Hacker News Reader

Comment by its_ethan | Hacker News Reader

It feels like you answered your own question in a way..

"Why couldn’t the regulators in Brunel's day have carved out an open-ended “unless otherwise demonstrated” around the use of iron structural members?"

The answer is partly in your statement: "regulation is, in isolation, neutral." Looking around at regulatory/ bureaucratic bodies, "in isolation" is rarely (never?) achieved. Satisfying ambiguous "unless otherwise demonstrated"-esque clauses that are enforced by unelected paper pushers is very much part of Brunel's concern.

View on HN

> unelected paper pushers

The core of your argument is that regulators are unelected (vs engineers ???) and incompetent, when in reality they either get counsel from people in the field, or are former or partially active members of the profession themselves.

Engineers, at least at that point in history, paid the consequences of their failures. It’s not about competence, it’s about “skin in the game”. For further reading, Nassim Taleb wrote a whole book on this idea.

That doesn't ring true to me, looking at Amazon it doesn't look to me like their warehouse system engineers are paying the consequences of their system, while the OSHA is some corrupt/carefree player.

Also, looking from a step behing at our exchange, you are arguing that people need skin in the game to be fair and make weighted decisions, pointing at a writer who stopped having any skin in the game to write books and go on interviews and become an influencer.

Dubious. The designer of River Dee bridge, Stephenson, faced inquest after the incident and was cleared of any charges. Stephenson continued to have successful career as engineer and also in politics as MP.

Funny, I thought it was the people who died or were seriously injured due to the bridge collapse who paid the highest price for the engineers’ failures.

But they're already dead, so future events do not affect them, as they are no longer in the iterated game of life.

The engineer, on the other hand, continues playing the iterated game of life, and so their reputation does matter (to themselves at least). Therefore, by making sure that any bridges that collapse has social stigma painted against those who designed and/or built it, it would encourage proper engineering even if there's no third party at the time to certify it.

Makes me think of the portal song

> for the people who are still alive

The test subjects who are already dead don’t matter. GlaDOS, on the other hand, must continue to make choices in which experiments and test subjects will deliver the best bang for the buck.

"In reality" the politicians who appoint the regulators "get counsel from" the lobbyists who bribe them (excuse me, completely legally help the PACs that help re-elect them) the most generously.

Regulatory capture is a very common theme throughout every agency. Take Ajit Pai, who is and always was very obviously a Verizon stooge, as a textbook example. For that reason I don't blame anyone who would prefer a minimum of detailed, 'implementation-detail-level' government regulation on tech. Best case scenario they're poorly-written and arrest innovation, worst case they're also written to advantage the biggest or most politically-connected companies, who never deserve the help.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com