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mattnewport comments on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong
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This is untrue. Consider a similar claim: "spreading the idea that very few passengers on planes are killed by terrorists has negative utility, regardless of whether it is true or not, since it would encourage dangerous behavior."
Informing people of the true risks of any activity will not in general have negative utility. If you believe a particular case is an exception you need to explain in detail why you believe this to be so.
In the case of infectious diseases, there are large unpriced negative externalities involved. Everyone doing what is individually rational, given true beliefs about transmission rates, is likely not socially optimal, because the expected individual cost of a risky action is less than the expected social cost. Giving people false beliefs about transmission rates can improve social welfare by shifting the expected individual cost closer to the expected social cost.
Are you talking about free rider problems with health care costs under a partly or fully socialized health care system or something else? STDs seem to be less of a problem than more easily transmitted diseases like flu for most negative externalities I can think of.
And also, if you take some risky action that increases your chances of get infected, that also increases the chances of everyone else getting infected (causally, via yourself getting infected and then infecting others).
I'm not sure I get your point here. Whether it's more or less of a problem doesn't seem relevant to the original claim that spawned this subthread.
It's relevant to using your negative externality argument to support the original claim. To be consistent you would have to argue that we should make even more effort to avoid spreading the idea that airborne diseases like flu have low transmission rates (if true) than the idea that STDs have low transmission rates. Are you advocating a general policy of deliberately misleading people about the risks of various activities in an effort to correct for negative externalities? I'm pretty sure more efficient and robust approaches could be found.
It would be consistent with Wei Dai's claim just to argue that we should make an effort to not reveal how low the transmission rate of influenza is among people who don't wash their hands; we know that hand-washing is a large factor in transmission, but actual transmission rate numbers are still low enough to fail to convince people to wash their hands.
From a brief study of those particular numbers (I worked on a team modeling the spread of H1N1), I feel like we already mislead the public about the numbers themselves by being truthful as to the societal benefits and somewhat optimistic about the individual benefits of hand washing. If you believe more robust methods are more efficient, by all means, advocate for them, but I'm reasonably happy with the current situation.
From another perspective, blood-borne pathogens are particularly worth focusing on because they are easier to control. If we could encourage the entire population of the world to behave safely (not reuse needles, use condoms for sex, etc.), it would be a fairly minor change for individuals, but could eradicate or nearly eliminate HIV over time. With the flu, safe behavior will limit the damage of seasonal infections, but it's not realistic to actually eliminate the virus. Thus, over the long term, I think the negative externalities of HIV might outweigh those of influenza.
I think government policy makers and public health authorities already use a variety of approaches to reduce negative externalities related to infectious diseases, including subtle misinformation, such as making efforts to correct people's beliefs about transmission rates when they are too low, but not when they are too high (anything really obvious wouldn't work in a free society like ours). But it seems clear that large negative externalities still exist. What other approaches do you have in mind, and why haven't they thought of it already?
I think we're starting from quite different assumptions about how society works. I don't believe that government policy makers or public health authorities are very rational. Even to the extent that they are rational, I don't believe that their incentives are such as to reliably lead them to decisions that maximize utility by the kind of utilitarian calculus you seem to be assuming. So to the extent that we agree negative externalities exist (and I suspect we differ a fair bit on what they are and to what extent they exist) I have very little expectation that government policy makers or public health authorities will tend to take actions that minimize them.
What did you mean when you said "I'm pretty sure more efficient and robust approaches could be found"? You're not offering any concrete ideas yourself, and apparently you weren't thinking of government health authorities when you wrote that, so who is supposed to find and apply these approaches?
Think 'market based'. Internalize negative externalities. To a first approximation this usually means reducing government involvement rather than increasing it. This is straying into politics though so maybe we should avoid further discussion of this topic.
Compared to the rest of this open thread, I don't think you have anything to worry about!
Seriously though, I think we'd both like to hear you elaborate upon your market-based idea. I don't think I got any useful information out of your blurb.
I think you're on to something, but wouldn't that cause officials to overstate transmission rates rather than understate them?
What is especially strange to me is that the government pushed a fear campaign for HIV and promoted as a dangerous STD for the mainstream hetero community, but neglected to double-check their official statistics, which rather clearly destroy the STD theory. Perhaps it's just an honest mistake, but I don't think so. From what I have read, they have spent time trying to get honest statistics. So they overpromoted the STD message, regardless of the actual statistics.
Regardless of what HIV actually does or is, public campaigns to reduce needle sharing and reduce unprotected sex are probably net public goods.
However, on the other hand, if AIDS is really caused by drug toxicity, then at least some people are actively being harmed by spending energy in the wrong protections.
But I agree with your central point, and it applies to vaccines especially - they don't really have much of an individual benefit, but if enough people can be convinced to vaccinate, the entire epidemic can be curtailed or completely avoided.
That needs some clarification. Most people cannot distguish between a risk being somewhat low, and it being extremely low, so we need to be careful about the transition from numbers to qualitative divisions. The risks of being killed in a plane crash are so low that unless you're a pilot, you should ignore them; and overestimating the risks of flying would cause too much driving, which is more dangerous. In the case of AIDS, the probability of transmission may be "low", but none of the numbers given are so low that they would justify skipping any of the common safety precautions, so we shouldn't describe the probabilities involved as low in the presence of people who can't do the utility computations themselves.
Topical.