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Comment by OliverGilan | Hacker News Reader

People are going to focus on discussion with COVID but to me the big takeaway from this great article is the lessons not learned. Whenever discussing stagnation or regulatory deadlock in the US the default response is to handwring about the dangers things like the FDA protect us from. It’s refreshing to see someone eloquently write about how there is inherent risk that regulation also exposes us too.

There’s no one extreme that is perfect but I personally would prefer rapid progress with some mistakes as opposed to what we seem to be experiencing now.

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The comments on this thread are scary.

I work in the very conservative world of engineering, where there are standards and regulations up the wazoo. Welding standards, CE markings, standards for how high on the car your headlamps have to be, pressure ratings, instrumentation accuracy classifications. My colleagues in civil and nuclear engineering have even more stringent regulations to contend with. Compliance with those standards costs labour and money. It's tedious, painstaking, careful work. These regulations have been hard fought, and have taken millions of man-hours to perfect. But this is why we are able to have the degree of safety that we enjoy in this world.

This zeitgeist on HN that goes against regulation, fueled perhaps by SV culture, is a recipe for disaster. Self regulation is NOT a thing. I can write this down for you and promise ALL of my potential life savings. This is NOT a great article. It's a rambling overreach of a disaster that starts out fairly nice, but descends through seven circles of Paul-Graham-Know-It-All-ness.

It's a way better choice to be in a future where we are arguing about the extent and content of the regulation rather than the presence of it in the first place. A deregulated world is scary to me.

The standards in engineering largely arise from experience. We have a standard height for headlights in cars because we tried a bunch of different ones and found one that worked best. Without that experimentation, how can you arrive at a standard? If regulations inhibit the ability to experiment in fields where there is not yet a defined standard, we will not be able to reach one, or we will pick one arbitrarily that may not be the best and we will have no mechanism available to find a better one.

This is a pretty cavalier way to look at engineering standards. The majority of regulations and standards in consumer/public facing engineering works are written in blood. Saying that we "tried a bunch of different ones and found one that worked best" does a disservice to the people that died for us to learn our lessons. Retreading the cowboy attitude that led to these regulations is not something that should be encouraged.

Suppose cars didn't have headlights, how would you go about finding the right height to mount them at? You can do calculations, test in a lab, etc, but eventually you have to put them on a car and ship them.

In the meantime, how many deaths would you allow due to cars not being able to drive at night?

There is no scenario in which nobody dies. Doing something, even if it's not perfect, is often better than doing nothing.

Suppose a 737 had engines that were old and not as efficient as newer, larger engines. How would you go about finding the right changes to the airframe to accommodate these new engines? You can do calculations, tests in a lab, etc, but eventually you have to put them on a plane and ship them.

Oops.

But then again, doing something is often better than nothing. Even if it’s not perfect.

Cover-up of a known flaw is not the same thing.

You do eventually have to ship something, no test is ever going to uncover 100% of all possible problems. I guess you'd prefer to just never release anything? Then, certainly humans will live forever.

The point is what the GP said: “It's a way better choice to be in a future where we are arguing about the extent and content of the regulation rather than the presence of it in the first place. A deregulated world is scary to me.”

If you believe a deregulated world is better then you should be pleased with the progress made by engineers and managers like those at Boeing involved with the 737 who disrupted and circumvented the regulatory state for airplanes.

There are more choices than "no regulations" and "every regulation". Regulations created to address proven problems are one thing. Creating a new regulation because somebody dreamed up a theoretical scenario is a different thing.

Progress involves risk. Cowering and doing nothing because someone, somewhere might possibly be harmed is as bad as having no regulation, if not worse. We wouldn't have airplanes at all if someone were running after the Wright brothers telling them it's not safe.

How does "Maybe we don't need 800 bazillion regulations that make it impossible to do anything" get translated to "Oh, so you want a wild west cowboy world where everyone does whatever they want and there are no regulations at all?" Try and have at least a little bit of nuance.

Neither I nor TFA are arguing to abolish all regulations. Just recognize that regulation has a cost. It's not an unalloyed good. When speed matters, like getting a vaccine to end a global pandemic, that cost is measured in lives just as surely as the cost of a lack of regulation is.

The key is correctly assessing what part of the life cycle you're in.

If you're building a bridge for millions of cars to drive on, that's something we've done many times and which needs to be done correctly and carefully, so you should definitely pay attention to all the carefully collected wisdom embodied in standards.

If you're inventing clever new algorithms, then you should experiment as efficiently as possible, because 99% of what you try will be thrown away. Carefully planned waterfall style development will actively hurt you at this stage, because you have no idea where you're going yet. If you find something promising and want to scale it, then you slow down a little and check your work. This continues as you scale, and by the time your billion dollar business depends on your clever algorithm, the update process for your production version should look a lot more like the bridge building process.

The problem is the assumption that deregulation causes rapid progress. Regulation can inhibit progress, and I think almost everybody would agree that there are some regulations that cause more harm than good. But deregulation does not imply enormous leaps forward. Antitrust regulations, for example, protect progress by helping prevent large companies from eating up all the competition and safely stagnating.

This article is standard punditry of false dichotomies and excluded middles to frame an argument in a manner that assumes the outcome the writer wants to lead you to. I was expecting better to be honest. The problem with 'move fast and break things' is that when we are talking about real lives and real consequences then then things that tend to get broken are other people. Make no mistake, it is always 'other people' that pundits like this are talking about. They are never going to pay the costs of the negative externalities, it is always going to be someone else's life, someone else's child, someone else's home, neighborhood, or vocation.

If someone like this author was actually interested in working to fix the problem they would start by trying to provide regulators with the resources they need to actually keep up with a fast changing world filled with tech-bros out to 'disrupt' any industry where they think they can make themselves a middle-man in a transaction. Make it interesting and worthwhile for smart people to work on improving the regulatory process and adapting it to current realities and maybe we can start to make progress that is both rapid and safe.

Are you old enough to have seen the thalidomide children of the mid-1970s?

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