55 Comments

In some sense, the gov’t – though liability laws – already regulates your kitchen (albeit ex post): If I attend a dinner party at your house, and you negligently kill me with tainted food, a lawsuit may be forthcoming.

People know this, of course, and are careful to take precautions to reduce liability, e.g., you don’t serve Tommy peanuts at a dinner part if you know he has a severe peanut allergy.

Although the gov’t can’t regulate all private kitchens in all households all the time – that would be practically infeasible, or else it would! – it regulates the matter ex post through liability laws.

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Now I’m sure clever folks can think up justifications for such preferences. But as with the common preference to redistribute money but not grades, I expect few folks could quickly come up with those reasons, even though most embrace such preferences. This again suggests that the clever reasons some can offer are not the main reasons most folks support such biases. And the obvious reasons that might drive most folks to support such biases do not suggest these are biases worth keeping.

That just may be due to the difficulty of articulation and reasoning. When you ask "Why?", that starts down a path that most people haven't thought out. I think it's a basic trust issue. Virtually everyone has eaten at an unknown restaurant. Regulation, perhaps like branding or standards building, provides a means for people to build trust in certain activities or products.

Turn the question into a choice. Would the person rather eat at a restaurant where no standard of quality or safety exists (beyond whatever brief inspection the customer takes upon entering the place) versus one with regulation enforcing quality and safety? I think most people would rather eat at the place where regulations could close it down, if the restaurant became dangerous enough.

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I mean both in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (in which a human kicked out of its social group would almost certainly die) and in modern times. None of us can provide for our own basic survival without cooperation from others - which includes not only obvious things like nutrition, medicine, and shelter, but also requirements we are less conscious of but are no less serious and painful if we are deprived of them, such as sanitation and social/cognitive needs.

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".A human can do almost nothing on its own."

Care to explain further?

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A human can do almost nothing on its own.

We want to signal to others that we are good cooperation partners (to get more cooperation opportunities).

However, we also want to signal to others that we are better cooperation partners than others (to discourage others from removing our cooperation opportunities and transferring them to others).

So when we wish to inhibit others from competing with us (competitive motive), to the extent possible, we do so in a way that allows us to pretend we do so out of a cooperative motive - for their own good.

All flavors of hipocrisy are local solutions to this (disguising competition as cooperation, at least toward potential cooperation partners).

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I think people are confusing the utility rationalization of regulations with the legal rationalizations for regulation.

In the US, Congress has the right and the duty to regulate commerce. People who sell food can be compelled to prepare that food under certain conditions as part of the regulation of commerce.

Congress does not have the right or the duty to regulate hand washing before food preparation. The US Constitution was written before the germ theory of disease was developed and Congress was not given the authority to regulate practices (such as hand washing) so as to control disease transmission.

There is the “promote the general welfare” clause, which could (in principle) be used to mandate hand washing before food preparation, but there are lots of “libertarian-like” individuals who would object to that kind of intrusive government.

I think the “bias” that Robin is looking for is “preferences I have” over “preferences I don't have”. In the context of commerce, the government should be able to regulate air pollution; that is if you are selling something, the manufacture of which releases greenhouse gases, the government should be able to regulate that release as a part of commerce. “Libertarian-like” individuals who make money selling products that cause the release of air pollution don't want regulations that limit their pollution. The “reason” is not some libertarian ideal, it is simply their preference because they can make more money if they don't have to limit their pollution.

There are (or were), lots of laws that have no legal basis in the US Constitution but which have been adopted for no reason other than the personal preferences of lawmakers and those the lawmakers are trying to curry favor with. For example anti-sodomy laws. A lot of the tax code has also been adopted simply to shift the tax burden away from certain taxpayers and onto other taxpayers.

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@mtraven: Whoa whoa whoa! Are you seriously saying that, *even if* the explanation for the diner/dinner party disparity were as easy to explain as the school/prison lock disparity, you would nevertheless post some ~1000 words while *still* finding it too burdensome to articulate a justification for the disparity?

Because I just showed how easy it is to explain something like that ... if (and this is an important "if") you have a clue what you're talking about. (Kinda sucks when an example backfires like that, don't ya think?)

Are your explanation skills and understanding really that bad? When someone asks you why prisoners are locked into their prisons, do you really struggle to answer the question, unable to say more than "common sense", as you've done here? (Remember, that was the example you gave of a too-obvious-to-explain situation.)

Is there anything you _are_ capable of explaining (to the level I gave for the school/prison question), or is everyone just too clueless to understand everything you say? Have you ever transfered understanding to another human in your entire life?

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@silas: you are confused about what is at issue here. I could not care less about justifying the distinctions between gift transactions and cash transactions -- it's encoded into law and common sense and I am fine with that. If you feel a need to have further justification for it, that's fine, but I'm under no obligation to provide it for you.

Instead, I am interested in what motivates people like Hanson to mystify this distinction and pretend that it is due to "bias" or "hypocrisy". Since he is paid by the Koch brothers who are famous for their political efforts to abolish the regulatory powers of government, I assume that his agenda, like the Koch's, is to delegitimize the very notion that business should be regulated. All the cutesy word games are simply a blind for this, as far as I can see.

