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Comment by edmundsauto | Hacker News Reader

You start with a truism/No True Scotsman, then overlay a theory of everything without any evidence to suggest how construction deaths Are comparable to natural selection.

I don’t disagree with you - but it would be worth revisiting how you make this argument. You took all this time to write a nice comment! & here I am, criticizing it, but I think you may need some refinement.

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I think, like you said, the comment needs refinement, but I get the point.

Basically, if you lean against regulation, clever/imaginative/quality building will flourish, but the price you have to pay is that cheap/shoddy building will flourish, too.

The problem for me is that even though I can see the tradeoffs associated with regulation, it's difficult to determine where to set the regulatory "dial." And even if I could set that metaphorical dial with confidence, not everyone will agree with me. :-(

> it's difficult to determine where to set the regulatory "dial."

I think about this a lot and have come to this thought: you - specifically - won't get to set the dial at all.

Too many political philosophies completely ignore the other for the sake of a perfect solution. This framing of a knob to dial extended imagines a whole switchboard of regulations that can be tuned or turned off. The Democracy video games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_(video_game)) use this metaphor as their core game mechanic.

But the reality is that the Other(s) gets to act during and in response to your actions.

All this is to say that if politics is setting a knob on a control panel with a precise tuning in mind, reality is an annoying rodent running behind the panel and swapping wires with reckless abandon.

I’d say that that these two opposites (regulation vs. freedom to just create) will always exist side by side.

We tend to argue for one or the other and hope that a clean ideology will emerge from it because it makes our understanding of life so much simpler.

But if I continue my way of argumentation, I’d say this ‘pulling of opposites’ is a built-in feature of our existence. The really smart outcomes emerge out of the tension that exist between these opposing ‘forces’.

In the case of my evolution example, the two opposing forces are life on the one hand, and death (or the non-living environment), on the other.

Very abstract, I know. But this world view has been expressed by at least one thinker who formulated this ‘natural law’ if you might call it that: Henno Martin in this book (I couldn’t find an English translation): https://www.amazon.com/Menschheit-auf-dem-Pr%C3%BCfstand-Men...

Perhaps biological population macro models make sense - let things bloom, then cull the ones that don't meet societal goals. Regulation is the pruning factor, in great times, things bloom but the critical work is aligning the pruning shears with goals.

This perspective implies there is no right setting across time - the variance between permissive and restrictive is the value.

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