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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the noble motives behind this, but programs like the AMBER alert have not proven very effective[1].

Furthermore, abductions by strangers are incredibly rare; most abductions are by people that the child knows well (such as an estranged parent/relative, etc.). These are the cases for which the AMBER alert is most likely to have success, but they're also the cases for which it is the least likely to be necessary (ie, people investigating the case are going to be several steps ahead of a passerby who happens to drive by the billboard).

Also, 75% of children who are abducted and murdered are killed within the first three hours, so the shelf life of these alerts is incredibly small. Even smaller for people who are sitting at the computer when they see the alert, not driving on a freeway.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMBER_Alert#Controversy_about_...

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A friend of mine growing up had an older brother who was abducted. His mother quit her job and spent the next 5 years looking for him. Eventually, she found him. She called her mother's home and her son picked up the phone. He had been abducted by his uncle and told that his mother had sent him to live with his extended family. No one suspected it.

Now, I know n=1 is not a good sample size, but to downplay the significance of kidnappings by "someone the child knows" or that "it was a family member" is not reasonable.

Also, a study on the effectiveness of amber alert messages on the freeway be extrapolated to give data on results from a 404 campaign.

I can't estimate whether or not internet amber alerts are a good or a bad idea. Just tossing in my 0.02.

Your parent is not arguing that kidnappings by non-strangers are insignificant; rather, that public service announcements about such kidnapping are unproductive.

Whether this is actually the case, I have no idea.

And your parent was providing an example where public service announcements about such kidnappings could have been productive.

I don't think he provided example for successful public service announcement.

Yes they did. In the original story, no-one doubted the uncle's claim that the child had been sent by their parents. If there were public service announcements that "This child is offically missing", someone might have copped that something was up.

If the right individuals had seen the public service announcment. Were there any public service announcements for that abduction example given?

I think it's a given that nearly all the impressions of a public service announcement of a child abduction will be seen by people who have never seen that child. There's a cost of seeing a PSA of a child abduction. People will now consider child abductions more likely than they actually are. This causes them to make decisions that may be against the best interest of their children like go outside and play.

Right. Instead the example that refutes the idea that public announcements aren't necessary for finding kids who were kidnapped by family members because the authorities would have looked there anyways by providing a anecdote where a public service announcement could have helped find a kid who was kidnapped by family members and not found (for a long time).

Some way to tag your children (see Woz's attempts) are probably going to be more successful than alerting random people.

Or how about raising children self-confident enough to make a phone call home and demand to talk to their mother directly after a couple weeks.

And they would let him, why?

If they won't, he knows something is up. Did they never let him outside in public, never go to school, never have contact with anyone who could help?

If so, he was basically just locked in the basement, the whole thing about saying he was sent there didn't actually matter.

I don't mean flat-out deny, There's a reason why simple social engineering works with a very high degree of success, and manipulating small children who have trust in his kidnapper (which isn't rare, since they're often family members) is even easier.

Which is why I suggested raising less gullible, passive, compliant people. Gullibility is a problem, here and elsewhere.

I think raising people to be good, independent non-gullible people is a better approach than sticking trackers on them.

While we perhaps inculcate a bit more compliance than is strictly necessary, you can't make children not gullible. To be not gullible irreducibly requires enough experience with what is normal to know when something is not normal, and alas, not only do children have a straight-up calendar disadvantage there, the children that we are talking about are also more likely to not have a normal to compare against in the first place.

This is the wrong time to play that tune.

Reminds me of: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=elizabeth_sm...

> Which is why I suggested raising less gullible, passive, compliant people. Gullibility is a problem, here and elsewhere.

Young children are going to be gullible and compliant because they are young children.

That isn't something you can change until they are no longer young children. It's a question of both the teaching time required and the mental development required to learn those skills.

Similarly, some older children and adults are going to be gullible and compliant because they are mentally handicapped. Again, this isn't something you can fix by training them.

He was raised normally and went to school during those years.

I don't know what his thought process was but leaps of logic are a commonly observed phenomenon among kidnapped children.

A quick google on "Steve Wozniak children tag" and similar did not give any results. Can you provide a link? Would love to read more about that.

It would be more effective to have the FBI do face recognition on everyone's vacation photos on Facebook. Assuming that the kidnappers want to raise the kid as their own, they are bound to post pictures of him. This won't work for the 75% that chimeracoder alleges are murdered, but it might for the scenarios like the one you described.

