The "experts" also thought if Vietnam went communist the whole continent would. The "experts" gave us the war on drugs. The fatherless black household and the lazy black man weren't stereotypes until the "experts" tried to help minorities.

How many lives are you willing to ruin and how much blood are you willing to spill getting things wrong? The power of the state shouldn't be thrown around on a whim or subject to subject specific industry fads and circle jerks.

So if you don't touch the lever on the trolley you aren't responsible for the millions of people it plows through on the default track? Uh-huh. Keep telling yourself that.

Look, I invest in companies that stand to benefit in this transition and I want my stonks to go up -- but I'm horrified by the apathetic excuses people toss out to rationalize ignoring the externalities. Strengthening the safety net is the least we can do. "What if we get it wrong?" sounds an awful lot like "it's gonna cost money and I don't want to pay" to my ears.

History is littered with the stories of people who thought the end justified the means. The 20th century eugenicists thought they were improving humanity. The people who tried to civilize the natives with Christianity thought they were saving them from eternal suffering. The "if the .gov doesn't get involved things will go to shit and you'll be sorry" stuff you are saying is basically what people who were ardent proponents of things like restrictive zoning were saying and we all know how well that worked.

I'm not saying don't do anything. I'm saying it's more than ill-advised to get the vast resources of the modern state involved in things on the whims of "experts" because hubris abounds.

I think you and GP are both right. The Trolly Problem is legit and real. OTOH humans (especially those exercising any sort of power) are grossly incompetent, arrogant, and good at leaving trails of suffering behind them.

I also think you're not really disagreeing. GP is talking about specific implementations while you are talking about high level philosophy.

I don't believe that there's a right answer that will fit all cases here - for issues like same sex marriage, you can find all permutations of social acceptance and lawful acceptance all over earth, yet I think it's hard to justify any position besides lawful and social acceptance.

I think you have experts and politicians confused.

> The "experts" also thought if Vietnam went communist the whole continent would.

The domino theory was advocated by politicians, not experts.

> The "experts" gave us the war on drugs.

Nixon gave us the war on drugs as an excuse to be racist towards black people and let cops beat up hippies. Experts have derided the war on drugs (as opposed to treatment for addicts) and the classification of weed as schedule 1.

> The fatherless black household [wasn't] stereotypes until the "experts" tried to help minorities.

The stereotype preceded the experts, but yeah, Moynihan fucked up there.

> How many lives are you willing to ruin and how much blood are you willing to spill getting things wrong?

I mean, a not insignificant number. The US has 350 million people. Any decision at that scale is likely to fuck over a lot of people, whether that's allowing any company to put out a self-driving car or changing fuel efficiency levels.

> The power of the state shouldn't be thrown around on a whim or subject to subject specific industry fads and circle jerks.

On the contrary, I'm advocating the power of the state to take action against industry fads faster than the public notices the issues. Such as using governmental power to limit invasive tracking of internet activity.