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Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths. We are just so terrible at evaluating risk, for some reason it is OK to waste everyone's time with over the top security to stop a tiny portion of terrorism deaths, while still being OK with high speed limits that kill thousands of people per year. Not that I'm advocating for lower speed limits, just that there is a contradiction here.

I bet that if instead of having people go through security at sporting events, you had them all do 20 push ups, you'd save more people from dying of heart disease than would die of terrorism.

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> We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths

It would be a highly controversial dashboard, I guarantee it, likely unpopular with both political parties.

The problem is that assuaging fear is often more important (to irrational people) than saving lives.

For example, guns. Very few people die because of mass shootings. Your chances of dying in a mass shooting are virtually nil. Yet, every time one happens there's a big frenzy to enact anti-gun policies. So you have all this talk of "bump stocks" and "ghost guns" and "assault weapons" and whatnot, but it's all just smoke and mirrors to assuage fears. The goal isn't to save lives. The goal is to assuage fears. I don't take any gun policy seriously that purports to save lives if it isn't focused on handguns and suicides.

Yes police shoot and kill more people that mass shootings. But also covid has killed more police than people have.

What if -- and I know this is a crazy idea -- but what if there was some sort of metric beyond popularity by which things were reported? Maybe even decided?

For instance: if there was a free online study (in person test) "critical thinking" series of classes, where you could become accredited as a person who knows at least the basics of how lying works, statistics can be manipulated, science is hard, etc, etc, etc... if you had that credential, it could be included in stats.

"While 85% of people say they're really worried about X, only 12% of critical-thinking accredited citizens consider it something worth focusing on."

Sure but then politics becomes about controlling what's on those tests.

That's a good thing.

Having a giant political flamewar about how critical thinking should work has good potential to result in mutual destruction.

If you really play it out in your head, critical thinking is pretty hard to abuse because it tends to lean away from blind trust.

Every trick that could be taught to get people not to trust your enemy, is one less way you can take advantage of them yourself.

I have my doubts. People can learn “critical thinking skills” all they want, it’s the failure to apply them fairly that breaks political discourse at all levels of education.

People don’t investigate statements that conform to their biases. And if the statement is something they don’t want to believe, people will deploy the full force of their “critical thinking” toolkit to fight it, while allowing themselves to become vulnerable to all sorts of fallacies and cognitive blinders as long as it only obscures the inconvenient facts.

But compare that to someone who has no critical thinking skills at all.

Further, at least some people will be clever enough to use critical thinking on their own beliefs. Maybe some will only use it to further entrench, but not all. And it only takes a few amazing people to push society forwards; that's all we've ever really had.

That would be great, but it would be gamed so badly.

Like those lists of "over 500 scientists have signed a document saying 5G is harmful to health so it must be true". When actually half of the people on the list aren't real people and the rest of them are political scientologists, dentists and people who know absolutely nothing about radio waves.

Hopefully, anyone who had taken even introductory critical-thinking would recognize what was going on there and throw the article out.

If the worry is, "this is one more way to convince non-critical people of things," I'm pretty sure that's a lost cause to begin with.

> For example, guns. Very few people die because of mass shootings.

Adjusted for how armed Americans are, gun violence in this country is tiny. And seeing what an armed citizenry can do against the full American force (Afghanistan), an armed population is a necessity against tyranny in America.

The ongoing and ramped up tyrannies don't affect the people with guns, so it's not doing much good so far. When the oppressed arm themselves, people who claim opposition to gun control suddenly become very pro-gun control.

It was all guns rights until the black panthers started arming up, and all the sudden it was "perhaps some sensible limits might be wise"

Pretty hard to miss the intent.

Arm the homeless is what I say when I'm feeling spicy.

This shouldn't be downvoted - the roots of control in the US are absolutely rooted in this kind of racism, whether it be "modern" gun control as mentioned by parent, or the Sullivan Act over a hundred years ago.

Why shouldn't it? It's a complete and total fabrication used to smear a segment of the population.

Yup, California was an open carry state until the GOP assemblyman Mulford and GOP Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act into law banning the legal carry of loaded firearms. History is indeed stranger than fiction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act

the bill was crafted with the goal of disarming members of the Black Panther Party who were conducting armed patrols of Oakland neighborhoods, in what would later be termed copwatching.[1][2] They garnered national attention after Black Panthers members, bearing arms, marched upon the California State Capitol to protest the bill.

Yeah armed black militias marching through white suburban America will get the FBI interested.

Very pro-2A people agree that gun control is racist though. Mainstream republican party (what people think of as pro-2a) isnt very. Trump implemented bump stock restrictions, hell, reagan signed 86 new machine gun ban. If you talk to very pro-2a people you will hear them agree that armed minorities are harder to oppress; gun control is indeed very racist going back to army/navy laws and other restrictions on former slaves owning arms.

The highest death rate in 2019 is Alaska (TIL) with 24.4 deaths per 100,000 people. The lowest is Massachusetts with 3.4 deaths per 100,000 people.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...

There is approx. 393,000,000 firearms owned by civilians in the US. About 60% of all adult firearm deaths are by suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_ownership

Handguns accounted for 91% of firearm homicides.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

The assumption that the armed population and the forces trying to impose tyranny will be on opposite sides is looking pretty tenuous.

As well as the assumption that the kind of weaponry available to the population is effective against that available to the "tyrants".

We just spent 20 years in Afghanistan proving how effective and potent a modern military is against guerilla tactics. I think it's become pretty clear that if you're not willing to ignore the generally accepted rules of engagement, they will just outlast you.

Not to mention the Vietnam war or any of the other wars we've been involved with in the Middle East. Not to mention drug cartels in Mexico and Latin/South America.

