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Comment by pmarreck | Hacker News Reader

Public policy should only be based on objective truths and not evidenceless beliefs or feelings. It's one thing to be for or against marijuana usage; it's another to still have a law on the books banning its use and sale when a growing plethora of science says it's far safer than substances already legalized and regulated (such as alcohol) and actually therapeutic in some cases (such as cancer). It's one thing to be against pornography being freely available on the Internet personally; it's another when scientific data (hypothetically) indicates that pre-adolescent exposure to pornography incurs long-term and tangible behavioral harms, BUT does not seem to harm adults nor their marriages.

"Appeal to disgust" is a fallacy for a reason, and laws should be rational.

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"Damming this river will hurt the surrounding ecosystem" and "Damming this river will provide power for thousands of people" are both objective truths. The only way to mediate between them is by discussing non-objective things like how we value fish and the services provided by electricity.

Do we value keeping fish alive more than keeping old people alive via power-hungry air conditioning?

There are millions of similar conundrums, none of which are solvable via appeal to objective truths.

Exactly. The way I think about it is that logic is a wonderful tool for ensuring your beliefs are consistent and helping you implement them effectively, but it's incapable of determining what those views should be.

Put another way, you can only have a logical argument with someone who already agrees with your beliefs.

> Put another way, you can only have a logical argument with someone who already agrees with your beliefs.

Technically true, but that's an easy (and all too frequently used) way to dismiss other people's arguments and keep believing whatever you want.

It's very unlikely that any real-world policy question is a question about your fundamental value. You most likely don't value marijuana intrinsically. The future of a river dam is probably not the real center of your morality. Rational reasoning is useful to illuminate connection between the subject of an argument and your moral values. A connection that usually is pretty complex, and allows for honest and patient enough people to reach the same conclusion given the same knowledge about the problem.

I agree with you that it shouldn't be used to dismiss arguments, but I do think most contentious policy issues boil down to to fundamental values.

> Do we value keeping fish alive more than keeping old people alive via power-hungry air conditioning?

Consider the towns and cities by bodies of water that have either dried up or been polluted. It's financially ruinous because it either/or kills tourism and/or fishing industry; the salty dust left behind by water causes horrible health problems; there's natural brain/brawn drain that leaves only the older and sickly behind to either fend for themselves or be on gov pay check. Just off the top of my head. I can easily think up a lot more effed up scenarios that have already happened in the world (see Aral Sea).

The grandparent is meant as an example of one of the many tradeoffs that are hard to decide via objective truths. The exact details are not significant to the larger point.

But along the way to the unfortunate end you describe above, many good things came of the dam. Any calculus needs to evaluate the tradeoffs. "Were they worth it?" doesn't lend itself to objective-factual analysis, because "worth" is all about values.

> one of the many tradeoffs that are hard to decide via objective truths.

Those tradeoffs are "hard to decide via objective truths" only because they haven't been decomposed enough. You have to dig deeper into them, split them apart, ask why do we care about something, and then ask again and again. It might get hard to keep track of the expanding tradeoff space, which is probably why people shy away from digging into things too deep. But if you do the work, you may find out that there is a way to solve the original problem in a way that satisfies everyone's low-level values.

Reminds me of essays of Bret Victor, who occasionally seems to be making a related point - a lot of policy debates quickly devolve into appeals to emotions, because we lack tools to effortlessly decompose and analyze actual problems. See e.g. http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#media for a good example.

> "worth" is all about values.

So are engineering problems.

> The only way to mediate between them is by discussing non-objective things like how we value fish and the services provided by electricity.

No, it's not the only way. It's the easy way.

The hard way is to consider other consequences of both choices, including long-term effects, including changes that aren't 0%-100%, but slightly change probability of other events.

Hurting the ecosystem might increase the probability of flooding the area, which will hurt some of the people that you are trying to comfort by giving them cheaper energy. So, maybe it's objectively irrational to build the dam, no matter whether you value people or fish more?

Maybe the population in the area is decreasing anyway and cheap power won't help? We can predict such things pretty reliably. So why build a huge dam and hurt environment if in 40 years it will be useless?

It's impossible to know for sure, but it's possible to estimate. Abandoning the rationality altogether just because it's not immediately obvious what to do is very irresponsible.

I know it was just an example, but IMHO it's a representative example. Many of the issues in the center of the public debate now are objectively scientifically solved, or so close to be solved, that it doesn't matter what the exact details are.

