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Old_Gold comments on Open Thread, Feb 8 - Feb 15, 2016 - Less Wrong
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Comments (215)
Here's a hint, replace "tobacco" with "marijuana", or some drug that's currently fashionable. Note, how your intuition changes.
I don't follow. Can you elaborate?
Do you think the people advocating for marijuana legalization would be satisfied with legalization under the terms you proposed for tobacco?
I think there were be different strata of marajuana legalisation advocates who would be satisfied with different things. But when I put forward a policy position, it isn't to maximise political tractability, but rather to maximise public health gains. Political tractability can itself be advocating for with spin, coalitions, maneuvering and other such politics.
The fact is. marajuana is not tobacco. They are not interchangeable, in the same way that meth and marajuana aren't interchangeable, or chocolate for that matter. They all have different weights of costs and benefits.
So why didn't you simply propose a ban?
Oh, maximising public health gains would probably require force-feeding vegetables (in prison, if necessary) and mandatory exercise (ditto). But in the meantime you can start by banning sugar.
keep things simple, but never simpler than they are
because that wouldn't maximise public health gains. Would people be overall less or more happy? It's pretty obvious and that's a pretty dumb solution.
Bans are bad because smoking is addictive and withdrawal is harmful. It would be cruel. This kind of black and white thinking and slippery slope argumentation is really suprising to see on LW.
edit: maybe you're on to something. Take a read of this about options for a tobacco endgame. The number of good options available to the regulatory community is sufficient to make any gentle-nudge policy researchers and advocates feel like they're wasting their time (and maybe they are!)
You realize that there are pretty relevant differences between tobacco and marijuana other than the latter being "currently fashionable"? (assuming it actually is -- it doesn't look like it's much more popular than tobacco or than it was 50 years ago to me, at least here in [country redacted])
I said "fashionable" not "popular". I have no idea which is more popular, I mean fashionable in the sense of high status.
Marijuana is... high status?
Yes, all the cool kids are doing it.
And not tobacco?
No, tabacco is the stuff those old guys smoke.
Are you seriously saying that there is a sizeable fraction of people who regularly smoke marijuana but not tobacco? I haven't met many, whereas I have met plenty of people who smoke both or neither.
EDIT: I think what's going on might be that you noticed that many young people smoke marijuana and think it's cool and many young people don't smoke tobacco and think it's old people's stuff, but didn't notice they aren't the same people. But just because Muhammad is a common first name and Wang is a common last name doesn't mean Muhammad Wang is a common full name.
I'm not sure that distinction is relevant to the point under discussion, which isn't about reality so much as it is about how perceived "coolness" informs people's ideas about what policy proposals are reasonable.
Who is considering what policy reasonable for tobacco but overly restrictive for marijuana, or reasonable for marijuana but overly liberal for tobacco?
Marajuana is only high status in certain sub cultures and low status in others and among the general public, unless it's for medicinal use. I'd estimate it's overall far more less status.