I'm not sure how anyone can argue that a population with weapons can't hold off a tyrannical government. It is the same reason Marx said that under no means should we disarm the populous. I think people often forget that a government can't just kill all its population. Not only can you not rule over the dead but you also are going to have a hard time interacting in global trade (thanks globalism, but this even held true in the 1700's). It is kinda odd that this sentiment also often comes out of a country where some farmers fought off the country with the biggest navy and had an empire so great that the sun never set on it. Civil wars are extremely costly to countries. Also I'm not sure why everyone thinks that people from the military (including generals and entire battalions) wouldn't defect. That's also pretty common when looking at history.

> It is kinda odd that this sentiment also often comes out of a country where some farmers fought off the country with the biggest navy

With help from the country with the biggest army and the biggest ongoing beef with the country with the biggest navy.

But, I guess, its still a little surprising, since that part gets minimized in the farmers national mythology.

Which has also been common throughout history. Same thing happened during the US civil war, Europe got involved. Of course other countries would get involved. Why would it be different this time?

The notion that the primary threat to American democracy is an invading army seems comforting but unrealistic.

Pea shooters will allow you to stop the US Army on home soil? They have total information awareness, tanks, space/air power, snipers, GPS bombs, etc.

Afghanistan was lost because of our tolerance of corruption and intolerance for spending money on a speck of dirt. Oppression of the US will be far more worth the money to a tyranny.

If the second amendment actually said what gun people say it does (literalist/"strict constructionalist"), then I can use these arms as well:

- grenades?

- bazookas?

- artillery?

- explosives?

- chemical weapons?

- biological weapons?

- nuclear/dirtynuke weapons?

Where are you, as an apparently ardent 2nd amendment person likely living in at least a suburban population density comfortable with allowing your fellow Americans to arm themselves with?

At somewhere along that chain, almost all non-crazy 2nd amendment people "nope out" of allowing those arms. Maybe your typical gun rights person would allow grenades, MAYBE bazookas.

Major explosives or anything else? Nope.

But you'd need to get to the chem/bio/nuke arms to have any real deterrent to the US Army.

Your pea shooter militia is a fantasy. The US army has more than cannons, horses, and muskets now.

> A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.

That's the whole thing. I think the most literal interpretation is that people have a right to bear arms, and you cant infringe that, by telling them they can't bear any arms. Obviously reasonable people will differ here, but I don't think it's fair to say that it unambiguously grants the right to bear any kind of arms at all.

At the time of writing, "Arms" was muskets.

So you've already stated that it isn't reasonable to allow the other "arms". So why is anything more than a single shot barrel-loaded rifle allowed?

Of course the reason is that there is a massive industry in making guns and a rabid source of people that can be scared into buying their wares. The reason the laws are the way they are is because of the economics of the lobby and not any principle.

What about e.g. https://wryheat.wordpress.com/2018/03/14/multi-shot-assault-... ?

It's unreasonable to restrict ownership of arms unless you want to restrict violence to the government and organized criminals, which the founders most certainly did not intend.

Police killed more Americans in 2019 than mass shooters, how can you make an argument in favor of the cops and courts controlling weaponry? Did you miss the police brutality protests last summer?

I'm not a citizen of the US so I don't really have a horse in this race (about "gun rights") but I am curious about your comment. I don't understand how the right to bear arms has kept police from killing any Americans in 2019 and how it will keep them from killing more in 2021. Can you explain?

I also don't understand how citizens of the US are meant to protect themselves against police with the weapons they're free to carry. Is the idea that US citizens are going to use their weapons to resist the police from arresting them? Isn't that just going to cause no end of bloodshed?

If you look at police shootings, the bulk are police killing people brandishing guns or other weapons, who express intent to or are in the process of using those weapons on either the police or other people.

The vast majority of these incidents happen to hardened criminals that almost no one in their right mind would support. A small fraction of these incidents involve innocent people, or people involved in situations where violence is not the answer and de-escalation would have been a better outcome.

The police have a large amount of support because the people involved in these incidents are, generally speaking, bad people that the majority would prefer to be in prison. Most people don't think the police are an oppressive force that should be fought against with lethal violence.

The guns that Lewis and Clark used on their expedition were decidedly quite fast firing. Yes, it was short after the 2nd Amendment and certainly in the founders' sites of possible.

The right is codified law. It is not up to citizens to argue this. It is up to to those who need to control others to make these arguments. Yours are hncompelling, and have been swatted away by courts for decades.

The 18th century "regulated" means "well trained" today. What implies that any restrictions on the type of arms which may be possessed would be Constitutional? Where is the ambiguity outside of misunderstanding the contemporary meaning of "regulated"? "Bearing" doesn't mean using/firing weapons, of course, it's about preventing any authority from monopolizing violence.

Certainly the founders—you know, the violent, enlightened revolutionaries who lead the first colonial overthrow in history—wouldn't have favored limiting certain arms to only thugs of a future tyrannical government. Why would they write the first Constitution in history to enable future state-sponsored goons to persecute the people of the United States?

After McDonald v. Chicago, no restrictions on arms appear Constitutional (hence the collapse of intrastate weapon laws over the past decade), except, I suppose, as punishment for a crime due to the 13th.

The way the US government works today is VERY different from the government setup by the founders. Trying to divine what they would and wouldn't have wanted (understanding that they were all over the board on opinions) isn't a useful exercise.

The founders didn't want a federal military, they wanted each state to run their own military.

The founders didn't want a strong federal government, they wanted to states to be highly sovereign.

The founders put in the bill of rights to limit the federal government's actions, not state government actions.

The government completely changed after the civil war with the 14th amendment. The constitution was written primarily to limit the powers of the federal government. States were free to put, for example, requirements on religion to run for office.

McDonald v. Chicago would have been appalling to the founders, because it's the federal government trampling over the rights of a state government.

I agree on divining intent, but I'm not aware of any founder endorsing any form of arms control. I'd be interested to see any references suggesting otherwise. Are you aware of any meaningful debate on what became the Second?

I'm mostly going off Jefferson's "tree of liberty" letter [1], maybe there was dissent amongst other founders?

