Fraud prevention actually is a security issue. Not an Internet security issue, so mistakes aren't punished that quickly, but the analogy is still sound.
Someone buying a new watch with their expense account doesn't suddenly give them access to the whole treasury -- that's the difference between physical and digital realms I am trying to emphasize.
Most security breaches don't allow the malicious user to root the entire server farm either.
I just spent a week fixing permission validation done in JS on the browser. Users could have potentially allowed themselves to see parts of documents outside their role. This didn't give them access to our payroll system, credit card processor, or the backend infrastructure.
The problem is, once the government chooses to not close a known loophole, the number of people who exploit it may increase by orders of magnitude. Without a willingness to add the other 1350 pages, you may end up with something like 70% fraud prevention, not 99.9%.
What's needed is more refactoring. This would benefit from more capacity to try different sets of regulations in parallel.
This is a generally true statement about any process.
The solution to that is to enforce well enough that people don't think that's a good idea. I also did say you do have to refactor over time as compliance rate decreases.
Past that, i don't think we actually disagree :)
If you have a speed limit sign, and it says "speed limit, 50 mph, enforced by satellite observation", most people will probably ignore it. Those that don't and get caught, yeah, they go looking for excuses for why they ignored it to post-justify it.
Changing the regulation wording will not change this. You can make the sign much larger and say "speed limit 50 mph, even if you are really late for an appointment, etc" but honestly, it still will not help that. People ignore it because the enforcement mechanism makes them feel like it won't happen to them (and because it's not socially abhorrent, etc), not because of ignorance of the law
On the other hand, if you have a sign that says "speed limit 50mph, enforced by this guy, right here", and there is a smiling cop with a radar gun sitting next to the sign, enforcing it, most people will not ignore it. In fact, i'd bet you could write everything before "enforced by this guy" in small print people had to slow down to read, and most people would slow down and read it, because they believe the risk of enforcement is greater to them.
Will you get everyone to stop speeding there?
Nope.
Even if you add spike strips, laser beams, whatever, someone is going to do it, and in fact, enforcing harder sometimes increases the rate (depending how low the rate is) based on the thrill some people get. 100% compliance is just pretty much impossible, no matter what words you use.
Some organizations do startlingly well with good enforcement and a rule against circumventing the rules. Yes, that's subjective and messy, but it can actually work quite nicely.
Hell, it's basically what financial structuring laws are: a rule saying "no using loopholes if you find them". With that in place, it becomes surprisingly easy to address loopholes by punishing everyone who employs them.
* Just within the last 50 years, we've made a ton of progress on this "impossible problem". By any reasonable measure, global poverty has been cut by at least half. Keep in mind that both China and India each still have larger populations than the entire continent of Africa, and that the median Chinese and the median Indian were not in significantly better shape than the median African 50 years ago. Furthermore, some African leaders, most notably Rwanda's Paul Kagame, are now achieving some success at adapting Asian development patterns to their own conditions.
* Taiwan and South Korea did not need draconian one child policies, or any other form of population control, to become prosperous. And they've gotten much further than China. Of all the lessons you could draw from East Asia's rise, "copy the one child policy" is close to the most nonsensical. I won't deny the obvious fact that you can't sustainably have each generation be 5 times larger than the previous one, but we have tons of data points indicating that women's education, and other things you'd want to do anyway to facilitate economic development, happen to solve the "unsustainable fertility rate" problem as a side effect, and the causal mechanisms are fairly well understood (when women are permitted to do other things with their lives than serve as full-time brood mares, most of them take advantage of the additional options...).
>>Just within the last 50 years, we've made a ton of progress on this "impossible problem"
The overwhelming majority of that progress comes from replacing an evil, murderous, and incompetent dictatorship in the world's largest nation with a decent dictatorship. One faction, led at enormous personal danger by Deng Hsiaoping, replaced the preferred successors of Mao with ordinary dictators that wanted to rule a prosperous middle income country instead of a disaster area.
All the other progress in the world is small in comparison and we aren't going to see China rescued from sociopathic communism again.
There has been progress in SE Asia and India and Latin America and even some post-post-colonial recovery in Africa. There isn't that much grinding poverty in Latin America to alleviate anymore and SE Asia is getting there. But that leave the most intractable problems to deal with.
India and Africa have enormous birth rates, populations that have proven resistant to education, and local politics unfriendly to economic growth. Latin America and China brought down birth rates and raised educational achievement quickly as soon as their governments allowed it, but India and Africa have tried and the people aren't taking to either.
There are some encouraging places like Tamil Nadu and Botswana, but there are diminishing returns in development as in any industry. It gets harder and harder to grow economies once you've done the easy cases like China and Korea.
And because of birthrates, the hard cases just become a larger and larger problem. Two thirds of mankind will be Sub-Saharan African and Indian/Pakistani by 2100 according to the most optimistic projections. Will they still be grindingly poor? I hope not. Still there's no clear road from today to a decent future for most of mankind.
I don't get it. India's birth rate was 2.4 children per woman in 2012 and 2.3 children per woman in 2013, barely above replacement. We should expect it to get down below replacement rate in the next five years.
