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Notes -
Small Costs, Widely Distributed
Often when someone is making a policy argument, they will ignore the costs or downsides to their preferred policy. This is of course quite normal as part of persuasion and rhetoric, but I want to draw attention to a few examples of this where the arguer at least ought to make an attempt at neutrality.
Alcohol consumption: Public health officials look just at health outcomes, which are sometimes negative. But alcohol has clear benefits to the drinker (as /u/Difficult_Ad_3879 mentions). Even beyond the personal happiness derived from drinking, it is socially useful as a costly signal proving trustworthiness1. If a social group or an organization can use alcohol as a tool for establishing the trustworthiness of its members, it can reduce internal transaction costs since members don't have to monitor each other as much. This increases economic efficiency. How much I'm having a hard time finding evidence on; maybe because it's unpopular to be seen as an apologist for alchohol consumption.
Induced demand: Among urbanists and YIMBYs, the concept of induced demand is often used to argue against increased road capacity. If people just drive more when new roads are added, what's the point? As /u/freet0 notes, of course there is value in driving beyond just driving fast. You actually get places! The fact that people drive more when there are more roads indicates that there were places that weren't worth driving to before, but now they are. Those roads opened up access to useful places to go2.
Trans women are women: If some people experience pain because they're not considered to be in the social category they want to be in, what is the harm in everyone else agreeing that they are actually in that category? Why not consider trans women to be real women? This argument doesn't take into account the fact that words and categories are useful. In particular, they're useful to all the other people who are using those words and categories. For people who only want to date partners with whom they can reproduce, and for anyone who wants to predict others' behavior by knowing their biology, diluting the meaning of social categories and blurring their boundaries makes those categories less useful.
How suburban sprawl hurts the poor: This Vox article summarizes the sentiment that suburban sprawl is bad because it makes it harder for poor people to get around. And yet people continue to support suburban zoning restrictions in their voting choices. There is a cost that proponents of development and public transit (basically, of making it easy for poor people to get around) are missing though: poor people are bad (on average) to be around3. I'm not talking strictly about dry metrics like crime rate either; at a more basic level, the qualities that cause a person to be poor basically mean they don't produce as much value from their life as richer people do. As a consequence it's not as valuable to have such peope in one's community as it is to have more competent and value-producing people who tend to be richer. The zoning restrictions and bad public transit are just people expressing their preferences to be around people who are more worth being around.
Traffic safety and value of time: The discourse around traffic safety almost always ignores people's time and life value in the calculus. Where I live, the city has been building "road diets", where general traffic lanes are removed in favor of bike lanes and center turn lanes. This reduces collisions, especially with pedestrians, at the expense of making every single trip longer for everybody in a car. I did the math, and the reduction in trip times for my family's typical commute (2 minutes) is almost exactly the same as the expected loss in life-minutes from all the risk due to riding in a vehicle (1.46 deaths/100m miles, times ~5 miles, is 1.92 minutes). That estimate of vehicle risk is probably way off, though, since these are city streets at speeds where vehicle passengers are in no danger. So for my family we're losing expected life-years due to the road diet. Potentially even worse is the effect of car seats. Anyone who has had small kids in their life knows how much difficulty car seats add to the logistics of your life. They're gigantic (good luck having three kids if you have a sedan) and any time someone else could help carry a child somewhere in their car they have to have a car seat available on every leg. This actually figures into potential parents' choices and causes some people, on the margin, to not have a child. Someone did the math4, and the loss in children born due to the car seat requirement is about 140x times greater than the children's lives saved due to the extra safety.
One theme here is that the unmentioned costs of policy positions tend to be diffused across large numbers of people, while the benefits tend to be concentrated.
Another theme, maybe more important, is that opponents tend to not want to bring up the costs because they're socially undesirable things to talk about, even if they have significant real-world effects. A really strong theme here is that the unmentioned costs apply to higher-status people, while the benefits to the proposed changes apply to lower-status people. This applies to alcohol, trans recognition, and suburban sprawl (and maybe not induced traffic demand).
Notes:
1Between cheap and costly signals: the evolution of partially honest communication
2Induced Demand Threads
Against Induced Demand
stucchio on housing
There were several more threads on the topic of cars, urbanism, YIMBYs, and induced demand which I can't find anymore. I think Zorba posted at some point about getting access to more land area through highways.
