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Comment by HPsquared | Hacker News Reader

You could make the same argument against medical care. "If we start healing the sick, people will stop taking care of their health".

That's not even considering potential side effects of therapies, medicines, etc. Any action has a balance of good and bad, both directly and indirectly.

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The difference is that geoengineering affects the commons. I don’t mind people doing things to their own bodies, I do mind them messing with my atmosphere.

Infectious disease epidemics certainly affects the commons.

Typically spreads through the atmosphere even.

Surely you could see a case where an unwell person coughs on you or around you being comparable, right?

Exactly.

1. Industrial civilizations have been using the sky as an open sewer for emissions. Before that it was soot and lead (TEL).

2. No quick fixes with solar shades, adding chemicals, or fractioning air gases (good luck with scaling that). Get the carbon out of the air by growing stuff and sequestering it at the bottom of the ocean.

And that's essentially what has happened. We are sicker than ever because we have easy cures. The problem is that modern medicine works on the symptoms, not on root causes. So the more we "cure" symptoms, the more sick we become, overall.

That's a lovely bunch of non sequiturs you got there.

Most primarily we're more sick than ever because of two things that have absolutely nothing to do with "curing symptoms":

* We're so good at curing diseases and conditions that used to be fatal that people get a lot older than they used to, and old people get sick far more often.

* Automation and increased productivity make a sedentary lifestyle possible and even incentivize it.

This is very, very much not true. Do vaccines or antibiotics "work on symptoms"? Do knee replacements "work on symptoms" of our bodies being unable to regenerate cartilage? The only superficial "work on symptoms" treatments I can think of are palliative cancer care or cosmetic treatments like fillers.

I overall agree with you, but a much bigger counterexample would be the widespread availability of painkillers

By what specific measure are we sicker than ever?

Show your work.

The problem is that modern medicine works, so people are alive rather than dead.

Didn't the broad availability of the antibiotics made people stop caring about syphilis? It's easily curable now in most cases.

Kind of? I think people don't really fear it the way they might fear, say, AIDS, but they still practice protected sex regardless (because it's a good idea for many reasons). If people cared more about syphilis they probably wouldn't change their current behavior much. I think there might be better examples for this, like polio vaccines making people stop caring about polio (and then skipping the vaccines).

Usually you don't consider health insurance to be a moral hazard in this way. However, in healthcare, a moral hazard can occur when people use more healthcare services because the cost for them is low.

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