Why would a kidnapper would post pictures of a child they kidnapped on FB? Criminals are not always rocket scientists, and even then they aren't always rational(1). The kids also tend to go to birthday parties, school, and other places where other people post pictures of them that get posted on social networks.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Nowak

Wouldn’t there be a prohibitive number of false positives? It sounds like the poster child for this sort of calculation: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2b0/bayes_theorem_illustrated_my_way...

chimeracoder was saying 75% of kids who are murdered after being kidnapped are murdered within 3 hours of being kidnapped.

i.e. in conditional probability notation, P( A | B and C) = 0.75 where A = murdered within 3 hours of being kidnapped, B = kidnapped, and C = murdered.

Billboard??

Over here (in the Netherlands), we have a text message / radio broadcast / digital road sign alert that's put out within hours of the child being reported stolen.

> Also, 75% of children who are abducted and murdered are killed within the first three hours

This is exactly why it's a very fast, responsive system (here).

The parent post mentions "billboard" but it is a digital road sign (at least the ones I've seen). It's on a pole higher up so people can see it easily, similar to how many billboards are done.

If even ONE SINGLE CHILD is found and returned back into the loving arms of a parent due to a repurposed 404 page, the initiative is a great success.

Don't you think?

That would depend entirely on the cost of the initiative and what other things, including potentially more effective ways of rescuing kidnapped children, could be done instead.

Your answer makes me want to quit HN forever and move to the planet Mars where humans don't live.

Yeah, it sure is awful when humans are able to apply logic to figure out solutions to terrible problems.

That seems rather egoistic. Can you imagine how many children could be saved for the cost of a single mars mission?

Amusingly, I have a similar reaction as you, but to the other side of the debate.

How could you help find lost children on Mars?

Step 1: Send children to Mars

That would depend entirely on the cost of the initiative and what other things,

Um, obviously. The point is that the cost is just about nothing, especially if your current 404 is an apache default or a joke page. Nobody is suggesting some type of moral obligation, but if a repurposed 404 does bring a missing child home, the cost was clearly worth it.

including potentially more effective ways of rescuing kidnapped children, could be done instead.

It's a goddamn 404 page; it's use does not preclude any other methods of recovering kidnap victims.

You're thinking of time and money costs; those are just a small part. What about the costs of being reminded of such a terrible thing every time you hit a 404? And what about those costs for people who lost their child five or ten years ago, and for whom those are just terrible memories, with no hope left?

All great points. I'm reminded of that whenever I see one of those "cleft palate" pictures. It's a terrible thing of course, but it's not exactly something that lifts your spirits and should not be forced upon people.

You make an interesting point. I could see how these 404s could be in poor taste depending on the tone of the site, but I'm not really moved by the "someone might feel bad about something they saw on the internet" argument.

Opportunity costs always exist and should never be discounted. Yes, the opportunity cost for each instance is low, but it's also being spent by a whole lot of people.

"potentially more effective ways of rescuing kidnapped children"

Agree.

Better than nothing? Ok, yes. Better than a company giving people an opportunity to monetize their 404 traffic (people do this obviously) and then taking those earnings (even if nominal) and putting it toward a cause to help children (or anything "worthy") even better.

That would depend entirely on the cost of the initiative and what other things, including potentially more effective ways of rescuing kidnapped children, could be done instead.

No, that is incorrect.

The program would be regarded as successful if it rescued one child at any cost.

It is possible that there are more effective ways, but the existence of those possibilities does not preclude a less effective way of being successful.

Additionally, it seems unlikely that any other "more effective" way would be precluded by this method so it is inaccurate to measure the effectiveness of this method vs other methods ("could be done instead") - it would almost certainly be done in addition to other things.

Finally, on a personal note I believe attempting to argue that returning a kidnapped child to their parents may NOT be regarded as a success because of the "cost of the initiative" is morally indefensible.

The specific wording was "great success". Not merely successful, but greatly so.

Finally, on a personal note I believe attempting to argue that returning a kidnapped child to their parents may NOT be regarded as a success because of the "cost of the initiative" is morally indefensible.

But surely this isn't the case or each of us would personally have to dedicate all of our own time and money to finding every missing child, correct? Why aren't you using your salary to run ads on Facebook with the faces of missing children? It might work...

But surely this isn't the case or each of us would personally have to dedicate all of our own time and money to finding every missing child, correct?

