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Comment by redff0000 | Hacker News Reader

Your child could have slipped when getting off a train and permanently injured themselves, or in any other number of ways.

Low probability high severity events trigger a cognitive bias that makes people attempt to make things '100% safe'. There are two problems with that.

1: nothing can ever be made 100% safe so those low probability high impact events still happen from time to time.

2: making things safe hits a steep diminishing returns curve after some point, and the opportunity cost of creating said safety level starts to outweigh the benefits of not creating it.

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To put it bluntly, the increased happiness of millions of children is worth a couple children's health, or even lives.

That's a tough sell, but that sounds reasonable (well, I can talk, I don't have children). This is basically the same reasoning Yudkowsky presented with his dust speck vs torture argument argument: a sufficiently widespread benefit, however small, will outweigh a sufficiently improbable horrible event.

Well, I have a dozen kids, and I agree.

Of course, part of the reason for so many kids is to minimize the percentage of my family that would be lost if one did die. My wife's uncle had the postcard family, one boy and one girl in a cute little city house with a picket fence. The daughter died, and the father completely fell apart. He lost 100% of his daughters. It is too late for him to create a replacement.

Most families today are tiny. I think this has affected our perception of loss. The risk of 100% loss has become so great that people can't allow the risk of traditional play.

Of course, part of the reason for so many kids is to minimize the percentage of my family that would be lost if one did die.

I think I just read the most insane sentence I'll read all year.

How is it insane when this is the historic reason behind large families?

I'm not touching, "but it's historical!", because that's a problematic idea in of itself. Lots of things are, "historical", but don't make sense in the modern world.

Say you had two kids, and you lost both. One way to think of it is your lost all the children you ever had. Fine.

Say you had a DOZEN kids, and you lost six of them. Same thinking as above, you've lost half the children you ever had. Ok, but you still lost six kids!. Six kids have to go through life knowing they have lost six siblings. Having that somehow be better is pure insanity. Or at the very least the utmost self-centered thing I've ever heard of - you're hoping that the loss off 6 out of 12 kids is somewhat less of an impact on yourself when compared to losing two kids?

These are human beings, not cupcakes you're bringing to a picnic. If you brought two cupcakes, and hoping to have one yourself, but both were eaten before you could have your own cupcake, that stinks - but you're just out of a cupcake. Then yeah: bring a dozen cupcakes to share, and have yourself your own cupcake.

If I remember right, reducing child mortality actually decrease the number of children per family, so it's not that strange. Of course it's bluntly said and reductionist, but I think it has a basis in fact.

You've increased your likelihood of experiencing tragic loss 12-fold!

Does your stance on redundancy of loved ones also extend to the number of spouses you have?

You might still want to learn how to deal with grief and loss though. If you had 12 kids to avoid the possibility of losing all of your kids or all of one gender of your kids, it might still happen anyway. What if you lose your favorite one? What if you still lose all of them? I don’t wish any of that on you or anyone, but I just have to say that breeding for redundancy to avoid the pain of loss strikes me as being, and this is putting it mildly, a tad immature.

I think that's kind of missing GP's point that, while

> the increased happiness of millions of children is worth a couple children's health, or even lives.

might be totally true, it's borderline-impossible to convince concerned (or worse, bereaved) parents of this in many cases, for human, not utilitarian, reasons.

But is this really caused by grieving parents and not blood-sucking lawyers and idiotic bureaucrats?

I'm in Japan and there's a lot of dangerous playground equipment, hikes, stairwells, rooftop decks, onsens, alcohol that can be bought from vending machines, etc... And yet without all those 'experts'and authorities protecting society from these dangers, here it feels safety is many, many tiers better what we have in America.

But bereaved parents are only a small portion of the people at the time. They alone can't make changes. The rest of society has to agree to them.

> To put it bluntly, the increased happiness of millions of children is worth a couple children's health, or even lives.

I don't think that's an accurate reframing. The opportunity cost isn't just happiness (by making playgrounds boring, presumably) but also safety, and therefore lives, in other areas. When you hit diminishing returns trying to make playgrounds 100% safe, spending the same resources on e.g. road design will save more lives.

No, it isn't.

We can all survive with a little less happiness. If our playgrounds are a little more boring, we can all deal. (though if anything they are a lot nicer than the ones I grew up with) Happiness is a good that can come from many sources, and while it's nice to have, if it is reduced, we can usually adapt to it by finding a new source.

Happiness shouldn't be a reason to trade lives.

That reminds me of the villian robot in I, Robot movie. They don't want to harm human, they just want to keep them in the house, so that there is less crime, and less people die.

