There's certainly a concern, very pressing in the case of the rape example, that if the risk is too high then there's a responsibility upon society to mitigate it. In the case of the jumping off the roof example, building codes could mandate that the building be made impossible to jump off of or the surroundings be cushioned, but in this case most people would probably agree that the costs on society are too high to be justified in light of the minimal and easily avoidable risk. The case of the minimum wage worker falls somewhere in the middle ground between these, where the consequences are highly predictable, and the actions that would cause them avoidable, but with a significant cost of avoidance, like being unable to trust one's acquaintances, and unlike being unable to jump off a roof. And of course, as in both the other examples, limiting that risk comes with an associated cost.

Whether society should be structured to allow people to raise families while working on minimum wage is a question of cost/benefit analysis, which in this case is likely to be quite difficult, so it doesn't help to declare the question structurally similar to other, easier questions of cost/benefit analysis.

If you ignore differences in probability of outcome, you'll end up conflating arguments of enormously difficult meaningful content. For instance, both of the above also have the same structure as

Aw, you broke your leg? Well, who told you to jump off the roof of a three story building?

That an argument have the same structure need not imply that they be equally valid, if the implications of the premises are different.

Getting raped may be a possible consequence of walking into a room with a friend without a means to defend oneself, but it's by no means a probable consequence, and we have to weigh risks against the limitations precautions impose on us. If the odds of rape in that circumstance were, say, a predictable eighty percent, then for all that the advice pattern matches to the widely condemned act of "victim shaming," walking into the room without a means of self defense was a bad idea (disregarding for the sake of an argument of course everything that led to that risk arising in the first place.)

"Aw, you can't feed your family on minimum wage? well who told you to start a fucking family when your skills are only worth minimum wage?"

Pax Dickinson, former Chief Technology Officer at Business Insider, on rational family planning in the context of modern capitalism.

(in response to "That's perhaps an argument for the parents to starve but the children are moral innocents wrt their creation. Solutions?") - "If you remove all consequences to children from their parents stupid behavior, how will they ever learn any better?"

Him again on personal responsibility, setting proper incentives for the lazy masses, and learning one's place in society early on.

"An extremist, not a fanatic."

The tagline of a blog by Chris Dillow, a Marxist libertarian.

(His comment on it, invoking Bayesian principles.)

Why are nuclear weapons morally different from conventional bombs or machine guns or cannons?

Strategic nuclear weapons - the original and most widespread nuclear weapons - cannot be used with restraint. They have huge a blast radius and they kill everyone in it indiscriminately.

The one time they were used demonstrated this well. They are the most effective and efficient way, not merely to defeat an enemy army (which has bunkers, widely dispersed units, and retaliation capabilities), but to kill the entire civilian population of an enemy city.

To kill all the inhabitants of an enemy city, usually by one or another type of bombardment, was a goal pursued by all sides in both world wars. Nuclear weapons made it much easier, cheaper, and harder to defend against.

Tactical nuclear weapons are probably different; they haven't seen (much? any?) use in real wars to be certain.

suggest that those with the power to wield nuclear weapons have in fact been more morally responsible than we give them credit.

Perhaps. Alternatively, when faced with a similarly-armed opponent, even our habitually bloody rulers can be detered by the prospect of being personally burned to death with nuclear fire.

For to translate man back into nature; to master the many vain and fanciful interpretations and secondary meanings which have been hitherto scribbled and daubed over that eternal basic text homo natura; to confront man henceforth with man in the way in which, hardened by the discipline of science, man today confronts the rest of nature, with dauntless Oedipus eyes and stopped-up Odysseus ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird-catchers who have all too long been piping to him 'you are more! you are higher! you are of a different origin!' - that may be a strange and extravagant task but it is a task - who would deny that? Why did we choose it, this extravagant task? Or, to ask the question differently; 'why knowledge at all?' - Everyone will ask us about that. And we, thus pressed, we who have asked ourselves that same question a hundred times, we have found and can find no better answer...

Friedrich Nietzsche

What’s an example from your own life where building human capital and signaling quality to colleges have come into conflict? How did you resolve the conflict? Do you think you made the right choice? Is there anything you would have done differently?

When I planned to apply for university I had to find somewhere that would let me take A Levels, the cost of A Levels outside of school being prohibitive. Anyway, I eventually found a school that would let me do it. Naturally, however, the requirement to be in school from 8:30-15:00 allowed me far less time than I'd normally have to learn and pursue my own interests - the environment was utter hell if you were trying to learn in your free time. They didn't even really have a library you could go if you wanted somewhere quiet to think; they had a small room with books in that backed onto an open-plan classroom but it wasn't really suitable.

I resolved this by convincing the school change their registration procedures for the sixth form so that people could sign themselves in and out of school when they weren't meant to be in class.

Do I think I made the right choice? Well, it wasn't a bad choice. But there were better choices - I've since learned that some universities let you join without pre-existing qualifications if you do a bit of hoop-jumping, and I'd probably do that if I were doing it over again. Given what I knew then though I don't think I could have done much better.

Many bombing campaigns were indeed waged with an explicit goal of maximum civilian casualties, in order to terrorize the enemy into submission, or to cause the collapse of order among enemy civilians.

If Germany would have wanting to maximize causalities they would have bombed London with chemical weapons. They decided against doing so.

They wanted to destroy military industry and reduce civilian moral. They didn't want to kill as many civilian's as possible but demoralize them.

Foundations matter. Always and forever. Regardless of domain. Even if you meticulously plug all abstraction leaks, the lowest-level concepts on which a system is built will mercilessly limit the heights to which its high-level “payload” can rise. For it is the bedrock abstractions of a system which create its overall flavor. They are the ultimate constraints on the range of thinkable thoughts for designer and user alike. Ideas which flow naturally out of the bedrock abstractions will be thought of as trivial, and will be deemed useful and necessary. Those which do not will be dismissed as impractical frills — or will vanish from the intellectual landscape entirely. Line by line, the electronic shanty town grows. Mere difficulties harden into hard limits. The merely arduous turns into the impossible, and then finally into the unthinkable.

[...]

The ancient Romans could not know that their number system got in the way of developing reasonably efficient methods of arithmetic calculation, and they knew nothing of the kind of technological paths (i.e. deep-water navigation) which were thus closed to them.

• Stanislav http://www.loper-os.org/?p=448