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> you're giving me a choice that I have no right to make

Now you're just being difficult. This has nothing to do with philosophy: it's pure pragmatism. It's not about whether you have the right to make the choice or if it would be arrogant to do so. The question is: IF you had the power to make the choice and moreover were forced to take one of two alternatives, what would you choose?

It's useful to make these kinds of unconscionable comparisons because sometimes, corporately, we DO have to choose between two unacceptable alternatives or evaluate the cost of disasters we would never choose to undergo had we the option.

Or, more concretely: if the battery of safety precautions to reduce the odds of this happening by 90% would have cost $10 million per year, they would no doubt be worth it. But if they cost $1 trillion per year, they would probably not be worth it (unless you think the total value of all the offshore drilling ever done is less than the cost of this disaster). But even the latter judgment is a choice of one unconscionable option versus another.




> Now you're just being difficult.

I am refusing to be backed into the corner you're painting with your hypotheticals, yes.

I think we'll have to simply disagree here. I do not agree that there is any way to put a price on the existence of an entire species -- which was your original statement -- and I doubt that you are going to convince me otherwise.

If deepwater oil drilling cannot be done without a near 100% guarantee against disasters like this one, then I simply think it shouldn't be done. I think there are far less risky ways to generate energy that could benefit from a sudden infusion of interest.


> without a near 100% guarantee

Well, what percent guarantee would you need? Is 99.9% per year per well good enough? 99.999%? Seven nines? And how do you propose to measure that risk? These types of situations are after all inherently unforeseen.

Anyway, by admitting that a near 100% guarantee is good enough for you (no matter what that "near" is), you've admitted that you're willing to put a price on it. That price is, naturally, the dollar amount that would be required to reach the level of guarantee you want. So yes, the rest of this conversation has just been you being difficult.


Ah when a teleologist meets a deontologist...


I try to live deontologically in my personal life. With limited success, as you can see by my harassing this guy even though I should just leave him alone. But it just gets too complicated when you apply it to large systems like society . . . it becomes impossible to reason about. Nice observation though.


I left this comment:

I am a virtue ethicist for consequentialist reasons. While good results (consequences) are the end of my ethics, the real world is too complex for a real time evaluation of the likely results of even relatively simple decisions. So you use virtues (my definition is slightly non-standard) - rules that are more likely than not to result in better outcomes.

in a discussion on Less Wrong http://lesswrong.com/lw/2aa/virtue_ethics_for_consequentiali... early this month.


No, and your accusation that I'm "just being difficult" is starting to piss me off. I think you're a short-sighted, self-centered, argumentative, nihilistic, and stubborn little annoyance -- but I didn't yet disrespect you enough to say so.

Look, requiring a guarantee that such a disaster cannot occur is exactly the opposite of placing a value on disaster. It is in effect saying, "If this disaster cannot be impossible, then it is not worth it." I prefaced that guarantee with the word "near" because I pragmatically don't believe there's such a thing as a complete and total guarantee. In the case of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, there were maintenance schedules, safety checks, inspections, safety valves, backup valves for the safety valves, and so on and so forth, and every single one of those failed.

Shit happens sometimes, and that has nothing to do with placing a dollar amount on anything.

Tell ya what: if you can't see values or costs in things like this without putting a dollar sign in front, then -- OK, sure, I will readily agree to a formula for calculating dollar value that should make you quite happy. Are you ready? It's this: the cost of a disaster is the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster.

Lemme know when you've finished totaling that one up on your calculator.


> but I didn't yet disrespect you enough to say so

Sure you did; you were just passive-aggressive about it with that "to be polite" bit at the start. You're the one who took the dialogue to this level. I'm just more direct.

> the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster

Holding the debate hostage with demands for physical impossibilities is definitely a red flag in a conversation partner. There are other adjectives to describe it but I think the one I've already used is apt. Anyway, I'm sure you don't mean this, or wouldn't if you would just think about what you're asking for for a second. Since I can't seem to get a thoughtful, honest answer out of you, continuing this is probably not productive . . . although that was probably true several posts ago.


>> the dollar amount required to reverse all of the effects of the disaster >Holding the debate hostage with demands for physical impossibilities is definitely a red flag in a conversation partner.

But holding the debate hostage with demands for ethical impossibilities is somehow okay?

That said, by allowing for a dollar cost thaumaturgy was not holding the debate hostage. In fact, he accepted your challenge to debate him in the frame of reference YOU set up. A frame of reference which, btw, is not the only one in common use to decide such questions.

What you need to respond with now to keep your credibility is whether the 'true' dollar cost is:

a) The cost to mitigate every single effect from the disaster.

or

b) Some other, smaller, amount along with a list of the effects you have discounted from the full amount and justification for such discounting.

Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells then perhaps we should explore them rather than drilling.


> But holding the debate hostage with demands for ethical impossibilities is somehow okay?

It's not an ethical impossibility. It's a pragmatic imperative. AND it's the root of the entire conversation. It's what I started this comment tree about! How can it possibly be holding up the debate to talk about it?

> b) Some other, smaller, amount along with a list of the effects you have discounted from the full amount and justification for such discounting.

Well it's certainly got to be this one since reversing every effect is entropically impossible. Some obvious things I don't really care about are restoring BPs bottom-line to its pre-disaster levels. As a general rule I'm also not interested in paying to mitigate damage to wildlife that would fall under ICUN's Least Concern designation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_Concern) even after all harm to populations from the spill are taken into account. I feel this way except inasmuch as human beings depend on such wildlife for economic sustenance. Although it sucks that the animals die, if they are not used directly by humans the utility lost when a common animal dies is typically far less than the cost of saving it in an oil spill like this.

