Imagine a river with some distribution of flood sizes. Imagine this proposed improvement: a dam which is able to contain 1-year, 5-year and 10-year floods. It is too small for 50-year floods or larger, and may even burst and make the flood worse. I think such device is not an improvement, and may make things much worse—because of the perceived safety, people may build houses close to the river, and when the large flood hits, the damages could be larger.
But I think the prior of not diagonalising against others (and of not giving yourself rope with which to trick yourself) is strong.
I have hard time parsing what do you want to say relative to my post. I’m not advocating for people to deliberately create warning shots.
I do not think your post is arguing for creating warning shots. I understand it to be advocating for not averting warning shots.
To extend your analogy, there are several houses that are built close to a river, and you think that a flood is coming that will destroy them. You are worried that if you build a dam that would protect the houses currently there, then more people will build by the river and their houses will be flooded by even bigger floods in the future. Because you are worried people will behave in this bad-for-them way, you choose not to help them in the short term. (The bit I mean to point to by “diagonalising” is the bit where you think about what you expect they’ll do, and which mistakes you think they’ll make, and plan around that).
The quote is somewhat out of context.
Imagine a river with some distribution of flood sizes. Imagine this proposed improvement: a dam which is able to contain 1-year, 5-year and 10-year floods. It is too small for 50-year floods or larger, and may even burst and make the flood worse. I think such device is not an improvement, and may make things much worse—because of the perceived safety, people may build houses close to the river, and when the large flood hits, the damages could be larger.
I have hard time parsing what do you want to say relative to my post. I’m not advocating for people to deliberately create warning shots.
I do not think your post is arguing for creating warning shots. I understand it to be advocating for not averting warning shots.
To extend your analogy, there are several houses that are built close to a river, and you think that a flood is coming that will destroy them. You are worried that if you build a dam that would protect the houses currently there, then more people will build by the river and their houses will be flooded by even bigger floods in the future. Because you are worried people will behave in this bad-for-them way, you choose not to help them in the short term. (The bit I mean to point to by “diagonalising” is the bit where you think about what you expect they’ll do, and which mistakes you think they’ll make, and plan around that).