It may take away freedom. But freedom should not be a reason to trade lives.

Some may say the playground is about happiness, some may say it's about the freedom to experience.

Another thought that adds to this viewpoint: slightly more dangerous playgrounds teach kids how to play more safely, and they grow into adults who also know how to play responsibly. Kids who never get a chance to develop good balance (with the immediate feedback of bruises and scrapes) will not be as good at avoiding falls and other physical dangers as those who have good balance. They also won't know their own physical limits, and won't know which activities are too dangerous.

That's exactly the point. It's not that playgrounds should be more dangerous for the heck of it, or just because kids think it's more fun that way. It's because learning to deal with danger is an essential life skill and we are now depriving our kids of it.

The discussion is about quadriplegia, not scrapes and bruises.

The discussion began on the topic of playgrounds and safety. All people have the risk of injury and death at all times. Some types of injury are not severe and have few lasting consequences, others are of the converse type. Paralysis is incredibly uncommon when compared to scrapes and bruises, which is why I brought up that subtopic.

> Your child could have slipped when getting off a train and permanently injured themselves, or in any other number of ways.

But thanks to our laws, we don't have to worry about playground sets.

Low probability / high impact events are a fact of life and are a valid cause for regulations. Worker safety laws in the early 1900s were such that people more regularly lost fingers or even limbs in heavy machinery. It still happens today, but safety programs and safety regulations have made such events far less likely.

There's a difference between playgrounds and work environments: as far as I am aware, workers aren't any more miserable in safer work environment. Children in "safer" playgrounds, are.

The value of life is not infinite. It is perfectly reasonable to sacrifice a few to improve the conditions of the many. Funnier, riskier playgrounds do exactly that.

That said, the article stated the "safer" playground engendered more injuries, mostly because bored kids were taking inconsiderate risks. The more dangerous playgrounds actually looked more dangerous, and the kids in them ended up taking less serious risks.

There's a good chance that more "dangerous" playgrounds are a one sided win. They could be better than the "safe" ones even if you disagree with my first two paragraphs.

...you are arguing we should sacrifice lives for fun. Not something particularly necessary, like how many here argue for self-driving cars in that way, but our kids are impoverished because gosh darn it, playgrounds aren't fun any more!

I find it a very poor argument.

The second part..eh, if true than there's merit to it, although I would wager dangerous ones would hurt far more. We did stupid stuff just as much as in the old days as in the new, but iron does hurt a lot more than plastic.

> The value of life is not infinite.

Technically it is[0], but they're going to die in a century or so (if that) anyway, so anything that reduces quality of life enough is morally equivalent to killing them earlier.

0: at least to within measurement error

> The value of life is not infinite.

The whole western civilization is standing on the assumption that it is.

This is observably not the case, in all sorts of situations.

Violence, vehicles, medicine, pollution, etc, etc, etc.

Of course we've gotten to a place where we spend lots of dollars preventing 1 statistical death, but not even tens of millions most of the time.

I don't see how it's observably not the case when my mother is working in a hospital where people are kept alive for decades just for the slight chance that medicine might evolve enough to cure them or they just wake up one day; when they are spending extraordinary amounts of money and time of dozens of researchers and doctors on experimental treatments, etc.

I don't understand how vehicles or pollution change anything. I never said there are no bad actors, there are in every civilization, and there are compromises you need to make but that doesn't mean you would not do anything to save someone. Awareness about pollution and its effects is just starting to exist. We didn't think it's bad a few decades ago.

Assume this is true. The NHS is in the UK and run by the government. The NHS has a maximum spend on a single person.

The UK is part of Western Civilization. Therefore it rests on the assumption that life has infinite value. Therefore, the UK will spend infinite money to ensure a person lives.

A contradiction.

OK, that's the UK, I'm not sure why it split off; thank you for pointing it out.

Any continental EU country will spend an unlimited amount of money to save someone. Even Ukraine will. Get your shit in the UK back together, I'd suggest.

Suggesting a maximal spend in my country would immediately lead to a revolt and change of government.

While there may be no explicit limit there are practical limits on what will be done to help a single person. Unlimited is not the same as infinite.

The concept of a micromort [0] argues that people often to put a value on their life, at least probabilisticly.

Valueing life is also not unique to western civilization. Yes, it values individualism highly, but confucian values are also highly concerned with humaneness and the value of life.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

But it also means that we're neutering some really important mechanisms of human development. It seems very costly to squeeze out those teensy little bits of extra safety.

> Worker safety laws in the early 1900s were such that people more regularly lost fingers or even limbs in heavy machinery.

If it's regularly happening, it isn't a "low probability" event.

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