Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

I propose a system where deaths are statistically assigned to causes.

Eg. if a person dies of lung cancer, then we roll a dice and say "theres a 1 in 6 chance that was due to pm2.5 emissions". If the dice rolls a 1, then we look around the town for sources of pm2.5, and we find that 1/6 comes from a candle factory. We roll another dice, and if that comes out with a 1, then we say "This factory emitted air pollution that killed this person".

Then we treat it in law exactly the same as if the person had walked by the factory and been decapitated by a piece of roof falling off. Ie. we let the family sue. We send inspectors to see if there is negligence involved, etc.

View on HN

If we know that a candle factory is causing 1/36 deaths to lung cancer, we don't need such a mechanism (or the involvement of an arbitrary family) to take the operator to court. At least not in the UK.

My backyard bonfire in the UK produces so much smoke I'm sure someone somewhere will be given lung cancer from it. Yet, it's perfectly legal and there is no carrot or stick to encourage me to buy an incinerator or start composting.

Having a small chance of a knock on my door and someone saying "Excuse me, but you killed grandpa, plz pay for his funeral" probably would make me change.

Maybe you shouldn't do it, then?

Then, the candle production was moved to China. The end.

Not quite the end... since a lot of shareholder value was created due to the move, others followed their lead (even without the threat of lawsuits). Now we argue about capitalism, globalization, human rights, etc. but can't seem to reconcile the fact that our world simply _cannot_ be perfect and we should focus on compromises and balances instead; this is exceptionally difficult in such a polarized environment.

It will be interesting to see where the "end" really is.

In the US we don’t think of pollution as that bad specifically because we dealt with so much of it. In an unregulated country you get events like the Great Smog of 1952 in London which killed 4,000+ people and made another 100,000 sick, and then boom Clean Air Act 1956.

There are finite number of countries and they eventually focus on pollution after people build a lot of factories in the country. Even China is starting to focus on air pollution because they don’t have a choice.

Trouble is that those statistics are educated guesses. It's not like we have a precise table of fractional causes that could be split up via dice rolls. The first thing the lawyers for the factory would do is challenge the probability estimates.

And let them do that... before the death occurs. But once the death has happened and the dice have been rolled, the cause of death isn't appealable.

Did you take the idea from stochastic rounding?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com