My response to Richard Stallman | Hacker News Reader

My response to Richard Stallman

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24 pointsbcardarella23 comments

This post is wrong on so many levels.

First, it's irrelevant whether deaths occur on accident or on purpose. What matters is preventing death and suffering. Let's say I gave you a large sum of money, and somehow proved it could prevent 1000 accidental deaths/year or 10 murders/year. How could you morally justify choosing to prevent the murders over the accidents? What makes up for those 990 lives lost?

Second, the "message" we sent via our response to this situation was anything but good. We essentially showed terrorists how to easily cause $billions in damage to our economy and effectively publicize their message to the globe. On top of that, we've proven our inability to prevent and defend against poorly-executed attacks in crowded locations, and our difficulty in apprehending injured teenage suspects traveling on foot. Great. If I were a terrorist, I'd be drawing up plans to bomb shopping malls and little league football games.

Third, you don't fully comprehend the inefficiency with which money and attention are currently being spent. Accidental deaths are not unavoidable. With additional research and attention focused in the right direction, we can prevent far more deaths due to accident and disease than we do currently. We stand to save tens of thousands of lives per year.

But that would be boring.

People don't care about run-of-the-mill deaths. They aren't exciting, they aren't captivating, and the media knows this well. The average Joe cares more about watching a firefight and "sending a message" than he cares about saving lives or reducing human suffering. And that's a damn shame.

Deaths per day per cause, "sending a message", and "national security". All of these are heuristics, vague approximations, for the thing that we really care about: how do we save lives? Or, given that we will probably not be able to save all of the lives with the resources we have: how do we save as many lives as possible?

Doctors Schneier and Stallman are closer to this than anybody else I've read so far. They have, to some degree, realized that shutting down an entire city to prevent a few deaths is criminally inefficient. They are using this event, which is so obviously wasteful that even the most casual observers are frantically rationalizing away their horror, to hopefully kick people into gear on more efficient ways to save lives: better highway safety, better disaster preparedness, better disease control, better industrial regulation. That's a goal I can get behind.

Okay, so murders in general then. Still a bigger number.

By giving events like these a disproportionate audience, we provide them their precise motivation for having occurred.

By going to disproportionate efforts to prevent them (or capture those who cause them) we create greater cumulative negative effects than the events do directly.

Sorry if being rational doesn't mesh with what the popular emotional reasoning deems appropriate.

What makes these murders so special? Obviously, they were on the news. Why? Because they didn't happen to faceless poor people of color? Because it's a kindergarten or a marathon, where REAL people got hurt?

Edit: Also, could HN not become a forum for this sort of discussion, please?

Stallman made no mention of that. He only drew a comparison on the severity of what happened in Boston to that of car accidents and the explosion in Texas. To that point I was addressing.

Obviously. I feel like his were apt comparisons; it's not obvious to me why intent has a bearing on the math.

However, even if we suppose that intent should differentiate these acts somehow, the reactionary position doesn't seem to hold up.

*Edited to clarify slightly.

> What makes these murders so special?

Bayes' Theorem.

"The 100 car accidents a day are not planned and for the most part are unavoidable."

I'd suggest that many of those 100 car deaths per day are completely avoidable. So many of them are majorly attributable to drivers not giving a damn - mostly impatience and incompetence, but a lot of just nor caring about other road users (I got run into by a guy who was leaning over the back of his seat and yelling at his children, while not noticing the traffic in front of him (and in front of me) had stopped.)

Society, as a whole, does itself a great disservice by allowing the use of language like "car accident" - the truth is it's _rarely_ an "accident", it's almost always "somebody fucked up".

There's actually a page on Wikipedia that has a list of countries by traffic casualties[1]. If it was truly unavoidable, as the OP mentions, then there would be no significant difference between countries, adjusting for capita/vehicle count.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...

Not only that, but if you sort any of the metrics descending, the countries one might expect to top the list in traffic fatalities (Vietnam, India, China, etc.) are all near the bottom.