No.

"Success" in this case is defined by reuniting a parent with a child. Using monetary conditions to weigh that is immoral IMHO.

However, there is no implication that anyone should spend their money in this (or any other) way. Indeed, I don't believe that there is any moral imperative to implement this on their website. That is a personal decision and is best left to the person making it.

attempting to argue that returning a kidnapped child to their parents may NOT be regarded as a success because of the "cost of the initiative" is morally indefensible.

You're saying that any and all possible attempts at finding / returning a child would have zero costs associated, or that whatever the negative cost is irrelevant and should be disregarded. Imagine the government shifts a massive amount of spending towards finding missing children, and suspends the 4th amendment, hires a massive army of investigators and searches door to door to find missing children. Of course this is an exaggerated scenario but it's at least arguable that the negative costs associated with this plan could outweigh the benefits, and that this would be morally undesirable. I don't think there is ever a scenario where costs can be completely ignored / discounted to obtain any amount of beneficial outcome. If you agree with my point in the extreme case, but not in the original scenario, then the disagreement is one of degree not principle. i.e. "well it depends on the costs.." Exactly.

I'm saying that if your "exaggerated scenario" reunited a child with their parents it would be a success. I'm not arguing that something like that should be done, nor am I arguing that cost effectiveness cannot be considered.

I am saying that given that the prior condition of successfully reuniting a child with their parent then saying it was not successful because it cost too much is putting a price on the child's life. That is morally repugnant in this circumstance.

We're just dealing with two different definitions of success here aren't we?

Success Definition One: Success occurs when the child is returned. This is a binary outcome and you're right to say that if the child is returned then it simply is a success under this definition and nothing can change that.

Success Definition Two: The scheme works and is practical. This is a qualitative outcome which does require comparing apples to oranges (or as you emotively put it; "putting a price on a child's life"). If Bill Gates offered 12 billion dollars for the return of a child, no questions asked, no law enforcement involved, it might work very well indeed, but cannot be called a success under this definition.

With regard to the 'prior condition', I would still argue that if the scenario under Two above occurred, and worked, I would still call it a failure under definition two and a success under definition one.

And honestly, definition two is the more interesting one to try to produce a solution for.

How many false alarms would it take to distract the department from finding a lost child?

Let me put it this way: Let's say it take 500 hours to find a child without someone calling in and 5 hours to investigate a claim.

If the website method has a success rate of 1% or less the time needed to investigate the claims outweighs the time it would take to find the child without the 404 pages at all.

I don't have any numbers for this but surely that is one scenario where this could cause more harm than good.

Why doesn't Google stick a random missing child photo next to their logo on every page view? Surely it would be seen by millions in a matter of an hour. Why doesn't Windows display a little message in the corner of every desktop, linking to an important charitable cause? Why don't you place a bunch of 5x5 signs of missing kids in your lawn? You value the appearance of your lawn more than the possibility of saving a life? Why do you watch TV when kids are dying? You could be working, and saving money to send them food. You could have saved hundreds of lives if you didn't watch that last season of Breaking Bad.

Want more initiative? Hey, let's stick missing kid stickers on the rear window of cars. Or what if every Friday, instead of going out for lunch, everyone in the country donates 5 or 10 dollars to save starving kids. Or what if grocery stores had a basket next to each checkout, and you buy extra food while shopping, then place it in there to be donated? These ideas are a dime a dozen, and this 404 concept is one of the worst I've seen.

In short, everyone needs to draw the line somewhere. If someone isn't interested in changing their 404 pages, don't send the guilt trip party, because there are a million ways you could be doing more in your life. Everyone chooses to help to a different degree.

No, I don't. This kind of argument is commonly advanced, but it neglects the opportunity cost of over-saturation causing people not to pay attention or care. This is the lesson of the fable about the boy who cried wolf. Noise ends up swamping the signal.

When I notice the 'missing kids' thing on the weekly coupons that show up in my mailbox, as often as not it's some kid that disappeared 10, 15, 25 years ago. That's sad, of course, but as a practical matter it's making things worse.

Are you claiming that over saturation is worse than zero saturation?

To be honest, I can't remember the last "missing child" face I saw. If I visited Reddit today and saw a face of a kid in my state that was missing, I'd be more likely to pick them out. This program isn't getting forced by anyone but claiming it would do worse than "no good" is ignorant.