As far as federal vs. state military, I dunno, references? Each state would have their own navy...? Doesn't seem to fit with Jefferson's willingness to launch a preemptive strike on African pirates at the beginning of his presidency [2].

Agreed on strong states, hence the Tenth, and the impact of the Fourteenth, though I'm actually currently trying to get a better handle on that one (e.g. not entirely clear on equal protection yet).

Disagree on McDonald, doesn't seem like the design allows for states to pass laws that take away rights explicitly enumerated in the federal Constitution. States can "exceed" enumerated rights (like California's affirmative right to free speech), but can't cancel them out. Any sources suggesting otherwise?

1. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jefffed.html#105

2. https://www.city-journal.org/html/jefferson-versus-muslim-pi...

>The founders didn't want a strong federal government, they wanted to states to be highly sovereign.

Depends on which founding father you were talking about. Jeffersonians preferred weak central government and autonomous states while Hamiltonians preferred strong central government. It's what lead to the creation of political parties in Washington's administration.

>The founders put in the bill of rights to limit the federal government's actions, not state government actions.

The Bill of Rights limits both, that's why both state, local and federal laws can be deemed unconstitutional.

> > The founders put in the bill of rights to limit the federal government's actions, not state government actions.

> The Bill of Rights limits both

No, it doesn’t.

Guarantees equivalent to most provisions of the Bill of Rights have been applied to the States through the 14th Amendment under the Incorporation Doctrine.

Thanks for the info. I thought that was always the case.

https://sixthamendment.org/the-right-to-counsel/history-of-t...

> The founders didn't want a strong federal government

The founders very much didn't at the time of the founding. The framers by the time of the Constitution (a little over a decade later, and many of the same people) had moved quite a bit toward a strong central government based on the immediately-revealed practical problems with the abstract vision at the founding in functioning in the real world. Woth more experience, more practical problems were revealed; the Civil War being a key, but far from the only important, point in that process.

The United States Constitution was not "the first constitution in history". For earlier, famous, instances of actual "constitutions" rather than codes of law (such as that of Urukagina of Lagash) see for example Solon's constitution of ancient Athens:

The Solonian Constitution was created by Solon in the early 6th century BC.[1] At the time of Solon the Athenian State was almost falling to pieces in consequence of dissensions between the parties into which the population was divided. Solon wanted to revise or abolish the older laws of Draco. Solon promulgated a code of laws embracing the whole of public and private life, the salutary effects[2] of which lasted long after the end of his constitution.

Under Solon's reforms, all debts were abolished and all debt-slaves were freed. The status of the hectemoroi (the "one-sixth workers"), who farmed in an early form of serfdom, was also abolished. These reforms were known as the Seisachtheia.[3] Solon's constitution reduced the power of the old aristocracy by making wealth rather than birth a criterion for holding political positions, a system called timokratia (timocracy). Citizens were also divided based on their land production: Pentacosiomedimnoi, Hippeis, Zeugitae, and Thetes.[4] The lower assembly was given the right to hear appeals, and Solon also created the higher assembly. Both of these were meant to decrease the power of the Areopagus, the aristocratic council. The only parts of Draco's code that Solon kept were the laws regarding homicide. The constitution was written as poetry, and as soon as it was introduced, Solon went into self-imposed exile for 10 years so he would not be tempted to take power as a tyrant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solonian_Constitution

See also Aristotle's "Constitution of Athens", on the constitutions of Athens, Sparta and Thebes, and with a title that makes it clear that "constitution" was an established term at least since Aristotle's times.

Finally see wikipedia's article on pre-modern constitutions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution#Pre-modern_consti...

Modern constitutions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution#Modern_constituti...

And (modern) democratic constitutions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution#Democratic_consti...

For more examples of constitutions before the United States Constitution.

Right, I should have said "first codified Constitution that's still in use today".

Sort by "date ratified": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutions

That's more accurate :)

Mustard gas for the masses!

Absolutely agreed though, it's a very internally inconsistent viewpoint from my perspective.

Technically you can buy chlorine and turn it to gas at any place that sells pool supplies.

> an armed population is a necessity against tyranny in America.

Why are we comparing to Afghanistan? You can look much closer to home - at America - and see that this specific armed population just spent half a decade doing absolutely jack shit about tyranny.

Your chances of dying in a mass shooting may be very small, but it doesn't take a large number of shootings to start affecting our lives. For example, events like First Friday in Oakland have been essentially cancelled indefinitely and most public events have large numbers of heavily armed police standing around and getting paid for overtime.

But is this essentially like arguing that terrorism justifies all of the security theater at the airport?

But then the thing causing the damage isn't actually the shootings, it's the reaction to them.

It's the same thing as the War on Terror. The enemy in the War on Terror is Terror, i.e. Fear. The only way to win the War on Terror is to overcome your fear and not sacrifice your principles because you're afraid.

The British had it in the 20th Century. Stiff upper lip. Or you'll do more damage to yourself than the enemy can.

Be careful with that reasoning. Its illegal for the CDC to study gun violence as a public health measure. If that happened it might rank on child mortality rates.

It is not, and never has been, illegal for the CDC to study gun violence. One specific part of their budget that had been earmarked for those studies was reallocated once. That's the extent of the so-called "ban" that the politicians keep harping on about.

That re-allocation did happen, but it also came with wording that effectively barred from doing any research until a recent change to the law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment

What's interesting is how all these policies focus on banning legal guns.

Now, try asking in a debate the proportion of crimes committed with legal weapons vs illegal weapons and watch your opponent start dancing around the question! Good luck getting a straight answer.

Which is probably why the US stopped reporting on the percentage of gun crime committed with legally versus illegally obtained firearms in 2004. I bet the data is available, but you'd have to comb through court records yourself.

Even at that point, "legally obtained" still included borrowing one from a friend or family member.

> Which is probably why the US stopped reporting on the percentage of gun crime committed with legally versus illegally obtained firearms in 2004

That's interesting! Why would they hide such stats?

