When those start to have a noticeable impact on society, I'd imagine yes, they'd start to do something about it. Right now, diabetes is indeed a serious problem.

> The cost burden from diabetes, including medical expenses and productivity loss, is expected to rise from beyond $940 million in 2014 to $1.8 billion in 2050. The prevalence of diabetes among Singapore residents (Singapore citizens and permanent residents) has increased over the decade. [...] Table 2 shows that even after accounting for Singapore's ageing population, the prevalence of diabetes in Singapore (10.5 percent) is higher than the world's average (8.8 percent). Rising obesity is also a significant contributor to the rise in diabetes prevalence. [1]

> Diabetes is a serious health concern in Singapore. One in three Singaporeans is at risk of developing diabetes in their lifetime. [...] The Ministry of Health (MOH) launched a War on Diabetes (WoD) in 2016, in response to the significant health and societal burden posed by diabetes, and established the national Diabetes Prevention and Care Taskforce (“Taskforce”) to spearhead a whole-of-nation initiative to tackle diabetes. [2]

References:

[1] https://www.healthhub.sg/a-z/diseases-and-conditions/626/dia...

[2] https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/421/HESA/Brief/B...

> Should we stop people from doing high risk activities in general? Mountain climbing? Sky diving?

This is not comparable. We're not talking about banning sugary drink, but banning brainwashing people (including kids) to make them consume them.

I suppose the argument is frequency of the activity, balanced against the expected skill of the person doing the activity. I am not an expert car driver -- I just do it everyday. That's different from an F1 driver; such a driver is fundamentally engaging in a much higher risk activity, but they are probably very well trained.

Skydiving medical costs are pretty small. But something with a big impact such as those new electric scooters get lawmakers to quickly act. Speed limits, restrictions on where they can drive, helmet requirement... all of it is being contemplated by regulators everywhere. Because they are widely used and pretty dangerous.

Well, we know that:

Expected payoff = Probability * Impact.

Extreme activities have a low probability of resulting in anything bad (especially with the gear and protocol we have today), but the impact can be high when it happens -- though if we take the summation across the population the overall impact is low because only a small sliver of society will participate.

Sugar consumption has medium probability of leading to poorer health outcomes, and impact is also medium, but I suspect the overall payoff (or harm in this case) is much higher when summed across the population.

So yes, from a purely rational perspective, we should try to stop people from doing things that harm the system as a whole.

If they want to do things that harm themselves at a localized level (with no 2nd or 3rd order effects -- though this is rare), then on balance policies should allow them to.

When I learned skydiving in the early 2000s, I did about 50 skydive jumps; I was still a rookie. In France, where I learned, I found the industry very well regulated with the highest security standards. I am glad I was able to enjoy this in the safest possible conditions.

I knew someone was going to push the limit - how about exercise, it kills some people.

The bleedin' obvious answer is where the benefits outweight the cost. Benefit obviously extends further than 'can kill with x% probability'.

This is a useless post, try answering the question, or giving a framework within which it can be answered, instead of asking it.

It's not a useless post at all. It's sometimes difficult to quantify the negatives and positives of an activity. For example, eating meat. I have heard a lot about how eating meat is harmful to people's health and our environment. Shouldn't we ban that as well?

> It's sometimes difficult to quantify the negatives and positives of an activity

So from this you talk about banning them, right? Except you ban everything because everything has a risk, which is something no-one would accept. Alternative is you try and answer the question instead of asking it.

A utilitarian viewpoint.

A 'You-can-{smoke/drink/parachute/motorrace}-if-you-have-enough-money-to-cover-your-own-hospital-costs' approach.

An attempt to quantify where the line should be drawn, which is what I was getting at.

Or not ban them at all, as some people will propose, which certainly has some merit.

Hand over that decision to the government (which seems to be happening anyway) and wash your hands of it as an individual - the conformist approach.

And doubtless others.

Don't ask obvious questions, questions are easy, and this one is trivial to ask. Try to answer them instead.