We do not have zero saturation. There are many other channels besides the 404 one suggested above.

To be honest, I can't remember the last "missing child" face I saw.

That may be because you have subconsciously stopped looking.

Depends. It might convince the public that the biggest threat to children is from strangers. A lot of children would be harmed by their close relatives and the general public might think there's nothing wrong.

It seems like you are saying that the effort is futile because they won't find them anyway.

It doesn't matter of they are "incredibly rare". We are talking about human lives here. If it saves one life, it's worth it.

Please read this: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=psychology-...

> When people are asked to trade their sacred values for values considered to be secular—what psychologist Philip Tetlock refers to as a “taboo tradeoff”—they exhibit moral outrage, express anger and disgust, become increasingly inflexible in negotiations, and display an insensitivity to a strict cost-benefit analysis of the exchange. What’s more, when people receive monetary offers for relinquishing a sacred value, they display a particularly striking irrationality. Not only are people unwilling to compromise sacred values for money—contrary to classic economic theory’s assumption that financial incentives motivate behavior—but the inclusion of money in an offer produces a backfire effect such that people become even less likely to give up their sacred values compared to when an offer does not include money. People consider trading sacred values for money so morally reprehensible that they recoil at such proposals.

An interesting article about human behavior. How nice. However, I don't see a categorical disproof in there of the idea that saving lives is something worth spending time and money on, so could you take a minute and connect the dots for us plebs? Thanks.

I assume zmj's point is that we implicitly make this trade-off all the time. For example, cars could be safer, but then they would be more expensive. Anytime we opt for a cheaper car with less safety features, we are making a cost-benefit analysis involving our own lives and the lives of the people who will travel in our car. (Who are probably the most important people to us.) There becomes a point where the actual gains in life-saving potential is negligible, and we don't think it is worth the cost. But we rarely state it that way.

We could easily make cars way, way safer - put a giant, sharp spike sticking out of the center of the steering wheel, pointed at the driver's heart, and forbid seatbelts. Nobody would ever go over 5mph, or put themselves at risk of crashing into anything.

You have completely botched this example. This example is useful to explain why airbags increase collisions. Putting a spear in cars would not make cars safer.

I don't understand your objection. Do you see a meaningful distinction between "cars are safer" and "cars are driven more safely"?

There is a major difference. The number of traffic accidents did not change significantly from 1990 to 2009, but the number of deaths from traffic accidents dropped 23%[1]. This is most likely due to cars being built in a way so that their passengers are more likely to survive accidents.

[1]: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.p...

This is one of the better comments I've seen lately - perfect execution of the "take the parent post's example to an absurd, irrelevant extreme and say Q.E.D."-style comment that seems to be all the rage around here lately. Love it, A+!

From http://squid314.livejournal.com/260949.html: Contrary to popular belief, you can put a dollar value on human life. That dollar value is $5.8 million. Denying this leads to terrible consequences. Let me explain.

I'm guessing these 404 pages aren't at all cost-effective. The chances of saving a life are incredibly low, and the cost of implementing and maintaining them is pretty high. Also, there's value lost to users. They'll see a missing child instead of helpful navigation suggestions.

These things sound inconsequential compared to a human life, but they add up extremely quickly. Our minds can't intuitively do the math.

A common example of trying too hard to save lives is the unintended consequences. Example: making airplanes more safe -> flights cost more -> more people opt to drive -> more people are killed in car accidents than saved by safer airplanes

Whether that fits here or not I'm not sure.

Why don't we make the speed limit 5 MPH and save a large number of the 45k deaths a year in the US? We could save thousands of lives, but it won't happen.

So, in your mind, a nearly zero cost repurposing of the 404 page is equivalent to reducing the speed limit by 75-95%? Not saying it's a good idea to apply this, but the detractors are blowing the cost way out of proportion.

Maybe this makes me a terrible person or someone with a bad photographic memory, but I literally cannot recall any missing person's face that I've seen on a billboard, a website, a milk carton, etc. even if I saw them daily. Worse, the more sites that adopt this concept, the less likely I am to remember those faces and - out of how plain awful and sad it is it is - the less likely I am to even want to spend time looking at them.

There's got to be a better way.

We've come a long way from annual telethons or weekly tithings to every spare second of everything in our lives needing to be philanthropized - including 404 pages! You know those pages in books "this page intentionally left blank" - think of all the children we could save!!!!