Because it runs counter to the narrative of gun control advocates. Almost no gun crime is committed with legally obtained guns by previously law-abiding people.

The pro-2A response to gun control requests based on crime is often to say "don't ban my guns - just make 'felon in possession of a gun' a life-without-parole offense".

All these "illegal" guns started their life as brand-new perfectly legal firearms. It's a very leaky pipeline, one in which the industry and industry funded lobby groups have at least a bit of a mixed incentive to solve. The vast majority of the proposed gun-control laws focus on tightening up the leakiest parts of the supply chain, or on reducing the overall demand for various firearms.

> All these "illegal" guns started their life as brand-new perfectly legal firearms.

Citation needed here. Especially in the south.

My neighbor was the spokesman for the New Orleans police department. He gave a pretty detailed explanation of how illegal guns are used, and where they come from.

Most of them come from purchases at gun shows (as laws are considerably laxer on private sales). The serial numbers are filed off, then they're hidden in abandoned buildings by a person who rents the guns out to be used in murders. The same illegal guns are typically used in numerous murders, making it more difficult to trace them back to any particular person, if they are found.

> So you have all this talk of "bump stocks" and "ghost guns" and "assault weapons" and whatnot, but it's all just smoke and mirrors to assuage fears. The goal isn't to save lives. The goal is to assuage fears. I don't take any gun policy seriously that purports to save lives if it isn't focused on handguns and suicides.

It's also politics. If you actually wanted to solve the problem, well, like two thirds of US firearms fatalities are suicides. So a real solution is going to look like "improve mental health" and not "restrict who can buy a gun" or else you're only going to be diverting people to other methods of suicide, or keeping people "alive" but still in such a precarious mental state that the only thing preventing them from taking their own life is access to an effective means. Neither of which is actually acceptable.

But from a political perspective, proposing useless gun restrictions makes the other team have to spend political capital to oppose them, because even if they're completely ineffective at their stated purpose, they upset or inconvenience the other team's constituents. Which seems to be the goal of modern US politics.

It is interesting to compare US vs Canadian suicide rates to see what impact gun ownership could have.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

While I agree with the idea that removing a quick and accessible means of suicide can reduce suicide rates, there's a huge caveat on that article.

> we did not have the ability to control for differences between the two countries including poverty, unemployment, health systems, cultural, or other differences

The authors go on to suggest that they may in fact be underestimating the amount of suicides that could be averted with reduced gun ownership, but there are an awful lot of confounding factors that are simply not addressed in this paper.

> improve mental health

I think that this is a poor target. How do you set out directly targeting mental health? What are the biggest causes of mental health issues?

https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm

CDC lists causes such as childhood trauma, trauma from medical issues, biological factors, alcohol or drugs, and loneliness or isolation.

How do you set out to tackle loneliness or isolation? How do you help prevent alcohol or drug addiction? What are the reasons that people become addicted to drugs or alcohol?

> Use and misuse of alcohol, nicotine, and illicit drugs, and misuse of prescription drugs cost Americans more than $700 billion a year in increased health care costs, crime, and lost productivity.

https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior...

> Some must cope with the early loss of a parent, violence, or sexual abuse. While not everyone who faces these stresses develops a mood disorder — in fact, most do not — stress plays an important role in depression.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/what-causes-dep...

This is a big interconnected problem. My point is that just giving directly to mental health resources rings hollow. A tougher holistic approach needs to examine why American society just plain sucks for so many people. Why do people want to kill themselves or others? Why does life suck so much for so many? We have a rotten system and drug addiction/gun violence/suicide are symptoms and not causes.

My 2 rambling cents.

It seems like free therapy would help with all of this? Therapy is part of free health care in other countries if I recall. Also free health care would help prevent people from ending up in dire straits.

This reminds me of the "This is fine" cartoon by KC Green[1]. Therapy treats the symptoms and not the cause of societal problems.

I do agree that therapy and free healthcare would help and are needed, but alone they are not a solution.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/5/11592622/this-is-fine-meme...

So we both agree therapy and healthcare would help. I did not say they are the only thing we need to do.

Have you tried doing more than nothing?

On many occasions in the past, I’ve found that doing anything often works better than doing nothing, like the US usually advocates.

Turns out that there are no perfect solutions, but there are a lot of partial solutions that in aggregate add up to the mental health the rest of the developed world has.

Thank you for making an account to attack a point that I did not make.

I did not say to do nothing. I said it will probably take a holistic approach. Holistic means look at the issue as a whole rather than trying to attack one symptom. A holistic approach would likely implement plenty of small partial solutions.

Doing nothing is OFTEN the best solution to problems!

Politicians generally don't understand this. Average people don't understand this. But it's still true.

In particular, by the time a problem becomes prominent enough to be noticed by politicians, it has often already been solved and the ensuing legislation is nothing but a deadweight loss.

For example, before 9/11 the assumption was that hijackers would try to ransom the passengers for money, so it was better not to resist so they didn't hurt anybody. After 9/11, the assumption had to be that they were planning to crash the plane, at which point all the passengers resist and a hundred passengers can easily take on half a dozen hijackers and it's well worth the risk of one or two getting hurt in the process.

So by 9/12, another 9/11 was no longer possible. It was already solved. None of the government action that followed was actually necessary and the TSA is completely pointless.

> just giving directly to mental health resources rings hollow. A tougher holistic approach needs to examine why American society just plain sucks for so many people

I don't think they are mutually exclusive, mental health can incorporate a systems approach. It seems patently foolish to ignore lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, sleep or social factors like friends, family, religion & other communal institutions.

> A tougher holistic approach needs to examine why American society just plain sucks for so many people.

Ship 'em to North Korea. A little perspective will work wonders.

Or be in their shoes, and a little perspective will work wonders to show you why they feel that way?

>How do you set out to tackle loneliness or isolation?

