I would like to propose a fine for a much more serious societal harm: if I read a blog post, and only afterward realize the post was written by an undergraduate, he gets fined and I get the money. Anyway, policy is not about being optimal, or about proposing a specific vision, or even a coherent one, and conversely setting some derivative to zero does not necessarily make for desirable policy.
Well, if you don't think there's a function, then what are you doing using quantitative words like "optimal," "harms," and "probability"?
I'm referring to what you're actually doing in this post. You're talking about a policy issue, but you're ignoring the policy part and imagining it's sufficient to treat it as an economic model (it's not, because policy is not economics). Except you're not even doing that, because it hardly qualifies as a model, because it's not quantitative (so you are not forced to wrestle with the assumptions of the quantitative form).
So what do you actually get? Wild assertions that rely on the reader missing those two points.
I would like to propose a fine for a much more serious societal harm: if I read a blog post, and only afterward realize the post was written by an undergraduate, he gets fined and I get the money. Anyway, policy is not about being optimal, or about proposing a specific vision, or even a coherent one, and conversely setting some derivative to zero does not necessarily make for desirable policy.
I don't see how it's a derivative -- there's no function which we would be taking a derivative of! What are you referring to here?
Well, if you don't think there's a function, then what are you doing using quantitative words like "optimal," "harms," and "probability"?
I'm referring to what you're actually doing in this post. You're talking about a policy issue, but you're ignoring the policy part and imagining it's sufficient to treat it as an economic model (it's not, because policy is not economics). Except you're not even doing that, because it hardly qualifies as a model, because it's not quantitative (so you are not forced to wrestle with the assumptions of the quantitative form).
So what do you actually get? Wild assertions that rely on the reader missing those two points.