As I mentioned earlier, negative externalities are easy to dream up. Many people consider it legitimate to complain about negative externalities caused by ugly buildings (such as power plants, wind farms or architecture that doesn’t fit with its surroundings) but complaining about the aesthetic negative externalities associated with unattractive people in public places is not generally considered legitimate.
In practice in democratic society these issues are generally resolved by who can shout the loudest or wield most political influence and not by any direct rational accounting of costs. It is not clear for example that the relatively small risks associated with second hand smoke justify trampling on the rights of smokers to indulge outside of their own homes, especially given that smoking is already subject to large Pigovian taxes in most countries with such bans.
Misleading people is so easy it’s almost impossible not to do it, so the cost / benefit ratio doesn’t have to be very high to make it an efficient activity.
It should at least be positive. It is not clear that it is in practice. It seems plausible to me that the general public distrust of government advice on risk that underlies phenomena like anti-vaccination movements is a direct result of an ongoing pattern of deliberately misleading people about risks. Overall I don’t see a strong reason to suppose the net effect is beneficial.
It seems plausible to me that the general public distrust of government advice on risk that underlies phenomena like anti-vaccination movements is a direct result of an ongoing pattern of deliberately misleading people about risks.
Best point brought up yet. While to some extent I think that mistrust of authority is indefatigable, increasing the risk of that is probably much more costly.
How do you feel about the specific example I mentioned, where the true risk of transmission of something is 1%, but the media outlet or whatever decides to omit the number and instead say something like “over the course of a week, an individual can spread disease X to over a hundred people”, and while true, that convinces individuals that the specific risk is much higher than 1%?
I personally find it a little irritating when the media omits information that would be necessary to work out actual risk numbers for myself. I don’t object if they communicate the numbers in a way designed to have maximum impact on the typical human mind (it’s been suggested that using frequencies rather than probabilities may help for example) but I do object if they leave out crucial information required to figure out true risk estimates. Of course I don’t generally assume this is some grand conspiracy but rather reflective of the innumeracy of the media in general.
I don’t believe in grand conspiracies because they just require too many contingencies. All this discussion, from my perspective, is about the potential for a tacit agreement between most (not all) of those disseminating information in various ways that the best method of talking about public risks is not necessarily to directly discuss low numbers associated with them.
As I indicated earlier, I think that this agreement effectively already exists regarding influenza, and probably also HIV and other infections as well.
As I mentioned earlier, negative externalities are easy to dream up. Many people consider it legitimate to complain about negative externalities caused by ugly buildings (such as power plants, wind farms or architecture that doesn’t fit with its surroundings) but complaining about the aesthetic negative externalities associated with unattractive people in public places is not generally considered legitimate.
In practice in democratic society these issues are generally resolved by who can shout the loudest or wield most political influence and not by any direct rational accounting of costs. It is not clear for example that the relatively small risks associated with second hand smoke justify trampling on the rights of smokers to indulge outside of their own homes, especially given that smoking is already subject to large Pigovian taxes in most countries with such bans.
It should at least be positive. It is not clear that it is in practice. It seems plausible to me that the general public distrust of government advice on risk that underlies phenomena like anti-vaccination movements is a direct result of an ongoing pattern of deliberately misleading people about risks. Overall I don’t see a strong reason to suppose the net effect is beneficial.
Best point brought up yet. While to some extent I think that mistrust of authority is indefatigable, increasing the risk of that is probably much more costly.
How do you feel about the specific example I mentioned, where the true risk of transmission of something is 1%, but the media outlet or whatever decides to omit the number and instead say something like “over the course of a week, an individual can spread disease X to over a hundred people”, and while true, that convinces individuals that the specific risk is much higher than 1%?
I personally find it a little irritating when the media omits information that would be necessary to work out actual risk numbers for myself. I don’t object if they communicate the numbers in a way designed to have maximum impact on the typical human mind (it’s been suggested that using frequencies rather than probabilities may help for example) but I do object if they leave out crucial information required to figure out true risk estimates. Of course I don’t generally assume this is some grand conspiracy but rather reflective of the innumeracy of the media in general.
I don’t believe in grand conspiracies because they just require too many contingencies. All this discussion, from my perspective, is about the potential for a tacit agreement between most (not all) of those disseminating information in various ways that the best method of talking about public risks is not necessarily to directly discuss low numbers associated with them.
As I indicated earlier, I think that this agreement effectively already exists regarding influenza, and probably also HIV and other infections as well.