Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU!mwm From: mwm@VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU (Mike Meyer, I'll think of something yet) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: Another Effect of Computers Message-ID: <8903140313.AA01117@violet.berkeley.edu> Date: 14 Mar 89 03:13:51 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 51 Just correcting some mis-information: >> A good example of this was the California insurance >> referendums--the voters had to choose between various proposals, >> read hard to understand legalese, and evaluate the impact given >> economic and political implications. How many people have the time >> to do this? Very few. It takes at most a couple of hours. Considering you're dealing with up to $1000/year diferences in rates, that would seem to be a wise investment. To bad very few thought it was worth taking. >> So, what happens is that they must trust someone--and the name they >> trusted was Ralph Nader. The proposal Nader stood behind won by a >> long shot. It was a "long shot" only in the chance sense of the phrase. Prop. 103 had a 50.xx% yes vote. They actually had to count the absentee ballots to dtermine that it had passed. The insurance-industry written no-fault had around 45% of the voters voting for it. It was a close vote. To date, the net result of people relying on a human filter instead of thinking themselves is that there has been no change in insurance industry pricing (the rate rollback is in court, and will probably be tossed out) or rate-setting (easily predictable if you read the proposition and look at current rate-setting), enough of the major firms that sold low-cost, low-risk insurance have pulled out of the state that buying such ranges from difficult to impossible (as promised by the insurance companies - it's obvious if you look at the P&L's for those companies in CA that they can't afford to sell insurance at 20% of the rates as of Nov 1987), one of the best cost-cutting aids in the industry (shared predictions on accident rates) is no longer available in CA, and startups that would compete with the existing firms no longer have any way of predicting overhead, thus pushing their rates up (likewise, implicit in the proposition if you read it). >> I think this is a perfect example of how things occur in a democracy >> with varied sources of information in the context of information >> overload. This is also a perfect example of the aldous dystopia. People believing what they are told by media figures, and not looking at the readily available facts themselves, even in matters that hit them where it hurts. If that's the future I'm working towards, I'd feel better helping the DoD build bigger bombs.