It looks like your post contains interesting thoughts, but it's hard to take the rest of it seriously when there's such extremely obvious inaccuracy.
There's also the problem that if your birth rate is below replacement your population gets old and shrinks and dies. This is a bad thing in the long term, and getting out of that situation is turning into a major challenge worldwide. We need to be very careful that we haven't swung this pendulum way too far in the wrong direction.
In practice, the question is if getting to X+n:Y is more than ten times as expensive as getting to X+(n/2):Y+(n/2), does it still make sense to prioritize the former?
This is not an argument against the "Hidden Genius Project" discussed in the linked article; it's clear that Mr. Young's comparative advantage does in fact lie with helping other black men, so you'd still want him working on that even if the broader goal is getting to X+(n/2):Y+(n/2).
It appears that you consider, among other things, Singapore's rise over the last 50 years to be "evil". This puts you at odds with practically the entire economics profession, and just about everyone else in the world trying to actually improve conditions in poor countries instead of burning perceived witches and warlocks.
You mean conducting eugenics experiments on low-income women?
Or did you mean encouraging only educated people to have children?
If you really think sterilizing and performing experiments on the poor without consent constitutes social progress... I don't really know what to say.
Anyways, it's a pretty far stretch to say that Singapore's eugenics program had anything at all to do with its economic performance over the past 50 years. More-over, the changes to reproductive rates in Singapore are pretty uniform throughout the population. So even if population control has helped Singapore, it was just the population control -- not the class-centered eugenics schemes.
And all of this is discounting the fact that it's not even effective when judged on its own terms... turns out governments don't make for very good PD controllers.
> with practically the entire economics profession
This is obviously not true. It is not the case that the majority of practicing ecnomists support eugenics...
Second, even if this were true, it would be irrelevant. Economists are not geneticists, biologists, anthropologists, etc. They are absolutely not trained to make the sort of assessments I'm talking about above.
Most economists agree that Lee Kuan Yew did a better job at increasing his people's prosperity than almost every other developing-country leader of his era. An increasing number of African leaders (Rwanda's Paul Kagame is an especially vocal example) see him as a primary role model.
You are free to believe that LKY's worldview was totally inaccurate and that he owes his success to a ridiculous amount of luck. (As you note, his views on human group differences were not a random eccentricity, they had a major impact on his policy choices in several domains.) Fortunately, those who are doing the most to increase African prosperity today reject your position, and tens of millions of people are benefiting.
In the repeated game of life, you can end up ahead if, by forswearing extreme cruelty toward others even when it's locally "efficient", you significantly reduce the probability of others behaving so cruelly toward you. This is a major reason civilization exists at all.
It is not unreasonable to believe that someone who is used to being exceptionally cruel to animals, when it is not terribly expensive to avoid that cruelty, will on average be more willing than usual to be cruel towards other humans. "Avoid hurting beings that can experience pain" is arguably a more compelling Schelling point to organize 21st century civilization around than "avoid hurting other humans, but do whatever the hell you want to other species". I disagree with Wiblin about this being a "no-brainer", but I mostly agree with his final judgment of the desirability of phasing out this type of factory farming.
Better representations are already used for downstream data analysis and continue to be improved; see e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.08452 .
However, algorithms for producing variant calls from raw sequencer output are also improving over time, and the way to get the most benefit from them is to save the old raw data so newer algorithms can be applied to them. That's where the storage challenges come into play.
The efficient, egalitarian solution to poverty is improvement of the home countries, not open borders. This is most obvious for China; that country has so many people that if one attempted to "solve Chinese poverty" via brute force importation of their people, the entire First World would have flipped to a Chinese majority. Instead, Chinese poverty is being solved more than an order of magnitude more efficiently and less disruptively--this is a thing that is actually happening, not spherical-cow theorizing--via trade, technology transfer, and related methods.
Open borders may still have merit (I'd certainly value the additional convenience), but your argument for it is obviously wrong.
For all the correlations which are greatly attenuated in China, it is safe to conclude that inequality is not a significant cause of the corresponding phenomenon; instead, causation goes the other direction and/or a third factor causes both.
Since the introduction of capitalism and free market, which marked the start of large income inequality, Chinese society has definitely experienced higher crime rate, lower civic participation, lower social cohesion, etc.
I remember when my home city was still very poor, people treated each other much better. There is a general sense of community and trust. People are always offering a hand to those in need of help, even though helpers themselves are poor. Theft was literally unheard of, let alone more serious crimes.
Also Edwardian England is a compelling counter-example. Read "The Classic Slum" by Robert Roberts. British society around 1900 was massively unequal and lots of people were desperately poor. But their homicide rates were 100X lower than the rates seen in the contemporary ghetto. The poor working class areas of England during that period had intact families, schools that provided discipline, strict policing, and strong institutions.
It's probably worth noting that the people living in those Victorian slums were largely homogeneous, and also homogeneous with the rest of the culture.
Likewise, the least-diverse states in the U.S. are also at the top of the list for lowest crime-rate.
