Something along the lines of "if it ain't broke don't fix it"
While this logic isn't best when applied to safety, that is unfortunately the way many people and companies look at safety and sometimes it takes a tragedy to get improvements.
I am a big motorsports fan, and in 1994, two drivers were killed in one weekend of Formula 1, including world champion Aryton Senna.
Lots of effort went into making the sport safer after these accidents and it would be another 20 years before the next death
They don't. If I make a change that prevents a death you will never know about it. If I make that change in response to a death you will hear about it, thus biasing you into thinking I don't care until there are no deaths. In reality though sometimes you need an actual situation to happen before you can imagine that failure most. Trying to guess how your widget could kill something before their are any deaths is hard. (in some cases you can look at existing widgets, but there is always something new)
Quite right. Also, trying to prevent harm through prediction is vastly more expensive than trying a product out in the market, and gets more expensive the more harm you try to prevent. It also causes product development paralysis, as deeper predictive scenario analysis results in longer design times and design lock-down ahead of product release, reducing agility.
While we might want all products and designs to be safe, in reality, we can only economically do so much before the cost of predictably assuring safety becomes exponential. See NASA.
The deaths are the very evidence that the system is unsafe and needs fixing. Until people die, a safe system and an unsafe system look very similar to all but the most trained eyes.
That is a market issue. The industry, public, and media do not believe the warnings unless there is a body count. By then it is becomes really hard to fix.
Deaths are a huge political liability even if they weren't a financial one, and would still effect change. I'm part of Transportation Alternatives, who has been advocating/lobbying/protesting very effectively for increased safety infrastructure in the wake of all these cyclist deaths. No financial liabilities involved.
They don't. Safety is often prioritized without deaths. Safety is sometimes prioritized even without any real danger (like with the so-typical "think of the children" argument).
Because you don't win points for prevention of hypothetical harm. See: vaccine "debate". Pro-vaccine policies saved millions of people who are alive right now, but you can't run on a pro-vaccine platform until people start dying again.
You can run a pro-vax platform - if the populace is not too dumb and uneducated. Anyone with a slice of a brain understands that anti-vaxx is a deadly game.
The problem is that (not only in the US!) education funding has gone way downhill and the "free speech!!!" absolutist crowd does not realize that truly free speech depends on an audience intelligent enough to separate facts from quackery (such as homeopathy, antivaxx and bleach enemas) or fascism - in a totally free-speech society with a dumb populace the profiteers will exploit whatever they can.
And yes, I am of the opinion that antivaxxers and other quackers should be jailed, for they are a danger to public health.
I don't disagree with everything you said, but suggesting people should be jailed for misunderstanding scientific facts is a pretty obviously disastrous position to take.
Who is the arbiter of the truth? What about people who are sincerely misinformed and well-intentioned?
Free speech laws in the US seem to strike a good balance: if you're selling a product under false pretenses, you can be sued. If you're just publishing content, you can't be sued.
Sorry, but antivaxxers, homeopaths and quackers telling drinking bleach drives out intestinal worms don't "misunderstand science". They spread, knowingly, lies.
> Who is the arbiter of the truth?
Why does a fact need an arbiter in the first place? It is general scientific consensus that vaccines do not cause autism, that homeopathy is placebo at best, and that the "worms" that people excrete after drinking bleach is their intestinal lining. And for heaven's sake the earth is a globe, not a flat pizza. Everyone has a right to be an absolute moron, but it should not be allowed to knowingly spread dangerous lies. Democratic discourse requires facts as foundation, not lies.
> What about people who are sincerely misinformed and well-intentioned?
Reeducation camps? I don't care about people too dumb to accept science. Sarcasm aside, I do not see a realistic way on how to re-integrate people brainwashed by conspiracy crap over years back into democratic discourse that does not at the same time build a system that can easily be abused by fascists. And this is a problem.
> if you're selling a product under false pretenses, you can be sued. If you're just publishing content, you can't be sued.
The people selling bleach cannot be prosecuted. They sell bleach, a perfectly legal product. The people who say that bleach kills autism cannot be prosecuted either, because "free speech". Meanwhile, parents are pumping their children full with bleach because they are afraid of "autism". I would prefer a system where no child has to suffer bleach enemas because their dumb-as-rocks-parents fell victim to quackers - I would prefer a system where these quackers are locked up before their speech leads to direct quantifiable suffering.
The problem with this argument is the assumption that “smart people” with whom you agree will be the ones policing speech. This is rarely the case.
This is also why fascists themselves are the ones who tend to embrace violence and censorship; fascism isn’t typically capable of surviving in an otherwise free and peaceful society.
Examples: Boeing, this article, and a recent HN post [0], etc.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21374525