Comment by Fordrus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Fordrus | Hacker News Reader

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See, I do feel for the FDA. Trying to message things properly is like trying to send a smoke signal in a hurricane.

When, for any given thing you want to regulate, there are 4 incredibly wealthy special interest groups trying to warp your message to protect the profit margins of the companies they represent, rather than keep safety or anything else in mind there, making sure that you don't take "Totally reasonable measure A" and get the people you're protecting messaged, "HOW DARE YOU, MY FREEEEDOM!" - that's quite difficult.

But despite my understanding of that, the HUGE problem there is that "Totally reasonable measure A" and "Draconian Evil Measure X" look almost exactly the same to us onlookers, and when the FDA, or anyone, uses "Morally Ambiguous Embargo Y" to protect their actions, why, the rational response from us as onlookers is the ASSUME that they're performing "Draconian Evil Measure X."

So what, exactly, is the answer? I don't think there IS one presently out there that isn't incredibly messy, but I hope we can still discover it - that is, figure out how to protect the almost certainly true and reasonable actions from the 'bad guys,' while not falling afoul of the rational reaction of the 'good guys' (us, in this case, the people being protected) and coming under attack from THEM.

This is apologism. I expect an expensive organization, that I pay for, to make their the case to the public without dirty tricks and intimidation. And I expect the news sources that I am intelligent enough to pick to investigate and report with integrity. I see plenty of fair, loud, and clear venues the FDA could have used.

>>And I expect the news sources that I am intelligent enough to pick to investigate and report with integrity.

Right, but see you shouldn't because that's hilariously naive.

You're not using the word "expect" in the same sense he is.

He's demanding transparency and good faith from the FDA.

No no, it doesn't matter demanding news sources investigate and report with integrity is just as naive as assuming they do.

Again, I don't think he's assuming anything. I read his comment as using "expect" to mean "they really really realy should, and it's a problem if they're not".

Indeed. One can expect all one wants, but the business incentives for the media are strongly opposing integrity and truth. Which one can see daily, most obviously when some outlet is reporting on a topic one has direct experience with.

Hmm... I intended this to be understanding of the situation, but scathing in tone - as in, "FDA, at least to us, this makes it look like you are engaging in 'Diabolical Action Z,' and we don't really have a good way to discern differently without investing dozens of hours of effort, and even then it's uncertain, given our collective expertise level."

Maybe it's better if I put it this way, "I don't actually think the FDA is up to rotten fuckery here, but it sure as hell looks like they're being FUCKING EVIL, and without a method to for to tell that they aren't, they should FUCKING STOP IT."

Here's the question: are they betting that most people will never see the second article, with the caveats and criticism?

Is seems to be the same move as using rebate coupons rather than outright sales.

Do you expect an expensive organization, that you pay for (Pharma company that makes your medicine) to also make their case to the public without dirty tricks and intimidation?

If so, I'm afraid you'll be sorely dissapointed.

Private enterprise vs taxpayer funded government agency. Vastly different. A pharma company answers to shareholders, a government agency answers to taxpayers -- except they don't. Pharma companies don't owe you anything because you're a customer. You chose that relationship. However, we don't get to chose the FDA .. it's foisted upon us.

Preferential reporters by government agencies ought to be illegal.

You still pay for it, and thanks to patent protection, you need to pay that particular company for it if you don't want to be dead.

Why must the pharma company answer solely to shareholders? They are doing medicine - they also have an obligation to do right by the public. Generally, when a medical professional fails to do right by the public, they get replaced with one that will.

For many medicines, I have absolutely zero choice in that relationship. It's <Company> selling <Drug that I need to not die>, or the highway (Not to mention that I'm not choosing the medicine - my doctor is prescribing it.). If that is choice, then so is not paying taxes.

To be consistent with your position, preferential reporting by anyone with an involuntary relationship with their 'customer' base should be illegal. This would disqualify most pharma companies right off the bat.

Is there a name for this pattern?

The propagation of (ethically-compromised) dysfunction? An escalating "giving forward" of negative value and technical debt? I seem to be increasingly noticing it.

Where a well-intentioned rational actor, because of upstream ethically-problematic dysfunction, chooses a "least-bad option" of creating their own ethically-questionable dysfunction, which then has a similar effect on downstream actors. Where at any point, you could imagine an upstream channel with a "no, that's beyond the pale, you need to stop doing that", but because of noise or other things, such signalling isn't working. Until it does. Sometimes.