Not having your media contributing to hyper-polarization of your populace through algorithm enforced bubbling, or riling them up through fear mongering helps. Lack of public works may also be a contributing factor. One thing I will say for the Great Depression/New Deal generation: they didn't have anywhere near the isolation issues our generation seems to grapple with.

> How do you help prevent alcohol or drug addiction? What are the reasons that people become addicted to drugs or alcohol?

Inability to escape or alter their situation except by altered mental state. Get people something they can constructively do (and fairly pay then for their time) and it's amazing how positive coping skills materialize.

For those with non-economic contributing factors, a big part of it seems to be social enablement, removing them from the stressor, etc... Which a robust framework of social services may help more with as long as you don't start trying to turn reaching out into a life tainting thing (no publically available by default records for info brokers to suck up that would adversely effect future prospects).

Also, unironically, a better justice system, post-release process.

These aren't hard. Just not terribly popular, due to the fact you have to pay people to help other people improve their lot. Or literally just inspect to make sure people are effectively using resources available to get their stuff straight.

A very simple step in the right direction would be to create more places where the exchange of money for goods and services is not a requirement for attendance. It sucks to be too poor to go to the library 8 miles away because you can't afford the bus pass.

> It's also politics. If you actually wanted to solve the problem

The pairing of politics to problem is a challenge in that solving a problem means shifting focus to a different problem set. A different problem set will likely emerge a different politics which is effectively a threat to the people engaged in the current politics.

> suicides

While I agree with the message I don't think this will sell well. Many people do not even have the faintest idea of what depression is like and understand it as an illness. So they see it as a personal choice and therefore not a thing for the government to solve. Similar to drugs. This is of course despite the connections to environmental causes and government regulations. You greatly decrease rates of depression and drug usage, which are highly correlated, by the same thing. Making life better and less stressful. That even helps non-depressed and non-drug users.

Despite that, I think we should just talk about other types of gun violence. The vast majority of which involve hand guns. Which if you understand this, makes the national conversation seem extremely odd.

I'd encourage everyone to watch Sapolsky's lecture on Depression[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc

[0^] My running hypothesis is that the since we have a new fiasco every other day that it causes over stimulation (like a stress response) and causes socio-motor retardation (analogous to psychomotor retardation)

> or else you're only going to be diverting people to other methods of suicide

It's important to point out that you can do comparisons between the US and other countries where guns are far more restricted and a lot of the US gun mortality shows up as other forms of suicide.

> because even if they're completely ineffective at their stated purpose

Ineffective measures are actually politically superior: They don't cure their ill, so you can keep using them again and again.

If $random_gun_restriction actually worked passing it would diminish your ability to campaign on gun issues in the future. This bad incentive applies on all sides too, not just pro-gun control. The gun control lobby is one of the single most effective promotional tools of anti-gun-control politicians.

guns have a tendency to escalate violence and harm (vs. say, fists), which is a real problem, but yes, the focus on terrorism and mass shootings is entirely unjustified vis-à-vis guns and gun policy. suicide by gun (20-30K/yr) happens twice as often as homicide (10-15K/yr), and non-fatal injury rates are ~3 times the fatality rate (80-100K/yr). almost none of those involve terrorism or mass shooting (combined, on the order of 100/yr).

It's not entirely unreasonable to regulate on the basis of psychic impact over straight up mortality.

Not saying our focus on mass shootings over suicide necessarily makes sense, but the collective trauma of 20 kids dying in a school shooting is arguably higher than the equivalent number of deaths by suicides.

My gut feeling is that if you look at these data they'll tell you "most people should focus on eating well and getting good amounts of exercise." They might also tell you "kids should learn water safety skills and comply with car seat safety rules scrupulously".

It's hazy now but I remember doing some back-of-the-envelope math in April 2020 to compare risk of death via SARS-CoV-2 infection vs. other causes. I think what I remember seeing was that if you're age 80+ getting COVID is similar to driving 10 million road miles in the US (NHTSA: 1.5 deaths per 100 million road miles; COVID: 15% mortality for infection in ages 80+). I think I remember being totally unable to evaluate the risk to a kid but maybe COVID infection is similar to driving 3000 road miles? (per upper bound at https://fullfact.org/health/bbc-children-covid-risk/). This mostly told me that driving was very risky.

Problems with comparing road miles to disease infection:

(1) being infected also means you're infectious; dying in a car crash doesn't spread exponentially to others

(2) I do not know how to reason about the long-term side effects of COVID on quality adjusted life years

> I bet that if instead of having people go through security at sporting events, you had them all do 20 push ups, you'd save more people from dying of heart disease than would die of terrorism.

I do a qualitative analysis of this every couple of years: should I bike to work?

(1) Cardiovascular fitness improves from exercise

(2) You might get hit by a car and die (worrying about this adds stress even if you don't experience it).

This was studied before, and the results are amazing -- it's 266th ranked in terms of disability adjusted life years:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11127-018-0590-...

> If terrorism were a disease, injury, or mental disorder, its DALY would rank in the bottom decile of the 291 diseases and injuries included in the Global Burden of Disease (Murray et al. 2012). Specifically, in Table 7 it is shown that terrorism would rank 266th, i.e., in the bottom 9%. Relative to the diseases that plague mankind, terrorism has limited consequences.

Death is not the only societal cost, and the study above only looked at first-order numbers of deaths.

Additionally, it's difficult to measure the cost of in-action when responding to an erratic phenomenon like terrorism.

Whilst I think airport security is indeed just security theater, roll my eyes every time I have to take my shoes off at an airport, and I disagree with some of the claims in this article that these things work and have kept us safe, I'm not sure that's a great idea.

I can only speak for myself, but I'm not a fan of cost-benefit analyses when it comes to human lives. Going down that route gives us such wonderful things like corporations preferring to pay out damages instead of making product recalls (c.f. the Ford Pinto case). It gets quite cynical. But I guess in the minority here. All my "tech bros" think like that too. It's all about cold, hard statistics.

