[ekoontz]

Seriously though, I found it interesting and am glad it was on Hacker News. Social engineering is engineering, and engineering is Hacker News. You are minimizing the harm and cost in a society by providing a place where people can safely use alcohol. It's far better and cheaper than leaving them to do it on the streets.

[vannevar]

Speaking as an engineer myself, there is more to life than minimizing costs to society. You could argue that the cheapest path for society is to commit mass suicide, reducing our collective social burden to zero. I do think this is a good article for HN precisely because it highlights the fundamental moral question: what exactly is social engineering supposed to optimize?

[reeses]

How are you measuring the minimization of the harm and cost? Where is the methodology? What hypothesis were they testing when they conducted this "experiment?" What are the second order effects on public infrastructure?

And social engineering is not engineering, unless anything involved in influencing the universe through action is engineering. Your analogies are based on logical fallacies.

[Daishiman]

The effects of this clinic can be easily compared to those of other institutions if proper statistics are kept. Judging from the article, they most likely are.

Aside from that, bioethical issues, while using quantified information as tools to measure effectiveness, need an equal or greater amount of thought to the basic philosophy of the clinic, and ultimately require human judgement where we determine what is "better" and what we want as a society.

So, yeah, wrong on all counts.