In this case, company and press lying, tolerated by press and public, prompts government conduct that further degrades the press, increases tolerance of lying, and impairs everyone's ability to improve government conduct.

Or consider the attempt to force TPP ratification in post-election session. The Obama administration has only managed to remain kind of functional, by doing end-runs around a dysfunctional legislature and press. But that has a side-effect of disabling legislative and journalistic checks on groupthink and regulatory capture. And press discourse has become loud and low quality, drowning out signals. So while a (now former) White House official, nicely characterized the regulatory capture of US copyright law, as "extremists are people who talk only among themselves", with only our current functionally-degraded mechanisms, it's a struggle for that insight to constrain policy.

The larger context might be a decline of civic society and civil discourse. But this seems a particular feedback pattern, of "things are bad, so now I have to make them worse". But does it have a label?

Don't over-think it: systemic failure as the result of institutionalized corruption.

It doesn't really matter what the initial justification was, it is what it is. You're increasingly noticing it because it is occurring everywhere and without any negative consequences to the bad actors (quite the opposite: significant rewards.)

What you're describing, to me, seems to be a symptom of information asymmetry/warping caused by a corrupt and ineffective corporate media.

Everything makes more sense if you don't think of the media as a medium, but a group of self-interested actors who sell tickets to exposing or suppressing what gets published.

Hmm. Some descriptions work better as summaries of black-box behavior, than as insight into white-box causation and potential for intervention. I wonder if "corrupt and ineffective corporate media" is an instance of such.

For illustration. Science education is remarkably ineffective, K-14, and worldwide. A rule of thumb that "people don't care whether science education actually works", will rarely steer you wrong. But it is an almost useless description of the underlying tangle of incentives and capabilities and visibilities and costs, which cause that surface behavior.

Take a professor teaching cell biology, who isn't disinterested in teaching deep understanding, but who, given severe time constraints, isn't going to disservice their students by trading against a specific superficial understanding that the high-stakes med school MCAT exam tests for. So yes, "don't care", sort of. But change the MCAT, and suddenly...

So one can have a observationally good description, one that's fine for spectators, but which isn't illuminating or helpful interventionally.

Or take the earlier copyright example. During the fight over SOPA, Hollywood executives publicly and angrily complained about congressmen not staying bought. A surface reading of that isn't a bad description of everyone's behavior. But my understanding is, they were basically saying "we talk among ourselves all the time; and we all agree; only a few weird and confused others disagree; and we're now startled and dismayed to find some politicians disagreeing; and can only imagine that this results from them being bought, or lied to, likely by the tech industry; we payed good money to elect what we thought were good people - why should we pay for the reelection of the corrupt and the gullible?". Will more insight into mechanism help you? Maybe not.

But while incentives matter, it's the actual incentives that matter. What if US copyright extensions were fought not with "Constitutional intent" and "public interest", so basically "we want you to give up a few billion dollars a year in Pooh et al merchandising fees", but fought instead with "here's a change in trademark law, or a copyright-excepting guardianship of a national treasure, which will preserve your big revenue streams in perpetuity". Addressing actual incentives, rather than narratives.

What are these "incredibly wealthy special interest groups"?

If you're talking about pharmaceutical companies, the FDA has enormous power over them, and I don't remember them ever saying anything critical of the FDA. That would be taking enormous risks.

Special interest groups are organisations that promote a specific interest. I would be shocked if drug companies didn't donate to groups that are critical of the FDA when it is in their interest.

Last time I heard of any real groups - as opposed to Economists or politicians - critical of the FDA was back in the AIDS days.

Not that I pay close attention. There might be some, but I think the pharma industry is deathly afraid of antagonizing their regulator.

> So what, exactly, is the answer?

More funds for checks and balance. Laws that make it clear what transparency means and actual funds for enforcing these laws.

In general the US seems to be stuck in a gordian self-fulfilling prophecy: many people in the US see government administrations evil or inefficient in all matters and they are enough to actually handicap the government administrations, and make them actually inefficient.

I think that at one point US citizens have to come to terms with the idea that they need to be protected by efficient government administrations, and that regulations are actually what makes free market move in the direction of social progress.

But seeing the resistance there was to Obamacare (which, seen from western Europe is really the bare minimum a civilized country should have) I am not holding my breath.

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