Well, judging by the negative karma it has given me, it seems clear that there is some “problem with the question” as LessWrong voters see things. Good thing that I don’t much care about karma, eh?
However, mostly I take it as evidence against the one-dimensional approach to measuring karma. Rather than take it as evidence that LessWrong itself should have lower karma, I see it as evidence that the shallow and close-minded Reddit approach of thumbs up or down is flawed. Even though the code has been rewritten, I think LessWrong might be “fighting the last war” on that front. Now back to the actual issue at hand...
Is pandemic insurance a good idea?
To address the substance of your [ChristianKI’s] comment [But did you also give me a thumb down?], we will always be in a position of “fighting the last war” after any surprise attack. That’s actually why I decided that Question (0) was the best one to focus on, since that generalization is (hopefully) applying a lesson learned from Covid-19 to develop a good policy for businesses going forward. (I also considered taking the approach that the pandemic was not a surprise, per John Oliver’s main story on the latest episode of Last Week Tonight. He included some historical background and I agree that we should not have been so surprised by the attack of Covid-19. (I even believe that we are only a couple of unlucky mutations away from being back to square one in the “last war” against Covid-19.)
So let me expand the topic into two “concrete models” of insurance, no-fault auto insurance and health insurance.
In the case of no-fault auto insurance, we basically take the position that there are going to be some automobile accidents that cause significant damages. We could spend a lot of time haggling about who is at fault and how much they should pay, but (at least in America) it was decided to simplify the situation by requiring all car owners to have liability insurance for their cars. Personal example time: I was involved in a car accident. No question but that it was the other driver’s fault. I even knew that I could sue him and the average settlement for such cases was twice the value of his insurance coverage. Was I a fool for accepting the insurance company’s offer of his full covered value? Maybe I was a fool, but I didn’t see any reason to damage his life for more money. (Plus I believed that the accident was at least partly his wife’s fault, so that suing him would have put stress on their marriage.)
I started with the auto insurance because that’s a more conventional case. Most of the people who buy the insurance don’t suffer the damages and the claims are paid from the premiums of the ‘lucky’ people who have no accidents. However medical insurance is different because sooner or later everyone is going to have major medical costs. But (again limited to America) the solution has been based on private insurance. There are two tricks involved in this version of the solution. One is the “sooner or later” part which justifies making young people pay sooner for the medical costs they will incur later. The other is the variable costs, especially at the end. I am not endorsing this position (and have major reservations about medical insurance in general), but some people die much more cheaply than other people do. End of life care can be quite expensive but many people are willing to be “reasonable” about it, at least when they are in good health and preparing a Living Will for their future self in terminal condition. (And now you see where the “death panels” come from?)
Prediction time: We will have new diseases and new pandemics in the future. I actually think that Covid-19 was an unlucky zoonotic accident, but the next accident could be much worse. Or the next pandemic might not be an accident. Maybe Betteridge was wrong and the answer to this headline question should have been “Yes”?
One more thing. Might even be related to the mysterious karma thing. Maybe the negative karma was voted in fear of politics? However, I would say that I want to avoid political responses to medical crises and Covid-19 is a MEDICAL crisis that has also triggered a secondary economic crisis. My focus was on dividing the economic crisis away from the medical crisis, where insurance is the “normal” solution to deal with economic crises. However Covid-19 could be (and probably has been) linked to politics via the money.
Meta again...
Now should I say “oops” about my karma? No, thank you. I would be willing to discuss that with the people who felt so strongly (and negatively) about the topic. Or maybe they just felt slightly negative and LessWrong encourages expressing such negative feelings? Or maybe I am merely slightly curious in whether I should care about the opinions of the (to-me-anonymous) people who felt the question deserved a negative rating?
Is there something substantively wrong with the topic? Four thumbs down (currently) say “Bad”, but I say “Boo” (and not as in “boo hoo”). I think it would be nice if they had been encouraged (or even required) to offer a few words about why they dislike the question so much. (How about giving less weight to negative karma if it is not actually justified with an explanation? Or even let downvoters pick from a menu of reasons to give full weight to their thumbs?)
