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Comment by hiddenfeatures | Hacker News Reader

I find it very interesting, that there are such websites. I wonder whether it works, but I guess that if only one life is saved by a notice on a website, that is enough

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Well if you truly meant one life saved fair enough.

So you'd have to deducted the people killed in making sites like these first. So a web site is possibly $40,000. A humans life in the US is probably worth around $2,000,000. So it might cost one 50th of a humans life to create a site like this.

I'd guess not, but the figures are complicated, the site is used for other things for starters.

I'd suspect a suicide help line would be better money spent. Don't drink and drive campaigns, healthy eating, quitting smoking help all far better returns I'd guess.

1. Human lives are valued at between $6 and $8 million in the US.

This is not what can be produced in the average human life, which is probably more like $1 million as I estimated recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543848 . Instead, it's how much it costs to save a human life on the margin, which is the applicable number here.

2. My impression from previous things I've read is that suicide lines are largely ineffective.

The figure I've seen is $2-4mm (based on payouts from life insurance by the government, etc.), but this was a few years ago, so maybe inflation.

Obviously there are huge differences between humans.

Life insurance payouts are actually an even worse measure of value here. Life insurance payouts should be set by the liabilities left over when someone dies (i.e. children that still need to be raised). A person with no dependents doesn't need life insurance (except for funeral expenses), but that doesn't mean orders of magnitude less should be spent to save their life.

Should be but frequently are not. Life insurance is frequently based on current income rather than current liabilities, and that is before we get into known cases of fraud involving murder for the insurance money.

Still I agree with you. Have a couple of upvotes. You can put a dollar value on a human life but it doesn't really cover it. Life is more than dollars and cents.

There are things at play other than life or death. Let's say you work on campus. There's a shooting and you're freaking out and there all kinds of rumors circulating about what you should do. When's it safe to leave? Should you evacuate? etc. Having a central place where all of that is available is valuable to a huge number of people. Multiply that number by whatever monetary value you attach to that peace of mind and you end up with something that certainly justifies the cost.

Are you kidding us?

You cannot compare 'human lives' by comparing dollars. And surely, the site does not "cost" one 50th of "a" human life.

Economists figure these things out by looking at how much people value their own lives (e.g. how much of a salary increase people expect for high risk jobs). The figures calculated are surprisingly low (IIRC ~$300,000 for an Australian in the late 90s). You need to do this kind of analysis to do cost/benefit analysis -- e.g. should we spend money on making a road safer or building a new hospital?

According to Wikipedia -- $6-7M per life in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life

Not to be a dick, but is an MIT student life valued higher than an average US citizen? I ask this in terms of average production value.

I wonder if someone would be brave enough to even predict these figures.

If you can save 1 life by spending $2.5M and instead you build 50 websites for $50k then it is reasonable to say that the site cost 1/50th of a human life.

My last job was doing websites for higher education, and I can tell you that it's very much a thing. It's a part of many universities' emergency protocols, sometimes paired with an alert banner on the homepage. (And that banner may or may not link to a further page of information.)

While things like a gunman on campus is most certainly an emergency, these systems also serve other messages. Things like other emergencies (earthquakes, for example), snow days, we're just testing the emergency alarms today, etc.

Edit because I had another thought: the whole field of emergency preparedness in higher education is rather fascinating. Most of what I found interesting I had heard second-hand from clients, but you might find it quite interesting.

Sloppy joe day

Yes like he said emergencies.

At this point that most higher-ed websites not only have their emergency website, but also a whole system. A lot of universities send out text messages simultaneously.

Yup. These messages are also sent to MIT students (and, I assume, faculty) via text message, automated phone call, and email.

This is beamed out to sites that people are actually likely to be looking at meaning it is all inbound to that link. I saw it appear on my FB feed moments after it was posted. My Tweetdeck column for "MIT shooter" is moving nearly as rapidly as the one for #BostonMarathonExplosion and almost everyone is sharing the link to them MIT site.

You know I had never thought about that, but Twitter really is the rapid alert system nowadays. You only really need to push messages to a few select parties then boom, everyone knows. It has to be as effective or more than any other alert system we use.

At my old uni, you could submit a cell number to an emergency alert system and you would get texts if something like this went down. I'm guessing MIT has something similar although not sure if this system is part of it. I'm sure someone will clarify soon.

I wrote a system that did that for students. It was a ton of fun to work on. And then it didn't work because the cell phone towers couldn't handle it. So of course they scrapped my code, went with a third-party system, and had the same problem.

Text messages during emergencies? Not a chance. Not when they don't even work for a simple test (hour delays!)

MIT's system has been alerting me with automated phone calls and text messages within minutes of emergency reports. I've been really pleased with the speed of the system.

My uni has just that, and the nagging question I keep asking myself is just how much money are they spending on that service that is profoundly useless. When there is an emergency the police show up damn quick, and there is nothing to be gained for people on the other side of campus to receive a text that building X is on fire. I feel the money would be of more use elsewhere.

Many places face hazards that have a delay before hitting - tsunami is one I know of specifically, and gunmen wondering around would seem to be relevant here. How is this not the best sort of alert system?

> Many places face hazards that have a delay before hitting

You ask yourself how people dealt with large-scale civil emergencies before cellphones became widespread. There were such things as warning sirens, and of course the police with loudspeaker vans. They are still doing that today - every time a hurricane is set to hit Miami the emergency services make the rounds of low-lying areas to get the word out to the homeless.

And a gunman or shooter on campus just cannot be hid - people shout warnings, someone will alert the police, who will then cordon off the area. The costs for the messaging system are obvious, high, and altogether the thing appears more like ass-covering for the administration than something that has tangible benefits.

Loud speakers aren't very effective if populations are spread out, or if one speaker fails many may be uninformed. However I agree SMS isn't a perfect solution either. The phone may be off, people may not have one, low signal etc. It's one more tool to communicate with as I see it.

And in fact my girlfriend, who graduated more recently than I did, got a text message tonight about the situation.

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