t force everyone to own a car and driver everywhere.
Additionally investments in public transport and active transport produce huge positive externalities for societies, and produce positive returns to governments once reduced road maintenance, reduced health costs, improved productivity and social mobility caused by public transport are considered.
So to answer your question directly, I would console for their loss and acknowledge that more work needs to be done to prevent needless automotive deaths. Plenty of cities and countries around the world have made tremendous progress towards zero road deaths, and have reaped substantial economic benefits along the way. To believe that eradicating automotive deaths can only be achieved by banning alcohol or car just demonstrates a lack of imagination.
> Just like here - introduce strong anti-allergy laws and now you get even more allergenic food.
I don’t have strong fews on the specific policies in the article. I’m only taking issue with idea that “social efficiency” is a metric we should be optimising for, above all else.
Why would I want to talk to someone about an issue I couldn't possibly expect them to have a rational opinion on?
> One of the frustrating aspects of arguments like this
Is people insisting on making a society-scale issue into a personal, emotional issue?
> is that proponents of "social efficiency" aren't personally impacted their proposed policies
Oh. Well funny enough, I actually do have a couple serious dietary intolerances - but I don't insist on externalizing my costs onto others against their will.
It may be alien to you, but in fact I am perfectly capable of considering policy decisions that are bad for me but good for society. Some people can't do it, I guess.
> Is people insisting on making a society-scale issue into a personal, emotional issue?
I apologise for believing that social policy should be empathetic towards the people it has the greatest impact on. I also apologise for believing that those who believe that the individual needs and right should be considered in addition to what’s “social efficient”.
Clearly a purely utilitarian approach to social policy should be adopted, individuals that reduce “social efficiency” should be removed or ignored. Those who object are turning social policy into an emotional issue, when clearly all social policy should be considered on purely economic and rational basis.
> Oh. Well funny enough, I actually do have a couple serious dietary intolerances - but I don't insist on externalizing my costs onto others against their will.
Thats nice. I’m sure you apply the same reasoning to every aspect of your life, and ensure that you never externalise any cost to society at large.
> It may be alien to you, but in fact I am perfectly capable of considering policy decisions that are bad for me but good for society. Some people can't do it, I guess.
Then I would say your arguments for why this policy is bad, are poorly constructed and lacking any real substance. It’s trivial to justify almost any policy based on “greater good” arguments, that doesn’t make them good policies.
Maybe if we examine your life situation, we will find some social efficiencies too - maybe its not socially efficient to spend police resources protecting your neighbourhood and your in particular from robbery and violence.
What is the point of society if we're not going to protect vulnerable people? You're talking about "efficiency" as though society has one goal to maximize. I would argue that there's multiple goals that need to be balanced but at the top of the list would be "protect children".
You started a hellish flamewar and perpetuated it. That's not ok, and since you've been abusing HN in other places and with other accounts, I've banned this account. Continuing to do this will get your main account banned as well, so please don't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> It is not socially efficient to spend massive amounts of resources accommodating a small number of people with allergies.
It is also not socially efficient to have a society where you have to worry about if your particular issue will be "efficient" enough for other people to care about. That basically sounds like a very low-trust society. And the economic consequences of having a low-trust society are so much worse.
Federal laws mandating absurdly costly subsidies of very small minorities is not what "high-trust society" means.
You're right in one sense - living in a low-trust society is very socially inefficient. I just don't think you have a working model of why we're becoming low-trust. It certainly has nothing to do with accommodating rare allergies.
By that argument, it is not "socially efficient" to make any accommodations to disability.
It would be "socially efficient" to euthanize our elderly once they pass the age at which they can work optimally.
We have, as a society, decided that we value human life and dignity more than any of that kind of "social efficiency".
> it is not "socially efficient" to make any accommodations to disability
More or less. The overwhelming majority of legally mandated disability subsidies in the US are horrendously anti-utilitarian.
> It would be "socially efficient" to euthanize our elderly
This type of absurd claim is a crystal clear indicator of someone who's stuck on a zeroth-order approximation of utilitarianism and isn't factoring in any higher-order terms like people's responses to incentives.
If we started killing old people, would that result in a net decrease in pro-social behavior? Obviously.
If we stopped wasting huge quantities of marginal resources on infrastructure due to e.g. ADA requirements, would that result in a net decrease in pro-social behavior? It would not.
> We have, as a society, decided that we value human life and dignity more than any of that kind of "social efficiency"
Another common refrain of the economically illiterate - claiming to "value human life" while simultaneously working against policies that would actually improve human flourishing. It's also very generous to describe the outcome of selectorate mechanics and lobbying as "we, as a society, decided..."
Spoken like someone who neither knows anyone with disabilities, nor realizes that they, themselves will likely be disabled at some point in their lives, and will both want and need accommodation at that point.
2 replies →
Soylent Green is “socially efficient.”