Endangered animals I do want to protect, but once again there's a line somewhere (I don't know where) where their protection costs more than its worth. For example, if there is a rare mosquito in the marshes of southern Louisiana that ends up being wiped out entirely because of this crisis, I would not assign a cost of a billion dollars to that lost. Some cost, yes, but not a billion dollars.

If the oil slick bears out to be very large but cause small or questionable harm across a huge region, I also don't think we should necessarily spend money compensating the victims of such small harms. (For example, even if the oil spill stopped now some amount of oil would probably disperse even as far as the west coast of the U.S. after enough time.) To assign a metric, if the amount of compensation we might provide to a given victim is less than ten times the administrative cost of giving that compensation, we should not compensate.

Looking at the worst case scenario: let's say that the entire gulf becomes unfishable for the next fifty years except if the U.S. spends a quarter of its total output during that time period cleaning it up. Obviously this would be a really bad trade because the fishing in that region accounts for a much smaller portion of GDP than a quarter. BP should have to pay to support the people in that region, but realistically even the profits of an oil giant like BP would quickly be quenched under such a deluge of liability. Maybe the government can help them move and pay for their retraining, but in the end there is no point throwing good money after bad. They would need to do something else or maybe relocate to another place.

Obviously all these numbers are sketches. I can hardly tell you what the actual numbers are (if you'll recall, my initial comment was a request for speculation on what that number might be). But there is no question that there is a number, or a range of reasonable numbers, to describe the cost of this disaster.

> Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells . . .

That is not even a point under discussion. Why did you bring it up? What makes you think I support offshore drilling? We are talking about whether it makes sense to assign a numeric cost to the disaster, which it obviously does.


>> b) Some other, smaller, amount along with a list of the effects you have discounted from the full amount and justification for such discounting.

> Well it's certainly got to be this one since reversing every effect is entropically impossible.

So you concede that there may be elements to this disaster that cannot be quantified as such quantification is entropically impossible?

> I feel this way except inasmuch as human beings depend on such wildlife for economic sustenance. Although it sucks that the animals die, if they are not used directly by humans the utility lost when a common animal dies is typically far less than the cost of saving it in an oil spill like this.

Often yes I agree with you. Although that is not an absolute. Very often species form part of the larger ecosystem so the extinction of a species not directly used by humans may cause difficulties if it is necessary for the continued survival of another species which IS directly used by humans.

> Looking at the worst case scenario: let's say that the entire gulf becomes unfishable for the next fifty years except if the U.S. spends a quarter of its total output during that time period cleaning it up.

Aieeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaargh!

:)

>> Alternatively, you can be gracious and concede the point that if there are alternatives to high-risk offshore oil wells . . .

> That is not even a point under discussion. Why did you bring it up? What makes you think I support offshore drilling?

My bad, I completely misread you.

I think you will be sympathetic to my mistake given that cost/benefit arguments stated in dollar terms are so commonly used to justify ideas that would still be bad no matter how good the numbers looked.


> So you concede that there may be elements to this disaster that cannot be quantified as such quantification is entropically impossible?

No, I'm quantifying it in terms of how much I'd want to see paid to avoid that outcome, or in terms of how much would need to be spent to "make it right" to my own satisfaction. There's nothing about such a quantification that is entropically impossible. Put another way, there's basically no possible outcome of this disaster that you could not pay me _some_ amount of money to endure. But the amount might have to be very high.

> Very often species form part of the larger ecosystem . . .

I agreed elsewhere that that would have to be taken into account when calculating the total cost.

> Aieeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaargh!

Yeah, that's pretty bad, right? Hopefully that is the worst case scenario, but I'm no biologist so I'd have to leave that to them. One of my friends tells me that oil does break down in water over time and that it is unlikely it would be that bad.

But even if that were to happen, life would go on, albeit worse than before. This account of the after affects of the gulf war spill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_oil_spill) gives me some hope that although there will doubtless be great harm from this spill, it is not going to be the end of the world.

> cost/benefit arguments stated in dollar terms

OK, I see where you are coming from. I am entirely amenable to the outcome being that offshore drilling is not worth it given the extent of this disaster. Personally I think gasoline should cost much more than it does in the U.S. today, and that would go some way toward making that a reality. But I do want to look at it honestly.


Mate, I think you should seriously reread what he wrote. It seems like you literally don't understand what he wrote, not that you understand but disagree.


> I think there are far less risky ways to generate energy that could benefit from a sudden infusion of interest.

That's nice, but how about some evidence. After all, you're wanting to spend a lot of money.

> I do not agree that there is any way to put a price on the existence of an entire species -- which was your original statement -- and I doubt that you are going to convince me otherwise.

You're missing the point. It doesn't matter whether you agree with the statement, your actions "put a price" on the existence many species. You may not want that to be true, but it is.

As a result, the question really is "What is the price?", not "Do you want to put a price on it?"


Not to butt in, but I think he is alluding to the value of things are inherent in you placing importance on them. That you possibly value a species more than 1 single human life is your personal values, but they exist nonetheless. Also, without the "death" part of it on one end: do you value a species enough to spend a full year of your time on helping that species continue to exist? A month? A day? An hour?

We inherently place importance on things by a) spending time on those things, or b) spending money we earned by working on those things.




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