When we go the other way, and allow actions that harm people, we have an unfortunate tendency to allow those harms to fall… extremely disproportionately on those with the least burden to bear the harms and the least power to be compensated for those harms.

I think, as the other poster noted it really comes down to the individualistic nature in which we try and address some of these collective action problems. We need to acknowledge that the solutions will cause less overall harm than not implementing them, but also recognize that the harms from the solutions may fall unevenly, and find ways to socialize the damage those solutions cause, rather than leave that damage on the powerless.

A few months back I was visiting family in New Mexico and chatting with some locals. I asked offhandedly about if they did controlled burns out where we were… and boy did I immediately realize it was a sore subject. Last year, the US Forest Service set off the biggest wildfires in the state’s history doing controlled burns, by irresponsibly starting them in the windy season and not monitoring appropriately.

“Only” a hundred or so homes were destroyed, but imagine if the federal government were to burn down your home, livestock, and property only to abdicate any responsibility and fail to have any modicum of transparency or accountability. The nominal monetary damages do not nearly capture the social harm caused by the incident, and there’s been little trace of accountability when it comes to the policy makers who approved the burn, living thousands of miles away and suffering none of the impact.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-mexico-wildfire-prescribed-...

https://www.fs.usda.gov/news/releases/statement-chief-randy-...

You're not contradicting anything, that's literally the topic of this subthread. From the GGP:

> We need to acknowledge that the solutions will cause less overall harm than not implementing them, but also recognize that the harms from the solutions may fall unevenly, and find ways to socialize the damage those solutions cause, rather than leave that damage on the powerless.

Wherein you've created the same problem in the opposite direction. Who's going to volunteer to do controlled burns if they can be held personally liable for failures?

Starting from "prove you didn't cause the problem" with such a dynamic and hard to control activity is setting up the same issue.

Professional engineers ARE held personally liable for failures. That’s why there aren’t that many of them, and they tend to be extremely conservative and most things they sign off on are very limited in scope.

No sane PE would ever sign off on a realistic prescribed burn plan, because they couldn’t control the variables enough to not get ruined. Any plan a PE would sign off wouldn’t be implementable because, surprise, conditions change rapidly and it’s not economic to do detailed real-time surveying of overgrown areas that need prescribed burns all the time.

I am disenchanted with our current system for executing them in the US, however. Like you say, we need a system for accountability to deal with the externalities.

I don't think this is true, or at least it is nonobvious. Are prescribed-burns-gone-wrong more likely to harm the most vulnerable, as compared to unprescribed burns? If not, then this objection doesn't really apply.

At the same time this is happening, there are countless people working outdoors or in other sorts of conditions where they don't have such luxuries. And the cost is masked because, somewhat like smoking, many of the consequences happen over many years if not decades. And even when you do hit a climax, it may be argued that the bad air contributed, but did not provably cause, e.g. some cardiovascular event.

Of course, if you don't burn - then a lightning strike, or a firebug, means you're going to really burn. Clearly we need an army of sheep. Gah, then people would complain about the methane and massive marbled mutton fests. Cripes things are tricky.

Texas capped medical malpractice damages, because surely, all the frivilous lawsuits were the reason for driving up medical costs. This resulted in gems like this guy maiming dozens of people[1].

You couldn't sue him, because lawyers aren't going to front their own money to take on a case like this, when the likely awards will exceed legal costs. Hospitals wouldn't fire him, because he'd sue them, and because they get a share of the business he brings in. Other surgeons couldn't pooh-pooh him, because he'd sue them.

Presumably, if he maimed someone who had enough out-of-pocket money to pay a lawyer, and then vindictively pursue litigation against him, this could have been resolved earlier. That's a lot of 'if's. In practice, he just... Kept on maiming people, shielded by protection from financial liability.

[1] https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2016/novem...

Yes. Because those planning the controlled burns will take more care in ensuring the politically powerful are not as likely to be harmed by the burns. If a controlled burn goes wrong it's more likely to fall on those who have less power.

Also, if the politically powerful are negatively impacted by the burns, their losses are more likely to be adequately socialized, while those that lack political power are more likely to bear the costs directly and individually.

However, even in a world without such countermeasures, if the negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what would happen doing nothing, it stands to reason that simply paying the price for the negative externalities would still be logical and it would have the advantage that those negatively impacted by those externalities would not feel like they are disproportionately bearing the burden of the action.

> But if you get treatment and the doctors make a mistake and their actions cause some unintended harm, then there's someone to blame and sue, even if your statistical outcome was drastically improved by their intervention.