Rather than take it as evidence that LessWrong itself should have lower karma, I see it as evidence that the shallow and close-minded Reddit approach of thumbs up or down is flawed.
I think you can easily interpret it here as the LessWrong readers who engaged with the post don’t consider it valuable. It’s a badly argued post with political implications. Badly argued in the sense that you don’t address the tradeoffs.
I would be willing to discuss that with the people who felt so strongly (and negatively) about the topic.
Looking at the score, I don’t think anybody gave it a strong downvote.
There’s no law that requires no-fault auto insurance. There are laws that require certain minimum liability coverage. Those laws exist because of the possibility of people damaging other people to make them be able to pay.
Businesses in a pandemic don’t create damage for other people for which they need liability insurance.
We generally regulate businesses in a way that businesses are allowed to take risks that make the business go bust.
One of the main idea of why we have the Great Stagnation is that increased regulation. You are advocating that businesses need more regulation and we need to forbid them from taking risks that they are currently taking.
With pre-Kefauver-Harris laws after Dr. Stöcker gave his himself a vaccine in March that gave him antibodies against the COVID-19 spike protein he could have easily sold it and by winter a large amount of the population would have been vaccinate.
While pandemics are certainly a significant risk, adding specific regulations for insuring against them increases the burden of starting a company which in turn means that it gets harder for businessmen to start companies to solve other problems.
No, what you are saying is NOT related to what I am advocating. Even worse, I am having serious trouble trying to reconstruct a logical chain whereby you could have gotten there based on what I was trying to say. I know I write badly, but still...
Your departure point seems to be that government-mandated insurance is bad, but even there I am not convinced my examples were inappropriate. Rather I feel as though you are flying off in a completely different direction.
So let me try to take it from the top again. First of all, my basic premise is simply that insurance is a “normal mechanism” for responding to risk.
Now there are many kinds of risks and many kinds of insurance. Most insurance policies are based on predicting the future. I think you want to limit the examples to purely voluntary insurance, which doesn’t bother me, but the key to selling voluntary insurance is to convince the customer that the probability of the adverse event is high enough that some money should be diverted from present expenses to protect against that event. As a company would see things, that basically means deciding whether to spend less on maintaining and expanding the current business operations so as to protect future business operations. (And yes, I will even acknowledge that the government will naturally be pressured into regulating the insurance industry for several reasons. The most important one is that insurance companies have perverse incentives to exaggerate or even lie about the risks in order to sell more insurance.)
However Covid-19 is an example of an unexpected and essentially non-insurable disaster. Even worse, it affects almost every company more or less adversely. Such disasters create overwhelming pressures for governments to respond to protect the lives and welfare of their citizens. My suggestion is not that we normalize disasters, but we try to normalize the responses with TIDI (Time-Inverted Disaster Insurance) to reflect cases where the government has been forced to act as insurer of the last resort.
The situation of TIDI is fundamentally different from regular insurance, but in some ways advantageous. Looking at the damages after the fact, we can actually get a clear handle on how much economic damage has taken place. From that perspective, the insurance companies are using TIDI to help total up the damages and apportion the economic responses according to the actual damages suffered.
The main “trick” in TIDI is that the premiums would be paid after the fact, after we’ve seen how bad the disaster was. And from that perspective, the main problem is making sure the government as customer pays the premiums within a reasonable time frame. That may be the fatal flaw, however. Governments are notoriously bad about sticking to their payment schedules.
Maybe you think I’m trying to defend the notion of “too big to fail”? If so, then no. Rather I actually think that one of the most legitimate responsibilities of government is to prevent corporations from becoming too big. Every company should be free to go bankrupt at any time, but without taking the rest of the economy down with it. But yes, the entire economic system as a whole does need to be protected from collapse, and that’s another legitimate responsibility of government.
Returning to the specific case of Covid-19, I think mixing up the costs of the damages with the costs of the medical responses has made the situation much worse. An especially noteworthy bad example in Japan was a series of GoTo campaigns that were supposed to help businesses, but which actually wound up helping the coronavirus more.
