

My response to Richard Stallman - bcardarella
http://reefpoints.dockyard.com/opinion/2013/04/20/my-response-to-richard-stallman.html

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csallen
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.

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saulrh
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.

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lotyrin
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?

~~~
bcardarella
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.

~~~
lotyrin
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.

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bigiain
"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".

~~~
jfim
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-
related_death_rate)

~~~
sli
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.

~~~
claudius
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.

~~~
bigiain
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.

~~~
claudius
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.

~~~
jfim
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?

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zdw
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.

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rcfox
> 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...

~~~
pnathan
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.

~~~
tzs
> 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.

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D9u
It's no "accident" when a drunk driver kills innocent people...

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dllthomas
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.

------
molecule
<http://xkcd.com/386/>

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

Flagged.

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reader5000
Look unless a murderer obtains a body count exceeding that of national
aggregate cancer deaths, I'm not concerned. It's just basic math.

