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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Temple Grandin is extremely influential in some spaces. I think she has probably designed like half the beef processing plants in the US.

She wrote up a set of safety guidelines for the beef industry and McDonald's adopted her recommendations. You couldn't sell beef to McDonald's without following her guideline.

McDonald's buys so much beef, this became the de facto industry standard.

You can't put a gun to someone's head and force them to love you. You can't get blood from a turnip. And draconian measures generally fail to get real results.

Carrots and stick sometimes work. But "the beatings shall continue until morale improves" is generally counterproductive. It doesn't supply the necessary competence for setting a higher standard and usually actively disincentivizes trying to solve the problem.

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"You can't put a gun to someone's head and force them to love you. You can't get blood from a turnip. And draconian measures generally fail to get real results."

I might be willing to stipulate the above. However there is a different mechanism at work when actors in the system have skin in the game.

And so, I will see your Temple Grandin (who I admire) and raise you a Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Specifically: these producers need to be feeding their own children and raising their own families with these very same products.

Ironically, wealthy-global-north consumers (like foodco CEOs) are almost certainly not consumers of infant formula[1] (or lunchables or scent sprays or Monster drinks) so it is difficult to establish "skin in the game".

... and therein lies a tremendous amount of information. It should give consumers pause to learn that these products are not used - and likely disdained - by the stakeholders that produce them.[2][3]

[1] https://qz.com/1034016/the-class-dynamics-of-breastfeeding-i...

[2] http://www.freebooks8.com/Fiction_Library/3308/37.html

[3] “I don’t think my kids have ever eaten a Lunchable,” she told me. “They know they exist and that Grandpa Bob invented them. But we eat very healthfully.”

I’m actually ok with beatings figuratively (or literally) if someone sells me poison to give to my baby.

It’s really that simple. We know how to make baby formula safely. We have known how to do that for a long time. It’s clearly profitable enough that companies are willing to do it.

But if you cut corners to boost profits and you end up poisoning babies you should be punished. There’s no need to tie yourself into knots reasoning that it’s actually not possible to enforce safe production of baby formula.

Which is why it's a saying about how it doesn't work: it starts from a faulty premise, that people know how to the job properly and aren't out of malicious intent.

When in reality, the worker who's not maintaining the machine properly, isn't doing so because he was never instructed in it's operation, his supervisor who's "been doing this job for years, never had a problem with this", the manager of the department loves how many run hours they're getting from that machine and "it hasn't killed anyone" is said when the dangers of not cleaning it are mentioned in meetings, and after all they don't want to look bad to the executives who are saying serious things like "the economy is tightening, we need to find savings!" a lot.

In that chain, pick out who is directly responsible for the situation? Better: pick out who can be told to fix this problem, and they'll actually know how to do it? Pick out who you kill as a lesson to the others that will actually be learned?

Suppose you kill all of them: great, so what are you now doing to make sure the next group actually do their jobs properly?

Why not target the individual with the most influence in the organization, the highest C-level executive responsible for overseeing the operation? The threat of punishment for oversight failures on high level executives will naturally result in strict company cultures of safety and caution since the most powerful person faces real risk.

this comment makes no sense.

You're at the same time arguing "meat producers had to adapt to external guidelines to be able to continue selling their products"

and "government imposing external guidelines for producers to be able to continue selling their products would be inefficient".

Or am I misunderstanding your point?

Temple Grandin supplied a superior solution. A very influential company adopted it because it works better. They voted with their dollars. No one was told "You will go to jail."

She provided a better method. Market forces took care of the rest.

A gun to someone's head doesn't magically make them capable of coming up with better solutions.

What does the market having a standard higher than the legal minimum have to do the law enforcing a minimum?

In your example, for instance, even if the law said Ronald McDonald would face the firing squad if their beef didn’t meet the legal minimum standard it wouldn’t matter because they are already exceeding it. The stick is not causing the carrot any trouble.

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