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I.

Suppose that you, an ordinary person, open your door and start choking on yellow smoke. You call up your representative and say \u201cthere should be less pollution\u201d.

A technical expert might hear \u201cthere should be less pollution\u201d and have dozens of questions. Do you just want to do common-sense things, like lower the detection threshold for hexamethyldecawhatever? Or do you want to ban tetraethylpentawhatever, which is vital for the baby formula food chain and would cause millions of babies to die if you banned it?

Any pollution legislation must be made of specific policies. In some sense, it\u2019s impossible to be \u201cfor\u201d or \u201cagainst\u201d the broad concept of \u201creducing pollution\u201d. Everyone would be against a bill that devastated the baby formula supply chain for no benefit. And everyone would support a magical bill that cleaned the skies with no extra hardship on industry. In between, there are just a million different tradeoffs; some are good, others bad. So (the technocrat concludes), it\u2019s incoherent to support \u201creducing pollution\u201d. You can only support (or oppose) particular plans.

And yet ordinary people should be able to say \u201cI want to stop choking on yellow smoke every time I go outside\u201d without having to learn the difference between hexamethyldecawhatever and tetraethylpentawhatever.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/details-that-you-should-include-in\xa0