Comment by sundvor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sundvor | Hacker News Reader

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You want all people to do the right thing? Fine them if they don't. It's the only thing that's helped us get the virus under control.

Greetings from Melbourne, Victoria, currently on stage 4 lockdown because enough people are selfish and don't care (unless threatened).

EDIT: (Leaving my original text unmodified above) Agree that this sounds crass, and probably not very cultivated by HN's standards, but it's from the point of view of extreme frustration with the situation - having done all the right things myself, only to see it undone by others who just don't care.

I did observe significant changes of behaviour after the fines started getting press coverage. I believe it is indeed incredibly hard to reach out and educate the masses, but when the health of our society depends very much on the last few %s doing the right thing, and this segment is so hard to get to, then drastic measures do have a play. It definitely ought to be backed up by other educational efforts though.

This crisis is making me think hard about where we draw the lines on individual freedom, when they can cause harm to others. Also, having said the above, a number of breachers were in the upper echelons of society financially wise - so it's definitely not a clear cut thing about who needs to start caring more.

> Greetings from Melbourne, Victoria, currently on stage 4 lockdown because enough people are selfish and don't care (unless threatened).

Much of the second wave was due to mishandling of the hotel quarantine program. Given the complexity of such operations it was more likely bad luck than mal-intent. It does, however, highlight the problem of using un-vetted privatized staffing for such critical operations, and then under-training them.

Add to those blunders Melbourne's excellent public transport system that everyone depends on, a lack of mandatory mask policy, and you have the perfect storm.

"Department of Health and Human Services epidemiologist Dr Prof Charles Alpren told the inquiry that for Victorians who had developed symptoms over the past month, 1,589 had been genetically sequenced. Of those, 1,577 were linked to the cluster from Rydges, and 12 from Stamford. There were no other genetically linked clusters in Melbourne."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/22/appalling-and-...

>Greetings from Melbourne, Victoria, currently on stage 4 lockdown because enough people are selfish and don't care (unless threatened).

It's because your governor adopted a stupid policy that doesn't account for human nature. How well has banning drugs and teen drinking worked to limit those? It failed completely. How could anybody in their right mind believe the same heavy-handed approach is optimal for dealing with a public health emergency? It's not the people's fault, it's the governor's fault for adopting a policy that's doomed to failure and them blaming other people when the inevitable happens.

It's like designing an organisation. If it's possible for one single human failure to bring down the whole thing, if it's possible for one guy to accidentally delete the prod database, the fault doesn't lie with the guy who fucked up, it lies with the person who designed the system.

> It's because your governor adopted a stupid policy

The 'Premier' of Victoria, was one of the first to move, and the policies in place were holding up. Mismanagement of the mandatory hotel quarantine system caused an outbreak just days after restrictions were being lifted across the country. Using under-trained security guards was a mis-step, but for the outbreak to happen at this crucial moment was more a failure in execution of the policy, than the policy itself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24280156

I'm going to take it that the downvote was from the poster I was replying to. Without animosity, would you care to share what your disagreement is?

I'm always willing to correct my beliefs, admit to any errors. A down-vote on its own does not provide me with any new information though.

You (well, at least I) can't actually down vote immediate replies to your own comments.

I wonder what our leadership would make of the book "Turn the ship around". I'm not sure how they'd go about defining responsibility - it seems to be all about passing the buck and CMA.

> You (well, at least I) can't actually down vote immediate replies to your own comments.

Yeah good point. Was just unusual that that comment was downvoted (twice?) long after the submission had left the front page, but not the adjacent one where I say basically the same thing. Seemed targeted.

> I wonder what our leadership would make of the book "Turn the ship around". I'm not sure how they'd go about defining responsibility - it seems to be all about passing the buck and CMA.

Not aware of the book, but leaders of democracies are as accountable as much as their citizenry makes them.

The problem is more nuanced.

Nobody can argue fines for socially unacceptable behaviour don't work. They do.

The problem is that this method of ruling only goes so far.

Eventually you run into situations where a significant enough portion of the population believes something different from another.

Its in these situations, fines and laws prohibiting actions (alcohol, abortion), that things start to fail and where positive reinforcement starts to win out.

All this is with the caveat that I don't want to live in a non free society, if that's on the table, then yes, negative reinforcement works fine, if you don't mind attending the odd struggle session in a north Korean death camp.

Yes, same goes for following traffic rules. You cannot just fix the traffic problems by patting people on the back for stopping at the red light. You need to fine people as much as possible; the higher the fines, the lower the cases of traffic rules violation.

Sure you might get the traffic on I95 to actually go the posted limit of 55 with North Korea-esque enforcement but if your goal is to prevent traffic from having an absurd differential it's probably better for everyone to increase the number on the sign.

Same goes for intersections that violate people's expectations of what should be a stop vs a yield.

Traffic is all about making interactions predictable so people know what to do and how to do it right. Reducing variance in behavior is far more important than what the speed is or how any given traffic control device is treated.

Traffic rules are all about dumbing down these complex fuzzy patterns into something we can codify, enforce and build consistent signage/markings for.

With the number of un-legislated edge cases ratcheting up fines is a recipe for resentment among the populace (possibly leading to different voting patterns not in favor of whoever driving the push for fines). Strict enforcement usually comes with the nasty side effect of being regressive and having demographically uneven outcomes. Lax enforcement results in variable behavior. For example some people stop religiously at a certain sign, some people don't, body language indicating someone is going to do one and then they do the other can lead to unpredictability in the eyes of the other road participants (e.g. pedestrian trying to cross there) and bad outcomes.

The modern thinking (borne out by studies) regarding traffic is that the best approach is to make it easy and natural for people to do the right thing. Want people to take a stop sign seriously instead of mostly yielding, turn your Y intersection into a T. Want to slow people down without reducing visibility? Paint narrower lanes.

Relevant 99PI https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/policing-the-open-roa... This episode talks about the history of people ignoring the road rules when cars came about.

Except they aren't effective, and have done nothing but piss people off. Many municipalities have been getting rid of them for years now.

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