Trans People Don't Exist (essay by ymeskhout)
3Why are people poor? (Cato)
4Car Seats as Contraception. Quote from the abstract: "We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980".
How? How is it a costly signal and how does it establish trustworthiness?
Exactly what @marinuso said about telling the truth. I will add that in general most people can't drink heavily and still convincingly fake things - even if you have a high tolerance you still get drunk and it's hard to lie about how you're feeling in my experience.
On top of this, people tend to be more open to experience and foolish-acting when drunk. In a healthy, strong social group, sharing embarrassing experiences can help bonding quite a bit. You also share secrets with each other that you wouldn't normally mention.
On top of all this, getting a drink is a good excuse/motivator to get people together in one social space for an activity, with little investment on the event organizer's part.
These are just reasons why drinking is good, not why it is a costly signal of trustworthiness.
Is a social drinker more trustworthy than a completely sober guy? Maybe, but you can make plausible-sounding arguments either way. Maybe the drinker is less likely to have elaborately hidden secrets, but the teetotaler has also demonstrated capacity for self denial and high impulse control, which has to be worth something.
Do teetotalers have higher or lower than average rates of criminality? I would bet lower, but I could be wrong.
I’m not sure, but I suspect “teetotaler” actually includes a weird combination of a few different groups of people for whom the answers will differ:
people who don’t drink for moral reasons
people who don’t drink due to being recovering alcoholics
people who don’t drink due to illness
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I would absolutely argue that a social drinker who is drunker than normal is far more trustworthy than a sober guy, at least if you specifically ask the drinker what he believes.
Please make an argument as to how the sober person could answer more honestly?
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That seems dubious to me. What portion of most people's drinking involves getting that drunk? We have a lot of mechanisms for signaling and trust; large amounts of alcohol consumption as a way to demonstrate trust seems likely to be limited to frats, gangs, and similar groups.
Depends on the group. Also it doesn't have to be a group activity - two or three people can meet at a group and agree to go get a drink after. That's typically how it happens, and how you form stronger bonds. You break out from a larger group into a smaller subset.
Also, do you really think frats and gangs are the only groups that drink together? I fear you might have a bias against alcohol. Off the top of my head - theater goers, dancers, people who play pool, many people who go to sports game, etc get drunk enough to become more honest than most.
Only ones to drink together? Of course not. Only ones to drink together enough to get drunk, often enough for it to be a significant contributor to trust? Could be. I've been in a lot of contexts where people get drunk (including sports and theater) and can't say trust ever seemed to come from drinking. It came from working together. If anything, excessive drunkenness was associated with less trust ("do they have enough self-control to help the group succeed?", "they did something inappropriate while drunk").
I'm not biased against alcohol. I drink and have gotten drunk. Making such an accusation is a waste of space, and I may as well just accuse you of being biased towards alcohol. Does doing so further the discussion in any way?
I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding - I see 3-4 drinks to be enough for most people to be more trustworthy. You don't need to get sloshed in order to be more open to telling the truth, in fact if someone is wasted they're probably going to be speaking nonsense. I called you out being biased because I thought you meant nobody besides frats, gangs etc had more than a couple drinks which I saw as blatantly false.
I am still curious as to your thought about sober people being more honest than someone 3-4 drinks in. I hope I've clarified well enough.
Yes, I assumed more than 3-4. That isn't a lot for people who consistently have several drinks at once.
Personally, at 3-4 drinks I certainly will say things I wouldn't be willing to say when sober. Does this reflect increased honesty? Is inhibition due to consideration of social rules dishonest? This seems like a philosophical question; I like to think that who I am sober, including the System 2 considerations, is a more useful picture of "who I am" than drunk-me saying the first thing that comes to mind, like how my choice of hobbies is more reflective of who I am than my reaction to jump scares.
If specifically you mean "are people more willing to say thing they think are true but unpopular" that might be true at 3-4 drinks, but I've been in a lot of situations where people drink that much and it doesn't seem like they say things they wouldn't say normally. Like, I'm more likely to ask someone out, maybe do Karaoke. In my experience I'm not any more likely to say controversial things. It might theoretically have this effect, but as I've said all of the groups I've been in seemed to build trust primarily in other ways.
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Drunks and children tell the truth.
OTOH, if you're practiced and can hold your drink better than the other party, now you have the advantage over them.
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