There is something to be said about "Vision Zero[1]" type projects, but as it stands I don't think the TSA is currently engaging in a deliberate such project.

[1]: https://wikiless.org/wiki/Vision_zero

>I'm not a fan of cost-benefit analyses when it comes to human lives

What about when you measure the costs as lives vs. lives? E.g. spending X dollars on airport security saves Y lives, but spent on highway safety saves Z lives.

As someone else wrote in this thread, there's absolutely no way to know how many were saved from potential harm, so that's a useless contradistinction.

I think doing some kind of cost benefit would be preferable to just spending money on what types of death people are most afraid of, which is basically what we are doing now.

I'm not saying that we need to do super intense cost benefit on every way of preventing death. But if we are spending far more to prevent a particular type of death than another just because of public sentiment I think that is a problem we should fix.

And doing that kind of analysis can actually save far more lives by using resources more efficiently. Orders of magnitude more people die from obesity than terrorism, yet we don't spend orders of magnitude more money on promoting healthy lifestyles. Or to pick a slightly absurd example, if we replaced security screening with cancer screening it could be far more effective in preventing people from dying in ways that aren't their "fault" (false positives aside).

You MUST do cost benefit analysis. A lot of people say "well if TSA saves one life..." But at what cost? A billion dollars? A trillion? A quadrillion? You may argue that it may never cost that much, but it can if you don't do those analysis. And what about non monetary costs? How many lives are you willing to forfeit to save just one? A lot of people claimed to take to the roads after TSA was formed. Yet car travel, per mile is deadlier than air. So theoretically it cost more lives to save just that one.

There's a dynamic aspect to this that's difficult to capture in terms of straight up mortality risk.

For starters, we're more interested in the marginal average reduction of mortality per dollar invested rather than point in time risk. Like, the risk of flying on airplanes is fairly low relative to driving. But that's, in part, because we've already invested a huge amount into making air travel safe. It might not make sense to funnel future dollars into making air travel safe as opposed to cars. But if we were to lower that investment going forward, mortality would presumably go up. Because people aren't that irrational: Zooming through the air a mile in the sky, absent safety precautions, really is inherently less safe than driving on the ground.

That's extra true for something like security, where you're dealing with responsive opponents. The odds of a plane blowing up in a terrorist attack are low, but if the bad guys had a 100% successful method for blowing up a plane, they'd probably take it and the odds would go up.

Plus the odds also vary quite a bit based on the denominator too. For instance, the odds of death by flying are lower over the last X years. But if you were looking only at mortality risk from flying on the 737 Max in 2019, maybe that's different.

And then there's the non-mortality cost. Eating healthier food would reduce mortality quite a bit. But people like eating unhealthy things -- at some point, the extra life gained isn't worth it.

None of this is to say that the current degree of security theatre is worth it. Only that relative mortality is probably insufficient a measure.

I've definitely considered this regarding COVID. It seems commonplace where I live that many people feel it is irresponsible to not wear a mask when doing something like hiking on an almost empty nature trail, but will drive recklessly on the highway without a second thought.

In my opinion, this is just statistics worship, and is not unlike a form of utilitarianism. Murder rates are low, but we spend an incredible amount of resources preventing, investigating, prosecuting, imprisoning and executing murderers, even those who have murdered just one person.

While I have significant grievances with the US justice and prison system, I'm okay with expending disproportionate resources to ensure that people don't take others' lives just because they want to or feel entitled to.

Tracking how many people die from different causes is easy. Difficulty is tracking how many lives were saved with specific preventive measure.

While I agree with your conclusion, the metric you suggest isn't a good one.

As a silly hypothetical: Imagine that terrorism was really popular but completely thwarted by taking your shoes off at airports. Because its well known that the shoes always come off, the terrorists don't even try. And as a result your dashboard would show lots of money being spent removing shoes but no terrorism. Yet (in this silly example) if the shoe removal spending stopped people would be blowing up left in right, so it's actually a good investment.

Successful measures tend to erase their own effect, especially when applied to intelligent systems.

If you allow observations vs cost to be your guide you risk cutting spending on highly effective measures and preserving spending on measures that do not work (which leave lots of observations around)!

This is one of the reasons that randomized controlled trials are so much better than basic observational science.

People are just fine at evaluating risk. It's just that the prioritization of the population is different than the prioritization of HN/Reddit/whatever. "People" aren't bad at stuff. On average, they're about average at it, which is tautologically true.

People don't wanna die in a car crash or from covid but they want to die at the hands of others even less.

> "People" aren't bad at stuff. On average, they're about average at it, which is tautologically true.

That is absolutely not true, at least not in the way anyone means.

Humans are "terrible" at remembering numbers. The average-ability human has average ability, obviously, that is tautological. But as a whole, humans are not good at remembering numbers.

A reasonable question is, what does "good" even mean? Well that depends on context. We are worse at remember numbers than computers are. We are worse at remember numbers than the same human, but with pen and paper. We are worse than some animals.

Obviously, there is no objective "good" or "bad". We are better than some animals, etc.

But when someone says that humans are terrible at evaluating risk, they usually imply that we are bad at it as compared to risk evaluation done with real calculations, and that is internally consistent. And that is something that IS somewhat objective, and most humans fail as compared to this objective standard (e.g., lots of contradictions in risk decisions).

I think you missed the point of the post you're replying to.

>People don't wanna die in a car crash or from covid but they want to die at the hands of others even less.

No, I was replying to the specific sentence I quoted.

I actually agree with the spirit of the post, it's just that one thing that bothered me.

> while still being OK with high speed limits that kill thousands of people per year.

The French government tried to tackle this issue. This lead to months of yellow-vest protests, close to a revolution at times. Some dude forced the door of a ministry with a bulldozer. Others set fire to a prefecture. Death threats everywhere. Small Guillotines were built. Etc. The protests were sill rocking after a year, and were put to a temporary stop due to COVID lock-down.

tl;dr: nobody would dare decrease the speed limits again.