The only sensible metric on that website is ‘Road fatalities per 1 billion vehicle-km’, and even that doesn’t take into account different degrees of occupancy of vehicles in different countries.

All countries you named are not ranked by this metric, and of those ranked, underdeveloped countries (Arabian, Brazil, Eastern Europe etc.) rank worse than highly-developed ones. Note furthermore that the US rank relatively high compared to other countries of similar population density and geographical size[0], yet surprisingly worse than most other equally wealthy (and comparable in population density and size) countries.

[0] Were the most important difference is between being slightly larger than Switzerland and being about the same size or smaller.

While I agree with the idea, I suspect even ‘Road fatalities per 1 billion vehicle-km’ isn't a directly comparable figure across different countries. Here in Australia, things are a _long_ way apart. I don't know quite what the relative risks of long distance highway driving compared to inner-city commuting is, but suspect the ratios of, say, sub 100 mile trips compared to over 100 mile trips in Australia vs The UK is startlingly different. Whether that affects the fatality rate or not I don't know.

But then again, emergency services probably get to an inner-city accident faster than to an accident in the middle of nowhere, making the latter potentially more fatal. Furthermore, many ‘smallish’ countries in the list are in western Europe, with a relatively high standard of living and – more importantly – functional and widespread public transport.

I guess it all boils down to being unable to compare apples and oranges with regards to their banananess.

If having functional and widespread public transport reduces road casualties, couldn't you say that road casualties are indeed preventable by having usable public transport?

The correct response to all of the above is disaster preparedness (as advocated by Schnier, et.al.), not spending trillions invading countries a half a world away. That wasted opportunity cost was not accidental...

Fundamentally, how should resources be spent? We should try to catch criminals. We should also try to make cars safer, and provide resources to recover from unlikely but devastating events. I disagree with the current spending ratio, which is incredibly skewed towards military and police spending (which is something >40% of the national budget, depending on how you subdivide it), and not as much toward solutions that would be useful in disaster scenarios.

> We will shut down the entire city and hunt these people down like dogs. At the cost of a $1 Billion/day economy. At the inconvenience to its population.

You're saying this like it's a good thing...

It confuses me how spending hours and hours of media budget and locking an entire city down is the appropriate response. If I was a terrorist-type, I'd really see an opportunity to hurt the US here.

As I am not a terrorist type, I believe that the best thing to do is - in the inimitable words of the British - Keep Calm and Carry On. Let the evils rage and deal with them calmly and minimize all disruption.

edit: RMS makes a good point IMO: if you want to paralyze a 1 Billion/day economy in the pursuit of 4 people murdered, that doesn't seem fruitful in the context of an accident levelling 1/4 mile around a chemical plant: Perhaps pouring several billion into improving safety and monitoring at chemical plants would significantly improve many more lives.

> RMS makes a good point IMO: if you want to paralyze a 1 Billion/day economy in the pursuit of 4 people murdered

That's not a good point, because it was not in the pursuit of 4 people murdered. It was in pursuit of the likely future murders if the bombers were not caught.

Ever seen The Usual Suspects? He's making the Keyser Soze argument: "Then he showed those men of will what will really was."

In other words: these are the lengths we are willing to go to. You can not get away with it.

I'm not arguing for it, but I think that is certainly what it is.

It's no "accident" when a drunk driver kills innocent people...

The point isn't that we shouldn't pursue and prosecute these crimes. The point is that the approaches we have been taking have been working - keeping the threat level from terrorism where it has been is basically acceptable: if we can do better cheaply (in terms of tradeoffs) then let's, of course, but going to huge expense to stamp out the last of it is stupid because there is basically no room for huge gains there.

http://xkcd.com/386/

Oh. You're emotional and you don't want rationality to intrude on that emotion.

Flagged.

Look unless a murderer obtains a body count exceeding that of national aggregate cancer deaths, I'm not concerned. It's just basic math.

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