= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Lumifer comments on Rationality Quotes Thread June 2015 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (127)
Err... no.
http://nypost.com/2011/12/16/hey-they-still-let-us-drive/
Yeah... NY Post is not really the bastion of thoughtful analyses and deep reflection.
As opposed to what, the NYT?
Contradiction is all well and good, but I think you can do better; can you name three examples of new technologies invented in the last 50 years and freely available to all civilian Americans each of which technologies causes up to 30,000 deaths and 2 million injuries annually?
High fructose corn syrup and its ilk have been rather devastating.
Et tu, Brute, want to look at only one side of the cost-benefit analysis?
I only thought of one possible example immediately - but are you asserting that people predicted those numbers when we invented cars?
You do realize that that's one thousandth the scale of what gwern is describing, right? (That may not be quite fair, as phone-distracted drivers fall in the "drivers" category instead of the "phone" category, but order of magnitude is important!)
More importantly, I'm disputing that it makes sense to judge by the numbers today.
It certainly isn't a perfect measure - but it seems like a decent one. I'd suggest correcting for some measure of how common the technology is. If there was something that only 10% of people have, but those 10% are getting killed at the same fraction per year as automobile drivers, I'd think it is still notable, though it wouldn't precisely meet gwern's criteria. If there were a technology which much less than 10% of the population has, then I'd be skeptical that it was unrestricted, at least in practice.
Frankly, there aren't very many technologies added over that period (besides the various flavors of electronic computation/communications/entertainment) that have that been so widely available. Microwave ovens - and I don't see many accidents from them. Perhaps home power tools? Forbes cites 37,000 emergency room visits per year from power nailers. They count another 37,000 from riding lawnmowers, but less than 100 killed.
They don't have to have predicted contemporary accident rates a century ago for automobiles to have been banned or restricted at some point since - none of that data is remotely new or surprising, after all - yet here we are with near-unrestricted cars.