The CDC collects these statistics. You would find, for instance, that more black people die each year from falling out of bed than they do at the hands of cops while unarmed (Unironically, provably true; look it up before you downvote... ideally no innocent person would die during police interactions). Clearly, whatever motivates policy and politics has no resemblance to a proportional risk-based assessment.

There is no purpose in comparing those two things as one is self inflicted whereas the other is involves a second party’s actions.

The other problem overlooked in this analogy is that the killings are the most extreme symptom of a tyrannical police force that terrorizes (black) American citizens at an incredibly high rate, from harassment to physical abuse. Protests against the police are using killings as an example of the problem, not the complete summary.

And, to be clear, the police treat white Americans very poorly as well. It's just that they somehow manage to treat black Americans even worse.

I went ahead and looked it up. According to google, in the US 650 die falling out of bed per year[1], while about 1000 are killed by police, about 20-25% of those police victims being black (while the US black population is around 14%).[2]

Falling deaths are quite common among the elderly. Police shootings, not so much.

  https://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

He said unarmed people. Those 1000 are mostly all armed.

There were 14 unarmed black victims and 25 unarmed white victims in 2019.

The number of unarmed black shooting victims is down 63% from 2015, when the database began.

The 14 unarmed victims in fatal police shootings would comprise only 0.2% of black homicides.

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/police-black-killings-ho...

An engineer friend, at VW, told me more people fall to their deaths from ladders than die on the autobahn. In DE, of course. He's one of those engineerz that evaluates the moral consequences of the companies processes, writ large. And you need an engineer for moral calculus. Sadly, this is still new territory for large companies.

Oh, and I alsi think this is a poor analogy. Mine is better (ducks).

> We should have some kind of dashboard tracking how many people die from terrorism, car crashes, heart disease, COVID, etc., and how much time and money we spend trying to prevent these deaths. We are just so terrible at evaluating risk, for some reason it is OK to waste everyone's time with over the top security to stop a tiny portion of terrorism deaths

The "preventing a single death is worth it" crowd has unfortunately been running the show since 9/11.

This crowd has largely driven the COVID response as well - which went well past "flatten the curve" and turned into "stop all deaths no matter the cost", ignoring all externalities and consequences along the way.

It's bizarrely myopic. It not only ignores any cost benefit analysis, but also larger preventable causes of death and poor health outcomes. Obesity being the proverbial elephant in the room.

Exactly. I really gotta stoo typing now....

> This crowd has largely driven the COVID response as well - which went well past "flatten the curve" and turned into "stop all deaths no matter the cost", ignoring all externalities and consequences along the way.

The US has the world's highest COVID-19 death count, and is #24 out of 223 per capita with just a smidge under 2,000 deaths per million people.

If you think that's "stop[ping] all deaths no matter the cost" I'd love to hear what you think of my state of 1.8 million people with a grand total of 4 deaths.

> The US has the world's highest COVID-19 death count

This is patently false. You might mean, the highest reported death count.

The US is the 3rd largest country by population - and the two largest countries either A) Have no feasible way to count accurately or B) Deliberately don't report accurately.

> I'd love to hear what you think of my state

You're clearly not in California - where the lunacy has gone off the rails. Los Angeles bulldozed sand into skateboard parks[1] because kids were playing... despite all data at the time (and since then) has showed children are not at severe risk at all. It went well into the "prevent any death, no matter the cost" territory for most of the past year.

Shutdown all the schools - force kids to stay at home in isolation - drive up teen suicide rates... but it doesn't matter because they weren't COVID deaths and the goal was to prevent all COVID deaths. We ignored all consequences of the policies we enacted - because the goal became zero COVID deaths. Goodhart's Law[2] might come into play here.

Self driving cars is another prime example. Spending billions and billions of dollars, countless man hours of research and engineering, selling a promise and vision - negligently killing people along the way - all so we can have some future where nobody dies from a vehicle? That's just not reality. The reality is people will just die from coding errors instead - but it's the pursuit of "zero lives lost" that drives that industry and fantasy right now.

[1] https://www.cbssports.com/general/news/skateboarders-remove-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

> This is patently false. You might mean, the highest reported death count.

Certainly possible that India has more deaths, but given that you've just described their death count as something which there is "no feasible way to count accurately", I'm not sure why you're so confident about the claim being patently false.

> You're clearly not in California - where the lunacy has gone off the rails.

Yes. California has had ~1,700 deaths per million people, a solid 723x more per capita than the state I live in (South Australia). So again, I don't really see how you could believe that the COVID response there is being driven by people preventing deaths at all costs. If it was, they wouldn't have such a horrific death count.

> drive up teen suicide rates

Have you got any source for this? Similar claims were made in my country last year during a lockdown (that successfully eradicated the virus), and then when the national mental health organisation released their annual reports it turned out that suicide rates actually went down drastically during lockdown.

I think Taleb has a point on this topic - the concern is about a forecasted growth rate, not about the current rate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dKiLclupUM

By that logic, shouldn't the concerns stop when the growth rate drops?

Exactly.

An entire 9-11 load of deaths in car accidents occurs EVERY MONTH ever since. The disproportionate response shows up the fraud of the War on Terror, Patriot Act and things like TSA SOPs at airports.

You can compare it to any other cause of death or even merely injury.

Those are risks that are stable from year to year. Deaths from terrorism, COVID and small wars are defined by power laws where they can quickly spiral out of control. You could argue people intuitively understand this and overreact in an attempt to get them under "control".

If traffics deaths varied by many magnitudes year to year you'd likely see a similar over reactions. I'm not saying I agree with this approach but it's not as simple as people make it out to be.

High speed limits are killing people? Are you ok man? Look at germany and their death tolls on highways compared to america.

Of course high speed limits aren't the only factor in traffic deaths. But if we set every speed limit to 25mph and enforced it, I'm pretty confident we would see a significant drop. Obviously we shouldn't do that, but the point is that we are allowing some people to die so we can get places faster.