Yet people continue to argue about them because of tribal thinking, religion, corporate interests, etc. See global warming, equality for sexual orientations, war on drugs, public vs private healthcare, etc.

OC proposed that human element is inherently unpredictable, so rationality isn't the solution. Yet - thanks to the law of big numbers - big groups of people are more predictable than small groups of people or individual people. So we may not know who will vote X or Y, but we can predict how many people will vote X and Y with reasonably small error. We have big data, that can predict you're pregnant before you know you're pregnant, just basing on you browser history FFS.

> The only way to mediate between them is by discussing non-objective things like how we value fish and the services provided by electricity.

Seriously, a better way would be to start doing 5-whys on this, instead of going for "non-objective things". A quick attempt will tell you that we care for both ecosystem and power, but depending on the local context, we might care more about one or the other. Maybe we can import power from elsewhere, or put a dam in a place where it won't disturb ecosystem so much. Maybe the ecosystem can handle the dam, or really the power is desperately needed.

You can quantify this all if you bother. Problem is, most people don't bother, they very quickly stop thinking about it, and start going by their gut.

(I'd say, they stop behaving like adults, but since a lot of adults have this problem, I guess we need a different phrase.)

"we might care more about one or the other"

Caring more about one or the other is exactly the issue. The reasoning about the degree of which to care about either at all is the issue that cannot be resolved objectively.

Putting a dam in place that won't impact the ecosystem so much--sure, we can minimize the tradeoffs, but the tradeoffs remain, and all resolve to what we value vis a vis what it costs. Which is not objective.

Of course the reasoning is objective, once you dig down to the underlying "non-objective" values.

Think of it as akin to mathematics. Mathematics starts with axioms, which can be completely arbitrary, and then derives an entire universe from them by following only objective, formal reasoning. Similarly here, you have some personal values that are (to some extent) arbitrary, but accepting those, you get to use objective reasoning to devise a set of tradeoffs that satisfies those values the best.

Also sometimes different people with different values aren't really in conflict, they just don't have enough knowledge to realize their values aren't being violated. Fix that, and you can get agreement.

The axioms are precisely what is not objective.

Yes. But everything above them is.

> The only way to mediate between them is by discussing non-objective things like how we value fish and the services provided by electricity.

Why are those non-objective?

Which is more valuable, a fish or a person's comfort?

There is no objective answer to that question.

>There is no objective answer to that question.

Prove it.

>The only way to mediate between them is by discussing non-objective things

Wrong.

Both the fish and the electricity need to be considered in a long term utilitarian framework.

The only reason you seem to have two conflicting objective truths is because your time window is too short.

> Both the fish and the electricity need to be considered in a long term utilitarian framework.

Says who?

You have an infinite regress problem here. You eventually are going to have to fall back on non objective feelings about how the world should be to justify your actions.

Right. We're going to fall back on "we should maximize utility because that's better than less utility". But we're not going to have to fall back on how it makes me feel to see dead fish or somesuch.

> "we should maximize utility because that's better than less utility

Depending on how you define "utility" - this is either a meaningless tautology that doesn't say anything at all, or a subjective belief that can be easily challenged by equally subjective alternatives.

Yeah, but the way between the real problem and fundamental non-objective feelings is a pretty long one, and on the way you may discover that differences in those feelings aren't that great, and they all can be satisfied in many ways - which means you can devise a solution that's acceptable to every reasonable person. Sure, it may not always work, but it's worth trying.

Taking that argument to its logical conclusion, there should be no public policy whatsoever. Every single policy has at its roots an evidenceless belief. As an extreme example, "Seat belts save lives" is an objective truth, but "Saving lives is a good thing" is an evidenceless belief. That is it believed by the vast majority of the human race in no way constitutes evidence.

Evidenceless beliefs are what need to dictate the goals of policy, because there is no other way to decide on a goal. Once the goal has been decided, objective truths must be what determine the best way to reach that goal.

> As an extreme example, "Seat belts save lives" is an objective truth, but "Saving lives is a good thing" is an evidenceless belief. That is it believed by the vast majority of the human race in no way constitutes evidence.

I disagree: I am strongly opposed to force by violence (laws) to prevent people from doing stupid things to themselves. In this sense, I do not necessarily consider saving lives a good thing (of course, there do exist lots of cases where I do).

P.S.: I strongly recommend wearing seatbelts, but am opposed to seatbelt laws.

