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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What does it take to ban a thing?, published by qbolec on May 8, 2023 on LessWrong.
Epistemic status: I am not an expert. I just took several things which people banned (child labor, chemical weapons, ozone-depleting substances) and for each just searched for the first article which seriously engages with the question "how did we succeed to ban it?", read it once, and summarized how I understand it. If someone has more examples, or better explanations, I'd be glad to learn.
I think that there's something to learn from examples of bad things that we have banned in the past despite some people benefiting from those bad things. A rosy-eyed, but wrong, image of how that happened is "well, people just realized the thing was bad so, they've banned it". Turns out it is not at all how it has happened.
Ban of chemical weapons
TL;DR: They seem to not be very effective (face masks), may backfire in case of wind ("blowback")
Source:/
Quotes I've found interesting:
One answer is that while gas attacks are terrifying, the weapon has proved to be militarily ineffective. After Ypres, the allies provided masks to their front-line troops, who stood in their trenches killing onrushing Germans as clouds of gas enveloped their legs. That was true even as both sides climbed the escalatory ladder, introducing increasingly lethal chemicals (phosgene and mustard gas), that were then matched by increasingly effective countermeasures. The weapon also proved difficult to control. In several well-documented instances, gases deployed by front-line troops blew back onto their own trenches — giving a literalist tinge to the term “blowback,” now used to describe the unintended consequences of an intelligence operation.
The world’s militaries are loath to ban weapons that kill effectively, while acceding to bans of weapons that they don’t need.
At the end of World War I, a precise tabulation of casualties showed that some 91,000 soldiers on all sides were killed in gas attacks — less than 10 percent of the total deaths for the entire war. Machine guns and artillery shells, it turns out, were far more effective systems for delivering death.
Among the ban supporters was a Norwegian foreign ministry official who issued an impassioned plea for the adoption of a treaty banning the weapon. In the midst of his talk (which I attended), a British colonel leaned across the table at which I was sitting, a wry smile on his face. “You know why the Norwegians favor a ban?” he asked. I shook my head: no. “Because they don’t have any,” he said.
Note, that cluster bombs and mines are still not banned, despite similar "moral" problems with them:
Additionally, key senior military officers believed agreeing to the ban would set a dangerous precedent — that the military could be pressured into banning weapons by what they described as left-leaning humanitarian organizations.
The world’s militaries don’t want to ban weapons that are efficient killers. So while it is true that the land mine and cluster munitions bans have gained widespread international support (162 countries have signed the land-mine ban, 108 countries have signed onto the Convention on Cluster Munitions), the countries most likely to use both (the U.S., China, Russia and India) remain nonsignatories.
Ban of child labor
TL;DR: In Great Depression children were considered stealing jobs from adults
Source:
Quotes I've found interesting:
By the 1870s, unions condemned child labor on the basis that overly young workers competed for jobs, making it harder for adults to obtain higher pay and better conditions – not due to concerns about the well-being of kids.
Despite Southern opposition, reformers argued that state-level regulations were rife with loopholes and difficult to enforce. In 23 states, for instance, there was no official way to determine children’s ...
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