20 years after 9/11, BinLaden still takes money out of your pocket (Airport security, air marshals etc.).

20 years later, the commodity that both financed and motivated 9/11 style terrorism and religious radicalization in the middle east and beyond - petroleum - still does that. It's also the same industry that provides a lot of revenue for the international arms industry.

But we didn't really want to stomach the lifestyle changes that shifting off of petroleum as a fuel would require, so instead we went decided to bomb societies out of supporting terrorism and into democracy.

Even if one doesn't believe climate change is real, that's a pretty good reason to avoid burning petroleum to move around by driving EVs and taking public transit.

USA had become net energy exporter, until January 2021 administration change. We didn't need OPEC. This year we choose to need OPEC.

Actually we are but actuaries aren't, maybe politicians should start using some actuarial expertise rather than jumping from one supposed crisis to the next to get votes. People, especially mobs, are ruled far more by fear than by facts.

I get $100 from my health insurer for getting flu shots, I imagine similar incentives are coming for covid vaccines. 2021 premiums were set before vaccines came out, so maybe they have had time to price it in by now.

Well said... I feel like someone out there has developed a dashboard like this.

We are pretty good at death counts, it's easy. All the data is there. Tied to anonymised health condition as aggregates.

The problem is how do we even start to evaluate the cost of prevention. Measures? We have equipment and labour costs, that's easy to measure but the data is not made available. But then what is the opportunity cost on those who are inflicted the measures. A person goes on holiday and can perhaps browse a book while queuing for an hour to go through the security checks, a business traveller is simply standing there, unable to even make a phone call due to lack of privacy.

Also, if we spend 1 trillion usd on say the prevention of terrorism, and we "only" suffered 20 death in the United States during that period, it doesn't mean halving the expense would only double the death toll. We put measures and have no tool to measure their effect, high number of variables, and each of their weight evolve dynamically.

I think we better spend time educating the media industry to somewhat control the increasing rate of fear inducing columns published each second. And if they don't learn, regulate them since we are already regulating countless industries for that matter.

Strong door to flight deck, and policy change to keep door closed and locked, eliminated hijacking risk. Everything else is an expensive show which air travellers apparently enjoy. They keep paying for it.

They don't enjoy it. It's mandated, and the cost isn't itemised on the ticket fare. If each and every traveller knew the cost of airport security measures put on them, more would complain, the most drastic airports may start to be avoided on principle. But we aren't in a capitalist regime where transparency and obligation to inform accurately is enforced. It's authoritarian capitalism. Pay up, or find yourself excluded from the show.

Good points on tax transparency. Add-ons are itemized on air tickets in USA, though things like airport remodeling costs are opaque.

Expensive 'raise arms under arrest' full body scanners aren't advertised as opt-in by TSA, but they are voluntary. I always go through standard metal detector only.

Maybe the masses don't care enough about cost/ benefit and allow career beauracrats to run wild designing 'security'.

Did you know the food store workers near the gates walk around TSA screening at most airports? Crazy.

While true, I'm not sure if you're suggesting that the war on terror and its intrusions in our domestic lives have to do with risk assessment? Don't think I have to say it out loud but it's about literal trillions of dollars that have flowed to MIC, expanded bureaucracy, surveillance, gov contractors, natural resource industries, foreign allies, and a whole lot more that could be noted.

Count of total death is just a 'metric' and something that can be 'optimised' and done 'cost benefit analysis' upon, unless it is your child or family member who is the casualty. I would like to understand how okay anybody would be when told that their daughter died because the government felt it was a waste of money to prevent it.

This is the core of my problem with utilitarian metrics like this, as they rely on quantifying the unquantifiable.

What is truly scary about it, though, are the people who are certain they can quantify those things, and convince others of it, too.

Big difference between labeling it a "waste of money" to having to prioritize whilst being constrained to a limited budget. I mean there's no words that will console a parent that lost their daughter anyways, not really a metric that should determine policy.

But we make those choices every single day, gathering data about it doesn't change that fact.

Most people who die in a car crashes would have been saved if we made the speed limit 25mph and enforced it with speed cameras, but that would be inconvenient for everyone else. There are plenty of very rare diseases that kill people each year, we don't spend as much money on them because it isn't worth it to just save a few lives each year relative to what we could be spending it on. Many flu deaths could be prevented each year if we just closed down every nonessential business during flu season, but we are OK with some people dying so we can gather socially, even if we don't have to.

I think doing cost benefit analysis for deaths and lost years of life would be great, and would allow us to make more logical decisions. Of course no one wants their child or family member to die, but the reality is that if you want to setup society to just stop deaths at all cost, you are going to have a pretty miserable population. And if you don't do any cost benefit, you will actually be allowing more people to die by spending money in places where it isn't the most effective.

This is close. A comparison of causes of death vs how much time the news spends focusing on each one: https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...

Not sure how you make such a dashboard when the expensive prevention measures affect the number of deaths. I think you are looking for number of deaths if the prevention measures weren't in place, but i'm not sure how you could arrive to that number accurately.

> I bet that if instead of having people go through security at sporting events, you had them all do 20 push ups, you'd save more people from dying of heart disease than would die of terrorism.

Or you would encourage the already-sedentary people to go out even less.

We sort of have this in the concept of a micromort: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

We could just start with people dying from starvation or wars globally. My guts tell me, if we can reduce this number, we will reduce the number of terrorist attacks as well.

There's a fine but substantial difference: Terrorism is murder.

Comparing murder to accidences or to fate in case of deathly diseases is inappropriate.

It's about preventing deaths and making people feel safe traveling.

Does coke want kid's to become obese?

No, they just want repeat customers.

Queue the “only so few die because we spend so much” response.

This is actually a logical fallacy. Heart disease, accidents etc: They happen. Terrorism: Someone wants them to happen. Big difference, think about it.

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