Consider someone who is deciding whether to donate their money to Seeing Eye or use it to dig ditches and then fill them. Seeing Eye is less than 0.05% as effective as the Fred Hollows Foundation, so the difference in social optimality is less than 0.05% of what it could do.
This means that if they dig ditches and then fill them, they are less than 0.05% more wasteful than if they donate to Seeing Eye. Why not just move the line by 0.05%, and let them do whatever they want? You can just tax them an additional 0.05% to make up for it, and they'll still end up with more incentive. For that matter, you'd probably save enough money on not bothering with regulation to make up for it.
It seems like digging ditches and then filling them is infinitely more wasteful than donating to Seeing Eye, since it makes an infinitely smaller difference, but that's not really how it works. The difference is so small it's lost in rounding.
i disagree with the kind of analysis you're doing here. Just because a difference is a small percentage of the maximal possible difference does not mean it is a small difference. Suppose you have three mutually exclusive actions available to you: A - play video games all day, B - put in a small amount of effort that will ensure that malaria is eliminated, C - put in a moderate amount of effort that will ensure that everyone in the world lives forever without sickness or deprivation. As a percentage of what you could accomplish by doing C, the difference be...
Or is the convention against discussing politics here silly?
I propose a test. I'm going to try to lay down some rules on voting on comments for the test here (not that I can force anybody to abide by them):
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments (or ridicule me and/or this test); responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) Try not to downvote particular comments excessively, if they're legitimate lines of argument. A faulty line of argument provides opportunity for rebuttal, and so for our test has value even then; that is, I want some faulty lines of argument here. If you disagree, please downvote me, instead of the faulty comments, because this post is what you want less of, not those comments. This necessarily implies, for balance, that we not excessively upvote comments. I'd suggest fairly arbitrary limits of 3/-3?
Edit: 4.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate. (My apologies about missing this, folks.)
I'm going to try really hard not to get personally involved, except to lay down a leading comment posing an argument against abortion, a position I don't hold, for the record. The core of the argument isn't disingenuous, and I hold that this argument is true, it just doesn't lead to my opposing abortion. I do not hold the moral axiom by which I extend the basic argument to argue against abortion, however; I'm playing the devil's advocate to try to help me from getting sucked into the argument while providing an initial point of discussion.
Which leads me to the next point: If you see a hole in an argument, even if it's an argument for a perspective you agree with, poke through it. The goal is to see whether we can have a constructive political argument here.
The fact that this is a test, and known to be a test, means this isn't a blind study. Uh, try to act as if you're not being tested?
After it's gone on a little while, if this post hasn't been hopelessly downvoted and ridiculed (and thus the premise and test discarded as undesirable to begin with), we can put up a poll to see whether people found the political debates helpful, not helpful, and so on.