Doctors still have a lot of cover, even if they make a mistake, for exactly that reason. The real challenge for doctors is the difficulty preventing the litigation itself. Even if they win in court, the consequences of being subject to so many lawsuits are dramatic.

> The same problem is going to exist trying to mitigate climate change. Positive actions to reverse the problem will create negative externalities that hurt some people, but doing nothing will be drastically worse.

I think the bigger problem is that mitigating climate change will necessarily change the winners and losers, and the current winners have more power than the current losers.

It’s common to the main deontological ethical frameworks including the Judeo-Christian models that underpin “western values.

The “solution” is to take a Consequentialist approach, though most people fail the trolley problem and find consequentialism repugnant, so I don’t think we will solve this problem any time soon.

(Most people are familiar with Mills’ hedonic utilitarianism, but it’s quite simplistic; I’m a big fan of Eudaimonia as your value function, and richer systems like two-level utilitarianism as a way of getting round the “calculate everything all the time” problem with some utilitarian systems.)

Or, to put that another way: instead of controlled burns where you're actively setting the fire, why not just build (and maintain) the firebreaks, wait for a wildfire to happen inside the burn zone, and then just refuse to put it out?

Per my understanding, part of performing a controlled burn is mustering more resources near the burn (spatially and temporally) than you could reasonably maintain near every possible burn site all the time.

If conditions aren't appropriate, then you're back to status quo of containing a wildfire; but maybe the firebreaks help somewhat?

(Would need the opinion of someone knowledgable in wildfire fighting rather than random internet peeps to know if this approaches a reasonable idea at all though; I'd wonder if it's reasonable to build and maintain general purpose firebreaks in large forests at all; and what effect that would have on the habitability of the forest for its flora and fauna)

A fire of any reasonable intensity can easily jump a firebreak with a decent wind. And then there's spot-fires, which are like voodoo, you can be fighting a fire in front of you and have fires suddenly 300m behind you.

All they really do is give you a point to fight a fire.

We need the EPA's emissions/particulate rules to be adjusted to give priority to prescribed burns by certified firefighters and foresters. They don't do burns often enough that the EPA should be limiting their power to manage fire susceptibility. We also need watchdogs to make sure that regular polluters don't increase output during prescribed burns in order to hide their actual emissions.

> Heather Heward is a senior instructor at the University of Idaho who teaches about forests and fires. She said it’s not just federal land we need to be thinning and burning, it’s private land, too.

> “We have a real lack of (prescribed burn) practitioners, specifically on the private land side, that are able to do this work because – we're scared, honestly. We are scared that something will go wrong and that someone will sue us. I'm scared of that,” she said.

In some places, proscribed burns are routine. Just not in the place that the article is about.

Heck, the Chicago Parks District does proscribed burns in Lincoln Park, which is a very urban location.

You can improve the retention basin by adding a pump to actively manage the basin's capacity. When there is rain in the forecast, you pump water out of the basin, reducing its water level. When the rain arrives, you turn off the pump and let the basin refill. This increases the amount of water that the basin is able to divert during the storm.

I worked with a company that designed such a system and we even installed a demonstration unit for a municipality. It worked as intended and the city engineer advocated for expanding the project to all suitable basins. However, when the municipality's lawyers looked at the project, they argued that if the system failed to activate prior to a storm, the city might be liable any flooding that occurred afterward. Of course, the scenario where the system failed to function was identical to one in which it had never been built in the first place*, but that was not a convincing argument and the project was killed.

* I like escalators because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. - Mitch Hedberg

Actuaries should be able to figure out reasonable values for the probability of some costly outcome (e.g., a massive, uncontrollable wild fire) given specific behaviors or conditions (e.g., letting property grow into being a wildfire risk, vs reducing that risk by clearing overgrowth), and for risks with costs that a person/company can't ever cover (e.g., a massive wildfire), those responsible entities should have to carry insurance, who can incentivize or implement cost-reducing preventative actions in the places with greatest risk.

In the climate change context, the price of dumping GHGs into the atmosphere is nowhere near the cost. If we priced that in, economics would rapidly make renewable | nuclear power projects, public transit projects, shifts away from concrete in construction, etc economically obvious choices. But we've messed up the prices, and these messed up prices incentivize people to ignore problems or worse, spend societal quantities of money and labor on growing the problems.

Autocrats often exist because ‘no one else can do what needs to be done’. They do this by being willing to be unphased by the threat of being ‘the bad guy’, or even reveling in it. They know as long as the folks in the background get what they need, they’ll actually be fine.