Let's try and give your picture a new frame. It may change your opinion on seatbelt laws! :)

From what I've been told and have read, the fines for not wearing a seatbelt are less about preventing people from making a potentially life threatening decision and more about preventing people from making a really bloody mess that tax payers then have to pay to clean up. A dead body strapped inside of a car is a lot easier to clean up than a dead body thrown 60 feet down the road and torn into who knows how many pieces in the process. Not to mention that what is the equivalent to a human cannonball can cause further damage to property and people who are unfortunate enough to be in the way.

Thinking of the fine as "Increasing Cost to Society" instead of "Preventing you from endangering yourself" makes it more agreeable to me - as I think we agree on the stance that laws that prevent people from doing stupid things to themselves aren't good laws. Laws that reduce wasteful costs to society so that funding can be put into less wasteful things, in my opinion at least, are good laws though.

Since most laws against preventing people from doing stupid things to themselves saves wasteful spending - I agree with them within that framing of the picture.

To simplify what you just wrote.... "Increasing Cost to Society":

You are forcing folks to internalize an externality. Same with carbon cap & trade schemes. Same with helmet laws. Same with toll roads. Etc...

The example there wasn't as something I was trying to convince people of, but rather to show how unobservable beliefs are necessary to provide value judgments on observables. You have different set of evidenceless beliefs, including "Laws are threats of force by violence, and should therefore have high bars to implementation." These evidenceless beliefs then influence which actions should be taken.

Why are you opposed to force by violence?

Good point technically but I think some subjective valuations are widespread enough to be able to be considered objective, such as "alive/animate things are better than dead/inanimate things", and "joy is superior to pain", and "murdering is bad". And regarding pain/pleasure, you can always do what doctors do and ask patients to assign the intensity a number from 1-10, which is basically a hack that takes a qualitative subjective valuation into the quantitative objective world where it can then be reasoned about.

We already do this in a quite literal way with money, the price of things follows the subjective valuation of those things, so for example if a bit of paint on canvas in a frame which would otherwise only be worth $40 is the Mona Lisa, then it is suddenly (and seemingly magically) worth $800 million. You could use this to evaluate joy and harm as well, in the form "what is the maximum amount of money you would spend to be able to eliminate this harm or to experience this joy?"

I disagree that joy is superior to pain. They’re both necessary parts of life and one without the other is indistinguishable from oblivion. Plenty of people would disagree about alive/animate versus dead/inanimate and in ways that would probably surprise you. I like mountains, I think they’re certainly more interesting and beautiful than pigeons. As for “murder is bad”, plenty of people disagree vehemently about the definition of murder. Is killing to defend someone else murder? What about killing someone during war time? Those aren’t even close to being settled issues and are absolutely matters of belief that are not provable in any scientific sense.

I think the distinction is a useful one to have, because it lets you identify the appropriate way to try to convince somebody. If people disagree about the effectiveness of policies, and which ones will bring about the desired effects, then additional evidence should be found and examined to determine who is correct. On the other hand, if people disagree about what the goal is, then no amount of evidence will convince them, because goals are unobservable.

> "Saving lives is a good thing" is an evidenceless belief.

Is it? Any kind of value system must presuppose the value of life because only life can hold something valuable. Value systems that do not are therefore inconsistent.

I don't see any inconsistency there. For example, I could imagine a value system that solely values the existence of paper clips. Actions that increase the number of paper clips in the universe are good, while actions that decrease the number of paper clips in the universe are bad. Life has value only in as much as it causes paper clips to exist.

It would be a rather silly value system for a human to have, but there wouldn't be any inconsistency in it.

If paper clips are the highest good, then ensuring that paper clips will be made in perpetuity is also of utmost importance. Only life is capable of knowing the goodness of paper clips, ergo we should ensure life's continuance so as to ensure the continued production of paper clips.

With the invention of machines we could replace life with more efficient automated systems that produce paper clips, but stupid machines cannot adapt to changing circumstances, like outside threats in the form of asteroids, climate change, earth quakes, and so on. Therefore the machines should be at least as intelligent as possible so as to adapt to any circumstances and ensure the continued production of paper clips.

Intelligent machines are simply another form of life. This obviously wouldn't happen overnight, but with the gradual introduction of more and more technology, the creators would more and more integrate with their machines.

Any value system that denies the value of life is simply inconsistent.

Parent is a nice statement of the position the author opposes. It has the benefit of being irrefutable too by not admitting the premises necessary to do so.

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