Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

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This applies to everything, not just society. We see flaws in things, but don't realize the story behind them. We think they are oversights, or mistakes we can fix, and don't realize they are often times the result of a tradeoff to fix a more severe issue.

Just a few examples:

Tech: The NoSQL movement thought SQL databases were slow, so they stripped out a lot of the parts of an ACID database to make it fast. Some of those parts turn out to be important.

Government: We complain about regulations, because we don't remember how bad things were before them.

Medicine: Anti-vaxers think we don't need vaccines, because they never experienced the diseases they have eliminated.

I think of Uber and AirB&B as great examples of this, too; they bypass all sorts of rules and regulations we have put in place for transportation and housing, and at first they seem to be amazing. They are cheap, efficient, and provide great service. But as they grow, we start to notice more and more negative effects to society. These are the same negative effects that we put the regulations in place to address.

> We see flaws in things, but don't realize the story behind them.

Also known as Chesterton's Fence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

> Also known as Chesterton's Fence.

Also known as, "X is broken and we're fixing it."; "Building an X that doesn't suck."

cringe

> Government: We complain about regulations, because we don't remember how bad things were before them.

Maybe, but sometimes regulations reflect a historical context that's no longer valid.

As technology changes, and as cultural mores evolve the circumstances which prompted a regulation may no longer be valid.

That isn't to say that the regulation is now doing more harm than good, but that if we came at it today as a fresh start, we might not choose that exact set of regulation.

To give a very extreme example, let's look at health-inspections for meat.

1. Was motivated by disease tainted meat being wide-spread in cities, with no way of tracking down bad producers, and no simple way for consumers to ensure their meat wasn't tainted before eating

2. Fast forward 100 years

3. The regulation is still beneficial but (a) simple cost-effective testing can be carried out by consumers in their homes or grocers before sales (b) the industry has become incredibly cohesive, with much more sophisticated logistics methods and a smaller number of producers.

Today, if we wanted to 'solve' the issue of tainted meat---the industry could self-regulate out of fear of government action, and consumers/grocers could spot check with relatively small overhead.

We might not end up with the same level of USDA oversight as we currently have---although we probably would end up with something.

It's tempting but wrong to believe that our regulations are exactly what we would have always thought out, in every circumstance, simply because they're currently still beneficial.

RE: meat.

My experience has shown me that over time, someone will get away with as much as you let them. I.e. 50% of grocery store fish is not even the fish on the label.

So just because things are OK right now in the meat department.. take off regulations and wait 5 years, and someone will undercut by sneaking dog meat into ground beef, and then some people will die from it, and we will be sad and pass more regulations again.

I WANT freedom and less regulations. I do not trust for profit actors to deliver that for me.

On the other hand, if you want organic, grass-fed meat, you can get that at Whole Foods.

The the thing with regulations is that because they apply to everyone, every man and his dog (and his lobbyist) gets to have a say, and you end up with one size fits nobody.

Maybe it's better to avoid regulating any particular standard of quality, and allow people to buy and sell more or less anything they want so long as it's not misrepresented. Dog meat as ground beef is not cool, dog meat as dog meat, maybe that's ok?

Or the guy at Whole Foods will sell you dog meat and label it organic grass fed beef, because nobody is looking over his shoulder.

If your assumption is that nobody is going to try to cheat or cut a corner to make a buck then your system is not going to work in the long run. As your system grows the odds of having an asshole who cheats and ruins it for everybody approaches 1.

It's funny that you mention Whole Foods' meat.

"Whole Foods’ expensive, ‘humanely treated’ meat is a ‘sham,’ PETA lawsuit claims" ~https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/2...

"All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

Saturnals!

Oooops mardi gras & carnivals.

A better argument against (some) government regulations is that some of them were bought by industry to exclude competition, and were never meant to benefit consumers at all.

Those aren't the ones that get complained about the most though. It's the health and safety ones, ones that ensure that industries don't just externalize a lot of bad costs that get attacked the most.

Your argument seems to assume that health and safety regulations aren't lobbied for as anti-competitive, which they often are.

A chicken farm might be reasonably safe if one in 500 chickens are checked for illness or disease. Of course, it would be perfectly safe if every chicken were checked for illness and disease, and checked at every step of the distribution chain. Of course, there's a huge cost disparity between reasonably safe and perfectly safe, and it behooves the largest farms to push more towards perfect, as sure, the cost of chicken goes up, but it goes up across the board, limiting the ability of smaller farms to compete, thus giving a competitive advantage to larger farms.

To prevent against salmonella and other types of infection, Grade A eggs in America must be vigorously washed, treated with chemical sanitizer, rinsed, and then thoroughly dried. Is this for safety? Clearly, it's there to prevent infection.

To prevent against salmonella and other types of infection, Class A eggs in Europe must never be washed or cleaned in any way. Because washing reduces the shelf life of an egg, and because inadequate washing greatly increases risk, they outright ban farm or factory washing of eggs. Is this for safety? Clearly, it's there to prevent infection.

The net result is that we have a pretty high set of safety standards in both Europe and America, despite diametrically opposed means of getting there. The only real difference is that the cost of regulatory compliance for egg makers in America is much higher in America, and as the equipment for washing, chemically treating, rinsing and then drying eggs is expensive, it favors larger egg farms to smaller egg farms, and increases the capital requirements to enter the egg market commensurately.

the industry could self-regulate

Always a bad idea. Have you been to countries why there's very little govt regulation? To promote self-regulation is akin to saying that we don't need a "central" govt.

Yes, obviously I am not arguing "We should never make changes because everything we do now is for a reason and so we should keep doing it the same way"

I am just trying to point out that it takes a LOT of context to understand why things are the way they are. We often look at the superficial features of something, and immediately think we can do better.

We should change things, but we need to be extra vigilant in understanding WHY we are doing things the way they are before we change them, and have a plan for how to deal with all of the things the current method already does.

This is a great argument for rewriting software too.

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