Narcissistic manipulation is when someone tells a story placing the blame for damage on someone or an institution while ignoring the actual context of that person or institutions actions so as to displace the blame/damage for their own actions (or lack thereof) and their own lack of ownership for the outcome. We’re awash in it right now.

It’s super toxic for everyone, and fighting it is extremely difficult to nearly impossible in the legal system because of rules designed to STOP this kind of manipulation (which is typical), and steady reduction in the consequences for ‘minor’ issues like Perjury and Contempt of Court which make failed attempts at this manipulation ‘free’.

Rules of evidence, standing, the way court ‘happens’, procedural things that cost time and money, etc. all play into it.

And the system inevitably ends up favoring bullshit, because anything but bullshit requires individuals take a stand and say ‘the rules say x, but in totality that’s bullshit and produces an unjust outcome so we’re doing something else’ is, well, not favored in the way the law works. Sometimes for good reasons, but it usually gets perverted in the day to day reality.

Basically, the "benevolent" half of the "benevolent dictatorship" is a long-shot at best and a total fantasy at worst. I think this is well-understood by reasonable people, but I'd also argue that "dictatorship" in this context is even more of a fantasy.

>An autocracy could make these trade-offs without political consequence

See, I don't think this is true at all.

Nobody rules alone, every dictator needs enforcers, those enforcers need enforcers, all the way down, and suddenly the well-oiled autocracy that can cut through red tape like butter looks more and more like it requires an endless hierarchy of "benevolent" (i.e. compliant) dictators or a bureaucracy overburdened by rules that was supposed to be democracy's great weakness.

Every decision you make as an autocrat is a gamble that your enforcers will carry out your vision faithfully, with a bunch of details you haven't even thought of also accounted for, while maintaining the facade that you are actually all-powerful.

All it takes is a few slip-ups for your underlings to have flexible loyalties, where "of course" you're in charge but maybe next time leave some wiggle-room for an alternative path of implementing your omnipotent decrees.

I completely agree with the parent poster. This is not a democracy vs autocracy question. This is entirely an individualism[1] versus a collectivism[2] question.

[1] Which prioritizes 'do not actively harm any individual.' [3]

[2] Which prioritizes 'do what is best for the group as a whole.' [3]

[3] While some societies are pretty clearly democratic, and some are pretty clearly autocratic (and some are a mix of both), every society is, to a mixture of degrees, individualistic, and to a mixture of degrees, collectivist. Where they differ is in where the line gets drawn, and on which questions.

There's a reason by China is having no problem rolling out high speed rail across the entire country on the order of a decade while California can't even roll out a single line in the same time.

China can just bulldoze entire villages while the little people have no recourse to resist. That power is incredibly useful for getting things done, but the big problem of succession makes that level of power incredibly dangerous, fickle, and fragile.

2) succession/plan B is always the problem with dictators/dictatorships.

If you’re lucky, the interests of those in power are genuinely aligned with your best interests and they’re competent - (Singapore/PAP, at least historically), but nothing lasts forever.

You’re correct on the impact to those folks, but there are also a LOT of other folks who benefit from the new rail (or should, anyway!).

At the end of the day, their strategy works for the majority better.

We’re deadlocked trying to not offend anyone (and get scammed by the contractors in the process). They say ‘fuck it’ and pave it over, and then tuck the little people in a closet and tell them to shut up or else.

But if they didn’t, they’d have no rail where they need to go, like…. us.

Eventually, without some compromise or balance, either system reaches a breaking point. Ours, we’ll eventually be so mired in shit not working that people will leave to somewhere different (if they can) wherever it’s really bad. Think NYC/Detroit/LA/etc. in the 70’s and 80’s.

In China, they crack down too hard (or stay too focused on ‘the plan’) that they destroy what they are trying to preserve/create. Either Violently (Russia), or by going broke/financial crisis (Japan).

It isn’t even about 10-100x cost, if it was straightforward cash. It would be resolved in weeks if that was the case. In many of these equivalent situations, it drags out for decades. At that point, it’s a toss up if the project even makes sense anymore, since everyone who needed it when it was voted in/started has moved on (by necessity) to something else.

In China, the courts basically just say ‘which way does the CCP want this to go?’ and voila, that happens. For better or worse.

By the time California HSR runs from LA to SF electric short-haul airliners will make the environmental benefits moot.

Of course a consequence of democracy is as you way - there are political consequences to unpopular (but necessary) actions, making such measures unpalatable for any but a second term president.

But we surely have navigated politically unpopular initiatives before, for the greater good of the nation. See: Civil Rights Movement.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-martin-luther-kin...

