[schismsubv]

We have this odd fixation in the US (and perhaps elsewhere) that we believe we are powerful and smart enough to prevent all badness - Make It Never Happen Again. Never mind that smoking causes two orders of magnitude more deaths annually in the US, 3400 people die from distracted* driving! It could be your daughter next!

What's happened to critical thinking and moderate stances? Why can't people be reasonable any more? To echo a sentiment I first read here (the provenance of which I am unsure), "Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become".

*- Distractions also include: pets, sandwiches, passengers, and beautiful people.

[LeifCarrotson]

> The legislation was prompted by intense lobbying from the group Distracted Operators Risk Casualties (DORCs). The son of its co-founder, Ben Lieberman, was killed in 2011 by a distracted driver in New York. The proposed law has been dubbed "Evan's Law" in memory of 19-year-old Evan Lieberman.

"Think of the children" isn't really what makes some arguments for increased surveillance or safety recalls so astonishingly powerful. It's when people think of their own child or children that laws get passed.

This is scope insensitivity: human brains are just plain bad at comparing millions of abstract unwarranted searches with the thought of their child dying because of a distracted driver. (More on this at http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw/scope_insensitivity/).

This is not a problem caused by a recent or American loss of critical thinking, moderate stances, or reasonability - it's a human, ancient bias. The effect is perhaps amplified because media allows politicians to use bias more effectively, but it is not new.

[digitalengineer]

It's called The Nanny State: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanny_state

[leetrout]

Very very good point about the other distractions. I've read stories in the news of people getting distracted driving tickets for eating a burger while driving.

The only thing about your argument (and I come from this side as a motorcyclist) is the odds of 2nd hand smoke killing me is pretty low. But the danger in which you put everyone else around you is magnitudes higher by distracted driving.

[schismsubv]

While I understand your concern, you are, statistically speaking (and according to the CDC), still 12x more likely to die from secondhand smoke than you are from another motorist's distracted driving.

The CDC states that smoking causes 480,000 deaths annually, 41,000 of which are from secondhand smoke. Dying from someone hitting you while they swill a triple mocha may sound scarier than dying from cancer, but dying is dying.

[bryanlarsen]

Why does the fact that smoking cause 480,000 deaths have any relation to trying to prevent 3,400 needless deaths?

[jMyles]

It's just pointing out that there's a certain sobriety that's needed when thinking about these things that is often absent these discussions.

Fewer than 250 people are killed each year by semiautomatic rifles, but proportionally, we hear many thousands of times more about them. This political vitriol makes it harder to actual address problems for which the commensurate amount of effort will likely actually make a difference.

[TheBranca18]

It doesn't. Not sure of the official name but Appeal to Worse fallacies are some of the worst I've come across. The smoking example is pretty much one of the worst ones considering what we're talking about anyway. Smoking has gone through a ton of regulation over the years. And is already rarer and rarer.

Perhaps scientists should stop finding a vaccine for Zika since it isn't as bad as cancer and other deadly diseases.

I think the actual issue is trusting the American government with our privacy. They've shown repeatedly that they don't care about it through various initiatives.

[talmand]

The only time it makes sense to me is when the minor issue gets an unreasonable amount of attention based on emotions rather than science to the point that other issues that may actually be far more important are ignored. Such as shifting limited resources from the major issue to the minor issue for little gain.

Then there's the problem of the minor issue involving a law that can be used for revenue generation.

[LeifCarrotson]

When evaluating a proposed regulation, which will decrease individual liberty to promote safety, it's absolutely necessary to ask if the exchange is an effective sacrifice.

Life and Liberty are core human rights. Sometimes a little of one must be exchanged to preserve the other. And let me be clear that I am not suggesting that we surrender all liberty to maximize safety, nor the other way around. Instead, reasonable compromises must be made.

Unfortunately, while there are units of lives to measure the one, there are no units on liberty.

But exchanging what is subjectively lots of liberty through warrantless phone searches to save a few lives is not a good choice when you also have the option to exchange a little liberty to save more lives through legislation on smoking. Yes, we could do both, but the former is a poor value and the latter is much more effective, making it not a false Appeal to Worse but an honest value comparison. And while there isn't a strictly limited budget on liberty before we reach "1984" - we can always inch fractionally closer - the same decision-making must be made.

Similar value comparisons must be made on other fronts as well: we have spent a lot of money and are very certain find that an overal cure for cancer is going to be hard to find, but it could definitely cure many people - say a 20% chance (sorry, my pessimism is showing through) that a cure can be found for $100B that will save 600,000 US deaths a year (and going back to the earlier topic, 150,000 of those are due to lung cancer...), or 5% that an additional $100B will find a cure. Contrast that to spending less than $100M for the first studies of Zika. Treatment is probably a vaccine, well understood as a tool to combat viruses, likely a just a few years out. Stopping Zika will save millions of lives. Or, alternatively, hundreds of millions of people suffer from malaria and millions die, and known treatments exist, and it's been eradicated in the US and Europe.

What would you spend the most money and liberty on? For some reason, our current answers are cancer and digital surveillance.

[schismsubv]

Smoking is more provable, controllable, and doesn't involve a highly invasive seizure and search, the results of which are questionable anyway.

We get all up in arms about relatively small numbers of needless deaths and ignore any of many elephants in the room, one of which is the fact that tobacco is a huge, profitable industry that has a vast lobby and kills nearly a half-million people per year.

All I'd like to see is a sense of scale to our outrage. Both distracted driving and smoking involve personal, silly choices, both of which can kill others. One is 141x more likely to kill; let's fight that first instead of yet further eroding privacy.

[TheBranca18]

They aren't mutually exclusive. Stopping texting while driving and stopping smoking can both be done. It's just completely irrelevant really.

[schismsubv]

I'm sorry I presented them as mutually exclusive, you're correct that they are not.

The difference is that one is already illegal - stopped, as it were. I postulate that this law will not significantly reduce distracted driving, but that it will primarily serve to perpetuate our government's apparent war on privacy. To be clear: I'm perfectly fine with a warrant-based search, particularly of carrier records. All this law does is grant individual law enforcement officers yet more authority to judge and immediately punish.

[logfromblammo]

I believe the underlying argument is that if you're going to trample civil liberties anyway, you might as well do it in a way that saves more lives, as greater compensation for those lives enjoying less freedom.

If we presume a totalitarian state to begin with, then logically, it should abolish tobacco consumption before abolishing texting-while-driving, and the resources devoted to enforcing the former should be 100 times greater than those devoted to enforcing the latter.

The premise is that countermeasures should be proportional to the relative risk or impact. You could make a similar comparison between the War on Terrorism versus texting while driving, or even compare the former to putting non-slip adhesive strips in your bathtub. You could literally save more lives by buying non-slip strips for every bathtub in America, hiring professionals to install them properly, and replacing every last one of them every five years, and do it all with a fraction of the budget. But dying from a slip-and-fall accident isn't as scary as dying from a suicide bomber.

Anyway, the ultimate premise is that government should do things that make sense, which is why the argument is doomed to fail. After it has outgrown its initial idealism, a government first does the things that maintain its own dominance, and then does the things that tangibly reward its greatest supporters. Cold, hard logic does not enter into the equation.