(no subject)

There's this post I keep seeing around tumblr which is, like, "good ideas for laws the French have". Which just lists a bunch of laws (or things claimed to be laws, i have not bothered to fact check that they're real. it's not really the point). And they're things like mandating minimum BMI for models or giving preschoolers four-course lunches.

and i'm weirded out by it, because my default assumption is that you should not be able to tell if a law is a good idea from a couple sentences on a tumblr post? there are occasional exceptions to that rule, but like.

1) The one-sentence summary of FOSTA/SESTA probably sounds really nice, if you've never heard of them before and you don't have a trained instinct for what "fighting [bad thing] on the internet" usually implies.

2.a) The world is complicated and everything trades off against everything else. The money you're spending on giving four-course lunches to pre-schoolers is money you're not spending on any other thing you might want to spend money on, and so you should not ask just "is pre-schoolers having four-course lunches good for them?" (no idea if it is, i've met pre-schoolers and they can be kinda picky about food, this might be upsetting to them) but also "is it better than whatever the money would've been spent on otherwise?". I mean, sometimes the answer is "well, otherwise the money would've been spent on drone strikes on middle eastern countries", because it can both be true that the world is complicated and also that the government has terrible priorities; the marginal government dollar is not spent on maximally effective interventions. nevertheless it's a consideration.

2.b) The world is complicated and everything depends on implementation details. Do you know what's the exact right BMI cutoff to pick in a law that correctly discourages eating disorders without unfairly penalising people who just happen to have a low BMI? Are you sure that what will happen after introducing a BMI cutoff will be that people get fewer eating disorders and not that you've taken people with a health problem and fired them from their jobs? Or people just lie about it? or find some creative way to game it? Or, or, or... like, i have no idea if this will happen or not. Maybe they have cleverly thought of those problems and created safeguards around them; the point is you don't know that from the one-sentence summary of the law. It is much easier to say "I wish fewer people had eating disorders" than it is to craft a law that successfully reduces them and also doesn't make something else worse.

3) I had a three, but I ended up adding so many caveats that I thought it'd detract from the rest of the post to leave it in. So instead we just have 1, 2.a, and 2.b.