Over-exposure will only serve to desensitize us to worthy causes. Everything in moderation.

Ditto. I'd also imagine that if I were the loved one of such a victim, the last thing I'd want while perusing the internet is another reminder. And this isn't even getting into what the scum of the internet would/could do to exploit or otherwise vandalize these databases or the content therein.

I would argue the opposite. A lot of people don't pursue worthy causes because they're unaware of causes worth pursuing. Plus, it's only on the 404 page.

To clarify: The idea isn't that you'll remember a picture, but rather that you might recognize a child you already know.

I just think it is a slippery slope where the ratio of false leads to legitimate tips weighs too heavily on the former for this to be practical and not threatening to real families when someone wants to play the hero. I'd be interested in seeing statistics about the percentage of abductees that are allowed to be seen in public without any sort of cosmetic alterations or other such obscurations, particularly in the first few months/years. Perhaps their captors are more lazy about that than I'd assume.

We are talking about human lives here. If it saves one life, it's worth it.

Ah, one of my favorite arguments. The good 'ol, "there is no price which is too high to save a life (period, full-stop)".

Do you actually believe that? Really? Or am I just reading you wrong here?

We think human lives are priceless because we like to believe that everyone is unique. There is no warranty replacement for children born defective; nor could you replace them when they break, go missing, etc.

Well obviously everyone is unique in that there's only one of any given life, regardless of whether or not anyone's life is qualitatively unique. But it seems obvious (at least to me) that what's much more relevant is that as self-reflective human beings, we have a responsibility to protect other human lives, within reason. Of course, what "within reason" means is a whole subject on it's own.

That "within reason" is the key.

Looked at from one (unreasonable) level, everything is unique. Looked at from another (unreasonable) level, most humans could be replaced with other humans and very little would change.

There's no obvious-to-me level to look from where this argument applies to humans, but not to pet cats and dogs.

Everyone is unique, in a sense. The real trip-up in that logic is, just because something is one-of-a-kind doesn't mean it has infinite value.

You don't have a child, do you? Are you an only child? Would you admit it now if you are?

Why does it matter if he has a child? Because it makes a purely emotional argument less effective on him?

Talking as someone with 5 siblings (4 brothers, 1 sister), I find that one brother is generally as good as another whereas my sister is unique.

Based on this, your question of "Are you an only child?" seems only to be helpful to your argument when used against people with a relatively small amount of siblings of a particular gender. This condition is, let's be honest, a relatively new development in the first world and simply doesn't generally exist in the developing world.

Is the cost (price) of this solution really so high though?

If you're a parent of a kidnapped child who you lost most hope of finding, what effect would seeing this on each and every 404 have? My guess is "not that great", to say the least.

If it's really that much ineffective as some are arguing, I think the costs to our mental health far outweigh the benefits.

You're absolutely right,

After all, why shall we even try to save human lives?

According to the current population growth rate[1], we have a relatively high supply of humans on earth, so anyone dying or disappearing will most definitely be replaced within a short period of time. Merge that data with the kidnapping statistics[2] and you'll see there's nothing to worry about.

Moreover, a child had likely not accomplished much in his life, so his disappearance could only affect a limited number of people.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping#Statistics

It would be of massive costs to change your 404, so those missing kids could suck it.

We live in a world with finite resources. That means nothing is free and everything has a cost associated with it.

That means you have to think a little bit about the cost and benefit of doing something.

You cannot save all children.

If it's that important, it shouldn't go on a 404 page (which, ideally, people won't see). You should dedicate space on all of your pages for pictures of missing kids. And escaped convicts.

What if it's not worth it? Can notfound.org keep up with increasing server loads? Do Missing Children Europe and Child Focus have adequate resources to run this project along with everything else they do? Will people become desensitized to missing children photos on 404 pages? What about all the other potential issues I'm not thinking of? Yeah launching this website is definitely a morally good action, but whether or not it will prove to have any actual positive consequence will need to be seen.

We are talking about human lives here. If it saves one life, it's worth it.

That is a good sentiment, but unfortunately it's not how a lot of society works. For example, many people die of poor nutrition, or from lack of the best medical care. If the wealth of the top 30% of the population (y'know all the billionares, millionares & upper class (maybe some middle class)) was confiscated then we could save these lives. However many societies do not make this decision, for some societies & cultures, that price is too high.

The inevitable economic collapse from the warped incentives would likely cost more lives.

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