Anecdotally, it’s not a small number of people. Ask a parent of school-age children in the past ten years. It’s increasing, for some reason.
I'm the parent of a school aged child. Due to the high occurrence of nut allergies they have eliminated nuts from all school lunch items. For example instead of peanut butter sandwiches they now offer sunflower butter sandwiches. My child is allergic to sunflowers.
> Soylent Green is “socially efficient.”
No it's not, but it's a good sniff test for people who have a zeroth-order model of utilitarianism and aren't thinking about things like incentives.
> It’s increasing, for some reason.
I agree - my suspicion is that accommodating the 0.1% of kids with peanut allergies means that another 0.5% of kids (or whatever, made up fractions) never get enough exposure to peanut allergens to develop a tolerance, so the problem is self-reinforcing.
I assume based on this comment that you would be happy to personally explain to parents of someone killed due to an allergic reaction, why their death was an acceptable trade-off for "social efficiency"? I assume that you would also be personally happy with inflicting an allergy based death, or serious injury, on those that you love?
One of the frustrating aspects of arguments like this, is that proponents of "social efficiency" aren't personally impacted their proposed policies. They're quite happy to push for policies that negatively impact others, but it seems unlikely they would pursue a utilitarian policy with such zeal if it personally impacted themselves, or those they love. The impacts of utilitarianism are for others to deal with, proponents almost universally only benefit from their policies.
> I assume based on this comment that you would be happy to personally explain to parents of someone killed due to an allergic reaction, why their death was an acceptable trade-off for "social efficiency"
What would you say to the parent of a child killed by a drunk driver? According to this line of thinking alchool should be banned because some drink and drive and kill innocent people.
Or driving cars should be banned because sometimes people fall asleep at the wheel.
Said otherwise: accidents do happen, trying to make them illegal will have massive "social efficiency" costs, which will affect the ones the banning tried to protect.
Just like here - introduce strong anti-allergy laws and now you get even more allergenic food.
> What would you say to the parent of a child killed by a drunk driver? According to this line of thinking alchool should be banned because some drink and drive and kill innocent people.
Drink driving is banned in most of the world, and most of the world doesn’t suffer from the US drink driving problem because other countries don’t force everyone to own a car and driver everywhere.
Additionally investments in public transport and active transport produce huge positive externalities for societies, and produce positive returns to governments once reduced road maintenance, reduced health costs, improved productivity and social mobility caused by public transport are considered.
So to answer your question directly, I would console for their loss and acknowledge that more work needs to be done to prevent needless automotive deaths. Plenty of cities and countries around the world have made tremendous progress towards zero road deaths, and have reaped substantial economic benefits along the way. To believe that eradicating automotive deaths can only be achieved by banning alcohol or car just demonstrates a lack of imagination.
> Just like here - introduce strong anti-allergy laws and now you get even more allergenic food.
I don’t have strong fews on the specific policies in the article. I’m only taking issue with idea that “social efficiency” is a metric we should be optimising for, above all else.
Why would I want to talk to someone about an issue I couldn't possibly expect them to have a rational opinion on?
> One of the frustrating aspects of arguments like this
Is people insisting on making a society-scale issue into a personal, emotional issue?
> is that proponents of "social efficiency" aren't personally impacted their proposed policies
Oh. Well funny enough, I actually do have a couple serious dietary intolerances - but I don't insist on externalizing my costs onto others against their will.
It may be alien to you, but in fact I am perfectly capable of considering policy decisions that are bad for me but good for society. Some people can't do it, I guess.
> Is people insisting on making a society-scale issue into a personal, emotional issue?
I apologise for believing that social policy should be empathetic towards the people it has the greatest impact on. I also apologise for believing that those who believe that the individual needs and right should be considered in addition to what’s “social efficient”.
Clearly a purely utilitarian approach to social policy should be adopted, individuals that reduce “social efficiency” should be removed or ignored. Those who object are turning social policy into an emotional issue, when clearly all social policy should be considered on purely economic and rational basis.
> Oh. Well funny enough, I actually do have a couple serious dietary intolerances - but I don't insist on externalizing my costs onto others against their will.
Thats nice. I’m sure you apply the same reasoning to every aspect of your life, and ensure that you never externalise any cost to society at large.
> It may be alien to you, but in fact I am perfectly capable of considering policy decisions that are bad for me but good for society. Some people can't do it, I guess.
Then I would say your arguments for why this policy is bad, are poorly constructed and lacking any real substance. It’s trivial to justify almost any policy based on “greater good” arguments, that doesn’t make them good policies.
Maybe if we examine your life situation, we will find some social efficiencies too - maybe its not socially efficient to spend police resources protecting your neighbourhood and your in particular from robbery and violence.
What is the point of society if we're not going to protect vulnerable people? You're talking about "efficiency" as though society has one goal to maximize. I would argue that there's multiple goals that need to be balanced but at the top of the list would be "protect children".
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2 replies →