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Comment by jetpks | Hacker News Reader

> Your kids will pay for my freedom in blood, but it's worth it because they're statistically insignificant anyway.

Everyone's kids are (statistically) paying for everyone's freedom in blood - for example your freedom to drive a car, use encryption and speak in public places could be used to run them over, exchange child porn, and teach them swear words respectively.

I know it's really hard to wrap our head around the idea of objective worth of human lives but we already have calculations for the statistical value of life[1]. We only need to do a similar calculation for our freedom and then we can objectively determine when it's worth it to trade lives vs freedom. At some point (if not there already) a few lives is going to be statistically worth less than the freedom of the entire population.

[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life)

Not gonna get into discussing the objective worth of a human life, but I'll note that the entire population cares about their kids, not so much about their freedom to carry guns. Those caring about the latter are a vocal minority (or at least a subset, I don't have the statistics at hand).

That's 1 of the reasons kids are usually valued more with these calculations. I'm not advocating for gun rights here. I'm not from the US and I prefer that civilians don't carry guns at all. Maybe I should have said that outright first so I don't just get down-voted and dismissed. I'm talking about freedom in a more general sense. Gun rights is not even the freedom being taken away by this type of surveillance.

I'm not sure what freedom in the more general sense means here. When focusing on a specific freedom, you'll often find that it's at odds with somebody else's freedom. E.g. I'd say being able to roam public spaces without fear to die is a freedom worth protecting (and it seems you agree).

Gun rights is the freedom that could be taken away (other countries have done it with great success) instead of installing body scanners, so that's why I brought it up here.

Oh, well, if we already have the calculations (and a Wikipedia page!), they must be right.

Would you rather we don't have these numbers help us with decision making? Do you have a better system in mind? Should we just never discuss or think about risk/reward trade-offs as soon as it involves a single life at risk?

I also don't get where the Wikipedia snark is coming from. I know that Wikipedia pages are not perfect but It's still a pretty good reference for a lot of things. I often trust Wikipedia articles for any given subject as long as it is well-sourced and not political just like this one.

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