Comment by bunderbunder

Comment by bunderbunder 8 hours ago

This is exactly why thinking of it in terms of individual cases of actual harm, as Americans have been conditioned to do by default, is precisely the wrong way to think about it. We're all familiar with the phrase "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure", right?

It's better to to think of it in terms of prevention. This fits into a category of things where we know they create a disproportionate risk of harm, and we therefore decide that the behavior just shouldn't be allowed in the first place. This is why there are building codes that don't allow certain ways of doing the plumbing that tend to lead to increased risk of raw sewage flowing into living spaces. The point isn't to punish people for getting poop water all over someone's nice clean carpet; the point is to keep the poop water from soaking the carpet in the first place.

supertrope 7 hours ago

Safety rules are written in blood. After a disaster there’s a push to regulate. After enough years we only see the costs of the rules and not the prevented injuries and damage. The safety regulations are then considered annoying and burdensome to businesses. Rules are repealed or left unenforced. There is another disaster…

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bunderbunder 7 hours ago

Tangentially, there was an internet kerfuffle about someone getting in trouble for having flower planters hanging out the window of their Manhattan high rise apartment a while back, and people's responses really struck me.
People from less dense areas generally saw this as draconian nanny state absurdity. People who had spent time living in dense urban areas with high rise residential buildings, on the other hand, were more likely to think, "Yeah, duh, this rule makes perfect sense."
Similarly, I've noticed that my fellow data scientists are MUCH less likely to have social media accounts. I'd like to think it's because we are more likely to understand the kinds of harm that are possible with this kind of data collection, and just how irreparable that harm can be.
Perhaps Americans are less likely to support Europe-style privacy rules than Europeans are because Americans are less likely than Europeans to know people who saw first-hand some of what was happening in Europe in the 20th century.

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