You're moving the bar a little there. There will always be harm to individuals due to the law of unintended consequences. However, government regulation is really good at preventing a "Tragedy of the Commons."

For instance, regulations on CFC emissions hurt a lot of individuals. However, they prevented a much greater tragedy.

Removing lead from car exhaust marginally hurt an entire generation, while improving the lives of the next by orders of magnitude.

Other examples: Building codes, Car Safety, Fair Labor Standards Act, Food and Drug Regulations.

Food safety, leaded gas and paint, restricted chemicals lists (for safety reason, less of a fan of drug bans).

Bank deposit reserve requirements. Obamacare. Antitrust legislation.

Seat belts (extremely controversial at the time, people protested the loss of their freedoms etc etc).

Alaska’s Permanent Fund. Norway’s government pension fund.

Your bar for a government regulation is really “not a single individual is harmed”? That’s insane, and almost exactly the problem anonporridge was describing.

Almost every government regulation harms someone, in that it almost always is limiting the actions available to someone.

To answer your question: no, there is no such regulation, but it’s not relevant, because I think your metric is atrocious.

This thread is about managing and reducing harm in places where having “no harm” (whatever that means) isn’t an option.

Mandating that the US postal service deliver to every address at a single price. This results in an efficient single price, efficiencies of scale that private carriers don't even have, and does not harm anyone outside of the externalities that would already exist for mail delivery regardless of who was doing the delivering.

I feel that this better illustrates the downsides of centralized power: centralized decision making won’t be as efficient as decision making done at the nodes, closer to the actual problem because of missing context and data; and maybe even indifference

For the record, I am not saying that there are no benefits to centralized planning and control. This is just one of its weaknesses besides corruption

It's nice to have a handy phrase for this effect.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

The goal is to enable the use of controlled burns as a valuable tool for land management and wildfire prevention while adequately addressing concerns related to potential negative externalities.

kids grow up without taking enough risks and it affects their brain development

we've sacrificed healthy risks for unhealthy fear

It's not about preventing the spread, but about controlling the rate so that hospitals don't / didn't get overwhelmed.

One of the early countries to get hit was Italy, and the army had to be called in to help with the logistics of taking away the body bags / coffins. A year after the pandemic started there were still refrigeration trucks outside of some morgues because of capacity issues:

* https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/07/us/new-york-coronavirus-victi...

Everyone on the planet will eventually probably get COVID, but as long as it's not at the same time, there are chances for treatment for those more heavily effected (some folks are fortunate enough that it's no worse than the flu; others suffer for months (e.g., Physics Girl)).

Everyone in the world masking (with effective masks), distancing a bit, and using standard sanitary practices edit to add, because I forgot - for two months, and a few with immune compromises spending some more months isolated, would eliminate a significant chunk of all contagious respiratory illnesses, not just have stopped this single one from spreading.

But it's not going to happen because a significant fraction of the population: 1) don't care (either from the get go or after a period of time), 2) think spreading the disease is a positive ('builds immunity'), or 3) make 'statistical decisions' that fail at points.

Edit to add: I hope the downvotes are because I forgot to add the "for two months" to paragraph two. This could all have been over and done with between April and June of 2020 (or maybe a few months later to give time to ramp up mask production). Oh well, at least big Pharma made big bucks.

This is delusional. China did far more than this and still was not able to control Covid. And even in a fantasy world where you could actually stop all human-to-human contagion, many respiratory viruses have animal reservoirs, making the entire exercise pointless.

It's comforting to think that it's all just a collective action problem and if people could be a little more self-sacrificing, we could make it go away, but it's simply not the case.

> And even in a fantasy world where you could actually stop all human-to-human contagion, many respiratory viruses have animal reservoirs, making the entire exercise pointless.

None of this contradicts GPs claim that it would eliminate a significant chunk of all contagious respiratory illnesses. Quite a few (common) respiratory diseases don't have animal reservoirs and would be effectively eliminated.

And sure, SARS-CoV-2 did end up in animal reservoirs, but nipped early enough in the bud this either wouldn't have happened, or would have been controllable (with respect to animal-to-human transmission).

The thing is, vaccines that haven't been through phase 2 trials can potentially make a pandemic worse. That's why you have to wait for them to resolve.

You can do challenge trials. Especially if you're going to let the virus spread through the population anyway.

Whether you let it run through the population anyway really doesn't matter though. If you push the untested vaccine out to the population, you might turn a manageable problem into an unmanageable problem.

In other words, these are situations where the incentives for individuals are not aligned with incentives for the group.