Well, judging by the negative karma it has given me, it seems clear that there is some “problem with the question” as LessWrong voters see things. Good thing that I don’t much care about karma, eh?
However, mostly I take it as evidence against the one-dimensional approach to measuring karma. Rather than take it as evidence that LessWrong itself should have lower karma, I see it as evidence that the shallow and close-minded Reddit approach of thumbs up or down is flawed. Even though the code has been rewritten, I think LessWrong might be “fighting the last war” on that front. Now back to the actual issue at hand...
Is pandemic insurance a good idea?
To address the substance of your [ChristianKI’s] comment [But did you also give me a thumb down?], we will always be in a position of “fighting the last war” after any surprise attack. That’s actually why I decided that Question (0) was the best one to focus on, since that generalization is (hopefully) applying a lesson learned from Covid-19 to develop a good policy for businesses going forward. (I also considered taking the approach that the pandemic was not a surprise, per John Oliver’s main story on the latest episode of Last Week Tonight. He included some historical background and I agree that we should not have been so surprised by the attack of Covid-19. (I even believe that we are only a couple of unlucky mutations away from being back to square one in the “last war” against Covid-19.)
So let me expand the topic into two “concrete models” of insurance, no-fault auto insurance and health insurance.
In the case of no-fault auto insurance, we basically take the position that there are going to be some automobile accidents that cause significant damages. We could spend a lot of time haggling about who is at fault and how much they should pay, but (at least in America) it was decided to simplify the situation by requiring all car owners to have liability insurance for their cars. Personal example time: I was involved in a car accident. No question but that it was the other driver’s fault. I even knew that I could sue him and the average settlement for such cases was twice the value of his insurance coverage. Was I a fool for accepting the insurance company’s offer of his full covered value? Maybe I was a fool, but I didn’t see any reason to damage his life for more money. (Plus I believed that the accident was at least partly his wife’s fault, so that suing him would have put stress on their marriage.)
I started with the auto insurance because that’s a more conventional case. Most of the people who buy the insurance don’t suffer the damages and the claims are paid from the premiums of the ‘lucky’ people who have no accidents. However medical insurance is different because sooner or later everyone is going to have major medical costs. But (again limited to America) the solution has been based on private insurance. There are two tricks involved in this version of the solution. One is the “sooner or later” part which justifies making young people pay sooner for the medical costs they will incur later. The other is the variable costs, especially at the end. I am not endorsing this position (and have major reservations about medical insurance in general), but some people die much more cheaply than other people do. End of life care can be quite expensive but many people are willing to be “reasonable” about it, at least when they are in good health and preparing a Living Will for their future self in terminal condition. (And now you see where the “death panels” come from?)
Prediction time: We will have new diseases and new pandemics in the future. I actually think that Covid-19 was an unlucky zoonotic accident, but the next accident could be much worse. Or the next pandemic might not be an accident. Maybe Betteridge was wrong and the answer to this headline question should have been “Yes”?
One more thing. Might even be related to the mysterious karma thing. Maybe the negative karma was voted in fear of politics? However, I would say that I want to avoid political responses to medical crises and Covid-19 is a MEDICAL crisis that has also triggered a secondary economic crisis. My focus was on dividing the economic crisis away from the medical crisis, where insurance is the “normal” solution to deal with economic crises. However Covid-19 could be (and probably has been) linked to politics via the money.
Meta again...
Now should I say “oops” about my karma? No, thank you. I would be willing to discuss that with the people who felt so strongly (and negatively) about the topic. Or maybe they just felt slightly negative and LessWrong encourages expressing such negative feelings? Or maybe I am merely slightly curious in whether I should care about the opinions of the (to-me-anonymous) people who felt the question deserved a negative rating?
