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mattnewport comments on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong
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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.
Let me first clarify the points I was making in this thread (which were not intended to lead to a debate about healthcare or politics in general). If you still feel we have substantive disagreements that we might be able to resolve through more explicitly political discussion I'm willing to continue the conversation unless there are strong objections from others.
First my points were not intended to imply any particular opinion on AIDS transmission rates specifically. My initial post was simply intended to point out that the utility of spreading the idea that AIDS transmission rates are low is dependent on the truth of the claim.
This was intended to be a more general point that exaggerating the risks of any particular activity is not a good general policy. In the AIDS case there are genuine costs to taking precautions against transmission, even if they are in fact greatly outweighed by the benefits. In a hypothetical world where transmission rates are negligible, maintaining that they are high would have negative utility.
Wei Dai responded by claiming that because of negative externalities associated with infectious diseases, exaggerating the transmission rate can improve social welfare. Now this is not incompatible with my original point, it is rather a claim of a mechanism by which exaggerating the risks of an activity can have positive utility. It is probably worth noting at this point that I am not a utilitarian so I am likely to disagree with utilitarians on what outcomes have positive utility but we can probably agree that in general internalizing negative externalities is a good thing.
I concede that it is possible in theory to imagine a situation where deliberately exaggerating risks has positive utility. The fun thing about negative externalities though is that it is very easy for an intelligent person to think of some and to propose plausible mechanisms by which any given action can be justified. I could easily argue for example that the credibility of science and scientists is undermined when they are caught making false claims and that the negative utility resulting from this outweighs any positive utility from individual acts of well intentioned deception.
Ultimately though I have what you might call a deontological normative belief about science that it should always pursue the truth and leave the task of judging when to strategically lie to others. I also suspect that this is a winning strategy for agents with imperfect powers of prediction but that is mere supposition.
Regardless, if negative externalities associated with infectious diseases are the real concern I'm pretty confident that you'd start with much higher expected value actions than lying about the facts in an effort to influence individual choices. If individuals are not bearing the full costs of their actions then there are more direct ways of changing their incentives such that the costs are better reflected than trying to influence their beliefs away from the truth by spreading false facts. This is the point at which I'd start to get into the politics of healthcare however and I don't particularly want to do that here.
Agreed. I think Wei Dai and I also agree (without speaking for Wei Dai), but think that the idea transmission rate to spread is conceivably a function of the true transmission rate, rather than locked to the true transmission rate itself. It sounds like you agree with that too, but are a little more stringent with what makes that "conceivably" true.
To my mind, one such situation is one where a super-majority of the population don't understand probability, and 1% effectively means "never" to those people. In this case, specifically lying about the number is less helpful than phrasing it alternate true ways, but because they don't understand probability, if you asked them to estimate a probability based on the true facts you just gave, they might say 10%; I might consider them deceived, even if you weren't doing anything that would deceive a rational agent.
This is a good point, much like Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans). One small caveat I'd like to make is that I don't think we are talking about science (or more accurately) scientists lying to the populace. I think what we are discussing are administrators, media outlets and policy makers that are informed of the numbers (it would probably be too generous to say informed of the science) choosing not to widely disseminate them in favor of reporting non-numerical information that might lead the populace to adopt an inaccurate belief about those numbers.
Yes. Please elaborate, this seems to be the most interesting part of the conversation, and the way you're conversing now, I don't see why you're worried about a backlash. It would probably be wise to be as general as possible and not make any specific reference to a given countries system of healthcare (if that's where you're going), but if you have a real point I'd really like to hear it.
Again, I wasn't purely speaking about false facts, more about choosing which true facts to announce, and in what way to achieve the desired impact. One doesn't have to lie to manipulate, and it's generally not the best strategy. I'm also not claiming that manipulation should be a primary goal, but selective revelation of data (which will always happen because of time and attention constants) is bound to be manipulative, even if accidentally, and it would be better to produce desired action than undesired action, so we should be aware of the manipulative potential of what we plan to say.