alt Hacker News> the ideal number of unsolved crimes is not zero and the ideal number of crimes committed using state apparatus is also not zero
I feel this is an _extremely_ good point, the kind that seems obvious only once you hear it. But i feel there’s an implication that could be made explicit here — we should be looking at the distribution of both apparatus-enabled-crimes and unsolved-crimes when we’re discussing this sort of thing. And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
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I think there's a bias in public discussion towards idealism, because most discussions will start by the argument that we need to reduce X, or we need to reduce Y. If there is a conflict and there needs to be a trade off, very few discussions and points will be about the tradeoff, but there will be a whole bunch of discussions about just plain reducing X or reducing Y.
> And if those metrics aren’t tabulated for easy access, they probably should be.
I couldn't agree more. They're two different error rates for our society and measuring them accurately would help us go to where we should be on the curve.