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Thanks to the non-mtraven commenters on this thread -- some great ideas about how to preserve the useful distinctions in the law while avoiding arbitrary measures -- not to mention the comment about Schelling's point.

@mtraven: I didn't change my tune. My position -- if read in context each time -- was that the difference you cited had no apparent significance, nor did you offer any. I always understood what the terms mean; I never understood in what sense you were claiming them to be a _relevant_ difference, a kind that _justified_ the different legal treatment -- and you should have done so the first (or second, or third, or last) time around.

You might just as well say that schools and jails are both buildings filled with people — why then do we put locks on on one but not the other?

If someone asked that, the correct way to answer would be, "A prison very strongly needs inmates to be kept from leaving -- which locks achieve -- while a school does not." See what I did there? I thought about a relevant distinction, and I articulated that distinction, justifying the difference that the hypothetical questioner didn't understand or notice.

That's what happens when you have real understanding of an issue. And that kind of skill is really neat to have, as it really helps you focus your thoughts and have genuinely fruitful exchanges of ideas with others. Definitely a skill that the folks in your neck of the woods might want to buff up from time to time. Just, whenever you notice you can't articulate an insight, brush up on the topic a little so you have a well-connected mental model of the world. Very helpful.

OTOH, if I were to approach that questioner with your level of intellect, I would say something cryptic like, "What a dumb question. This is so stupid. For one thing, school is a learning issue, while prison is a corrections issue." Or ..."schools are under the department of education, while prisons are under the department of justice".

Do you see the difference between those answers? If not, I can explain -- you know, the kind of thing you *can't* do when you purport to understand something. (Maybe find a circle with higher standards, or doesn't just agree with whatever you say?)

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We hold machines to higher controls because we can (at least for now). Robot ethics, if anything like animal ethics movements, will attempt to change this becasue they will see it as a bias.

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@silas -- you're changing your tune. First you said that your problem was that terms like "gift" were meaningless, now you say you understand them just fine but want to know why they should be regulated differently. But I don't see why that should be my burden -- Hanson is the person trying to conflate two different things which are clearly different. You might just as well say that schools and jails are both buildings filled with people -- why then do we put locks on on one but not the other?

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Silas Barta, you wrote (in response to Khoth):

If the regulations directly depended on the number of recipients of the food, your reply would be adequate justification.This happens, to some extent. There are regulations which are relaxed on small businesses. I think that the regulations typically use the number of employees as a surrogate for the volume of business, but it is still in the direction that you suggest.

Perhaps we need roughly 5 tiers of increasing scrutiny, based on scale of operation, and corresponding risks of operation:

individualssole proprietorshipssmall businessestypical businesses"too big to fail" businesses

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Tyrrell McAllister

I expect that people eat more servings of food prepared at home than at diners.Yes, that is true. However, the hygiene decisions made at many separate homes are made independently. As Khoth said

But a single restaurant will be serving hundreds of times more food than a single home kitchen, so the benefit of inspecting a given restaurant for hygiene will be hundreds of times higher than inspecting a given home.In addition, if the restaurant is part of a chain, with centralized decisions, such as tradeoffs between efficiency and hygiene, made by single executives and affecting the risks at many sites, then the argument for inspection (in this case of the decisions) is yet stronger.

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There are very few people who give away large amounts of food regularly, and very few restaurants who serve very little, so there's little upside to making it based on quantity.

However, when writing a law, there are advantages to basing it on a clear obvious distinction that basically captures what you really want rather than a hard-to-enforce numerical quantity. (For a similar case, see Schelling's discussion of how it can be a good idea to ban even small nuclear weapons even while allowing more destructive conventional weapons)

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mtraven, I deem myself smarter than you because, with each comment, you show new ignorance of the topic under discussion, usually by assuming that the the dispute is in one area, when it is really in another.

As Tyrrell mentions, it's easy to discern a gift from a pay transaction (the latter of which you mistakenly distinguish as "economic", when really they both area). That's not what anyone is having difficulty with.

The question, instead, is how that difference is relevant to whether regulations (such as the legality of not washing hands before handling food) should apply to one but not the other. And there may very well be a solid justification that starts from the fact of one being a pay transaction!

But here's the thing -- you haven't given such a justification! And until you do, your comments are not contributing to the discussion, and you probably should have just left it to people who at least understand what's being asked well enough to give relevant replies, such as Khoth.

Thanks for your cooperation in future efforts to keep up the signal-to-noise ratio!

@Khoth: That would be a good basis for distinguishing them, but the regulations don't depend on the number of people you serve, rather, they merely depend on whether the food is being sold. If the regulations directly depended on the number of recipients of the food, your reply would be adequate justification.

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If you really need the concept of “gift” and “economic transaction” explained to you, if those terms are just nonsense syllables, then there really isn’t a basis for discussion.

mtraven, I understand the difference between the selling of food and the giving of food to friends and family. When I look upon a group of people eating, I am never unable to ascertain whether they are eating in a home or in a commercial establishment. So, I recognize that there are differences between these two activities. And I recognize that these activities are different in ways that are important for some purposes (such as whether I need to bring enough money).

What I don't yet see is why the law needs to enforce hand-washing during one of those activities but not the other. Among the differences that I recognize, there are none which obviously have that implication.

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