Is there something substantively wrong with the topic? Four thumbs down (currently) say “Bad”, but I say “Boo” (and not as in “boo hoo”). I think it would be nice if they had been encouraged (or even required) to offer a few words about why they dislike the question so much. (How about giving less weight to negative karma if it is not actually justified with an explanation? Or even let downvoters pick from a menu of reasons to give full weight to their thumbs?)
I think you can easily interpret it here as the LessWrong readers who engaged with the post don’t consider it valuable. It’s a badly argued post with political implications. Badly argued in the sense that you don’t address the tradeoffs.
Looking at the score, I don’t think anybody gave it a strong downvote.
There’s no law that requires no-fault auto insurance. There are laws that require certain minimum liability coverage. Those laws exist because of the possibility of people damaging other people to make them be able to pay.
Businesses in a pandemic don’t create damage for other people for which they need liability insurance.
We generally regulate businesses in a way that businesses are allowed to take risks that make the business go bust.
One of the main idea of why we have the Great Stagnation is that increased regulation. You are advocating that businesses need more regulation and we need to forbid them from taking risks that they are currently taking.
With pre-Kefauver-Harris laws after Dr. Stöcker gave his himself a vaccine in March that gave him antibodies against the COVID-19 spike protein he could have easily sold it and by winter a large amount of the population would have been vaccinate.
While pandemics are certainly a significant risk, adding specific regulations for insuring against them increases the burden of starting a company which in turn means that it gets harder for businessmen to start companies to solve other problems.
No, what you are saying is NOT related to what I am advocating. Even worse, I am having serious trouble trying to reconstruct a logical chain whereby you could have gotten there based on what I was trying to say. I know I write badly, but still...
Your departure point seems to be that government-mandated insurance is bad, but even there I am not convinced my examples were inappropriate. Rather I feel as though you are flying off in a completely different direction.
So let me try to take it from the top again. First of all, my basic premise is simply that insurance is a “normal mechanism” for responding to risk.
Now there are many kinds of risks and many kinds of insurance. Most insurance policies are based on predicting the future. I think you want to limit the examples to purely voluntary insurance, which doesn’t bother me, but the key to selling voluntary insurance is to convince the customer that the probability of the adverse event is high enough that some money should be diverted from present expenses to protect against that event. As a company would see things, that basically means deciding whether to spend less on maintaining and expanding the current business operations so as to protect future business operations. (And yes, I will even acknowledge that the government will naturally be pressured into regulating the insurance industry for several reasons. The most important one is that insurance companies have perverse incentives to exaggerate or even lie about the risks in order to sell more insurance.)
However Covid-19 is an example of an unexpected and essentially non-insurable disaster. Even worse, it affects almost every company more or less adversely. Such disasters create overwhelming pressures for governments to respond to protect the lives and welfare of their citizens. My suggestion is not that we normalize disasters, but we try to normalize the responses with TIDI (Time-Inverted Disaster Insurance) to reflect cases where the government has been forced to act as insurer of the last resort.
The situation of TIDI is fundamentally different from regular insurance, but in some ways advantageous. Looking at the damages after the fact, we can actually get a clear handle on how much economic damage has taken place. From that perspective, the insurance companies are using TIDI to help total up the damages and apportion the economic responses according to the actual damages suffered.
The main “trick” in TIDI is that the premiums would be paid after the fact, after we’ve seen how bad the disaster was. And from that perspective, the main problem is making sure the government as customer pays the premiums within a reasonable time frame. That may be the fatal flaw, however. Governments are notoriously bad about sticking to their payment schedules.
Maybe you think I’m trying to defend the notion of “too big to fail”? If so, then no. Rather I actually think that one of the most legitimate responsibilities of government is to prevent corporations from becoming too big. Every company should be free to go bankrupt at any time, but without taking the rest of the economy down with it. But yes, the entire economic system as a whole does need to be protected from collapse, and that’s another legitimate responsibility of government.
Returning to the specific case of Covid-19, I think mixing up the costs of the damages with the costs of the medical responses has made the situation much worse. An especially noteworthy bad example in Japan was a series of GoTo campaigns that were supposed to help businesses, but which actually wound up helping the coronavirus more.