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It's like tech people have to relearn why we had age old things in the first place. We're starting to workout why hotels are a good idea now.

I saw Elon Musk questioning why we have medical regulations the other day, he was saying that it "slows down innovation" and so he thinks medical regulation should be abolished. He did the same for content moderation on his platform.

Well I don't agree that regulations stifle innovation, they might slow down the rollout of innovative products, but there is a very good reason why regulation was established in the first place. Could it be better? Yes.

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Safety regulations are frequently written in blood.

If writing something in blood made it correct I'd keep a pot of mouse blood handy for math tests. The fact that safety regulation is written in blood is one of the tells that it is overdone - it should be written with a dispassionate and distant consideration of the costs and benefits.

The major argument for rolling back most safety regulations is the fact they are written in blood during what was, effectively, a moral panic. Just tightening the regulations every time something goes wrong leads, ironically, to bad outcomes. The optimum state is to tolerate some level of risk.

I think it'd be hilarious if it wasn't so on-brand for Elon that he has a company that is designing brain-computer interfaces as an implant and while, to be clear, Neuralink obviously has medical and research leadership, not one of them is flagged on the company's website. Their "company" section is literally Blog and Careers.

The popular talking point is the FDA slowing things down. The large criticism given by most is the FDA not allowing drugs already approved by other large foreign medical regulation to be used, like the NHS or Australia's review body.

There is moderation on Twitter today things do occasionally get removed like death threats and the ilk.

You're likely misremembering his 'medical regulation = bad' arguments, and misremembering his twitter content policies as well.

>I saw Elon Musk questioning why we have medical regulations the other day, he was saying that it "slows down innovation" and so he thinks medical regulation should be abolished

Is he just posturing for his fans?

I see so many statements of this nature from him and I just can't believe that a person that successful can be so monumentally stupid.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” - Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

I see many, many tech people take an extremely simple position on a topic contrary to general knowledge.

Then they say something like 'I believe in strongly held beliefs, held weakly'.

I'm so bored of debating people with opinions on things they've spent zero time researching or even thinking about. Just say you don't know. It's okay.

this is like complaining about small talk. small talk is meant to draw people in. same with saying outrageous things. no one wants to chat in depth immediately and saying wild things draws a crowd.

no one is going to talk with you if you're drawing out all the nuance of medical regulation (nearly an 5k essay to broach) with nuance.

> no one is going to talk with you if you're drawing out all the nuance of medical regulation

Then why should anyone talk with you about it? What would be the point?

As a 'captain of industry' and generally wealthy man, Musk is much more constrained by regulation than he is protected by it. Unlike the common man.

So he's responding to his incentives, railing at the constraints on the ingenuity and productivity of people like himself. Likely underdeveloped empathy does not help.

I see so many statements of this nature from him and I just can't believe that a person that successful can be so monumentally stupid.

Don't forget that he is an unapologetic, very public drug user.

Every time he says or does something stupid, I just assume he's high. It helps explain a lot.

> I see so many statements of this nature from him and I just can't believe that a person that successful can be so monumentally stupid.

Clearly, you're not a student of history then. The trope of folks being good at one thing and believing that this can be extrapolated to other things is based on an almost infinite history of humans doing this exact thing, from politicians, business leaders, engineers, scientists, artists and just ordinary folks. When you couple this with the amplifying effects of having the money to surround yourself with 'yes'-folks that continuously reinforce your 'brilliance', and having the power that results in politicians kowtowing to you, then it is incredibly difficult to break out of that supreme belief in your own genius. It is literally a trap as old as humanity.

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