Morendil:
Like so many other status-related "explanations" this strikes me as a just-so story with no actual predictive power and no ready base of facts to check it against.
One prediction is that advocating a more severe crackdown on drunk driving will elicit general approval, and may well be a good tactic for a politician, whereas advocating a forcible crackdown on sleep-deprived driving will make people think you're a weirdo, no matter how good evidence you can show for the harm caused by it. This seems consistent with reality, as far as I see. If tomorrow a study appears making an airtight case that sleepy driving is actually as harmful as drunk driving in practice, do you think the government will rush to make it a criminal offence and start a project for devising practical field tests for sleep deprivation to be issued to cops along with breathalysers?
Another prediction is that if a prominent and reputable individual publicly admits to drunk driving, it will stir up controversy and damage his reputation -- whereas if he instead tells a true story that involves him driving sleep-deprived in a manner that can be shown to pose a similar level of danger, this won't raise any significant number of eyebrows. This also appears to be true. (For example, imagine what the reactions to a post like this would be if it involved drunk driving instead of what appears to be a reckless episode of sleep-deprived driving.)
Cracking down on drunk driving is easy to rally support for because - just as you said - doctors check for blood alcohol levels every single time a crash sends someone to the hospital. Facts are readily enrolled in support of the cause, whereas they remain more obstinately neutral in the case of non-professional fatigue.
However, in practice, the issue of drunk driving is given enormous public attention and the evidence for its harmfulness, though abundant and relatively clear, is often exaggerated (just look at the often ridiculous definitions of "alcohol-related" accidents in the commonly presented statistics). The evidence for harm from sleep-deprived driving might be less abundant and systematic, but the issue is given near-zero attention in comparison, which is way out of proportion even when we account for the scantiness of the evidence. Something other than a comparison of the available evidence must be invoked to explain this discrepancy.
"Something other than a comparison of the available evidence must be invoked to explain this discrepancy."
Yes, but what leads you to think that a status-based explanation is helpful here? The two predictions you listed are both perfectly compatible with many non-status-related hypotheses. For example, it's quite plausible that one meme happened to get a head start.
Hypothesis: Driving-while-drunk is a much bigger deal now than it was several decades ago, and it maintains its prominence primarily because of momentum: people keep talking about it be...
The following will explore a couple of areas in which I feel that the criminal justice system of many Western countries might be deficient, from the standpoint of rationality. I am very much interested to know your thoughts on these and other questions of the law, as far as they relate to rational considerations.
Moral Luck
Moral luck refers to the phenomenon in which behaviour by an agent is adjudged differently based on factors outside the agent's control.
Suppose that Alice and Yelena, on opposite ends of town, drive home drunk from the bar, and both dazedly speed through a red light, unaware of their surroundings. Yelena gets through nonetheless, but Alice hits a young pedestrian, killing him instantly. Alice is liable to be tried for manslaughter or some similar charge; Yelena, if she is caught, will only receive the drunk driving charge and lose her license.
Raymond, a day after finding out that his ex is now in a relationship with Pardip, accosts Pardip at his home and attempts to stab him in the chest; Pardip smashes a piece of crockery over Raymond's head, knocking him unconscious. Raymond is convicted of attempted murder, receiving typically 3-5 years chez nous (in Canada). If he had succeeded, he would have received a life sentence, with parole in 10-25 years.
Why should Alice be punished by the law and demonized by the public so much more than Yelena, when their actions were identical, differing only by the sheerest accident? Why should Raymond receive a lighter sentence for being an unsuccessful murderer?
Some prima facie plausible justifications:
Trial by Jury; Trial by Judge
Those of us who like classic films may remember 12 Angry Men (1957) with Henry Fonda. This was a remarkably good film about a jury deliberating on the murder trial of a poor young man from a bad neighbourhood, accused of killing his father. It portrays the indifference (one juror wants to be out in time for the baseball game), prejudice and conformity of many of the jurors, and how this is overcome by one man of integrity who decides to insist on a thorough look through the evidence and testimony.
I do not wish to generalize from fictional examples; however, such factors are manifestly at play in real trials, in which Henry Fonda cannot necessarily be relied upon to save the day.
Komponisto has written on the Knox case, in which an Italian jury came to a very questionable (to put it mildly) conclusion based on the evidence presented to them; other examples will doubtless spring to mind (a famous one in this neck of the woods is the Stephen Truscott case - the evidence against Truscott being entirely circumstantial.
More information on trial by jury and its limitations may be found here. Recently the UK has made some moves to trial by judge for certain cases, specifically fraud cases in which jury tampering is a problem.
The justifications cited for trial by jury typically include the egalitarian nature of the practice, in which it can be guaranteed that those making final legal decisions do not form a special class over and above the ordinary citizens whose lives they effect.
A heartening example of this was mentioned in Thomas Levenson's fascinating book Newton and the Counterfeiter. Being sent to Newgate gaol was, infamously in the 17th and 18th centuries, an effective death sentence in and of itself; moreover, a surprisingly large number of crimes at this time were capital crimes (the counterfeiter whom Newton eventually convicted was hanged). In this climate of harsh punishment, juries typically only returned guilty verdicts either when evidence was extremely convincing or when the crime was especially heinous. Effectively, they counteracted the harshness of the legal system by upping the burden of proof for relatively minor crimes.
So juries sometimes provide a safeguard against abuse of justice by elites. However, is this price for democratizing justice too high, given the ease with which citizens naive about the Dark Arts may be manipulated? (Of course, judges are by no means perfect Bayesians either; however, I would expect them to be significantly less gullible.)
Are there any other systems that might be tried, besides these canonical two? What about the question of representation? Does the adversarial system, in which two sides are represented by advocates charged with defending their interests, conduce well to truth and justice, or is there a better alternative? For any alternatives you might consider: are they naive or savvy about human nature? What is the normative role of punishment, exactly?
How would the justice system look if LessWrong had to rewrite it from scratch?