#scottalexander — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #scottalexander, aggregated by home.social.
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It feels great to stumble upon an #ACX post validating your own idea:
“I’m disappointed that no one has ever tried expanding the #QALY concept to things outside health care before. It’s not that I think it will work. It’s that I think it will fail to work in a different way than our naive opinions fail to work, and we might learn something from it.”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/
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It feels great to stumble upon an #ACX post validating your own idea:
“I’m disappointed that no one has ever tried expanding the #QALY concept to things outside health care before. It’s not that I think it will work. It’s that I think it will fail to work in a different way than our naive opinions fail to work, and we might learn something from it.”
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/
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That seems embarrassing, and I’ve been hearing about the sclerosis of #SanFrancisco for a while, too.
But I feel that proving a non-libertarian wrong in the abstract is indeed very difficult: #ScottAlexander is not arguing that governments and public agencies are always everywhere better than the private sector at everything they set to do — he’s showing that they are not always_worse_. This is intuitively obvious; ie none of the two extremes (absolute statism or #anarchocapitalism) is desirable.
If you’re a moderate, a centrist, or even a #minarchist, this comes as no surprise — no matter how many outrageous pieces of evidence you can collect to illustrate that “the other side” is sometimes inefficient, expensive, or even harmful…