I think the broader scope claim is that rapid progress requires mistakes. That all of China’s hastily built excess structures that have some quality issues that will cause problems for some of them, or the belching clouds of coal smoke, or all the people in the USA who were poisoned by leaded gasoline, may to some extent be a necessary sacrifice.
The eras when the most actual forward progress were made seem to have the most incidents like this. Today we have Teslas occasionally driving themselves out of control, or having component failures that legacy auto long since repaired. Or how AI models have all their faults.
I would suspect that excessively strict and arbitrary building codes/zoning are similar, that they kill more people from homelessness than are saved by a laxer system.
So that’s the tradeoff. Obviously you need government, but government agencies need to be somehow responsive to the total effect of it’s actions, not just it’s narrow domain. The NRC has to consider the coal pollution each requirement will cause, etc. Autonomous car regulators need to consider all the crashes a flawed autonomous car software stack will prevent, not just the few it will still cause.
Sovereign immunity happens to remove one of the feedback mechanisms.
I think the broader scope claim is that rapid progress requires mistakes. That all of China’s hastily built excess structures that have some quality issues that will cause problems for some of them, or the belching clouds of coal smoke, or all the people in the USA who were poisoned by leaded gasoline, may to some extent be a necessary sacrifice.
The eras when the most actual forward progress were made seem to have the most incidents like this. Today we have Teslas occasionally driving themselves out of control, or having component failures that legacy auto long since repaired. Or how AI models have all their faults.
It’s just a vibes thing, I don’t know an explicit way to prove this, but it certainly is suggestive, that the regulatory ratchet prevents negatives and also prevents the positives. And the positives can be enormous. For example if the NRC had less regulation, and a few hundred people had been exposed to radioactive releases and died, it might have prevented ~920,000 deaths over the last 40 years. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/particulate-pollution-from-coal-associated-with-double-the-risk-of-mortality-than-pm2-5-from-other-sources
I would suspect that excessively strict and arbitrary building codes/zoning are similar, that they kill more people from homelessness than are saved by a laxer system.
So that’s the tradeoff. Obviously you need government, but government agencies need to be somehow responsive to the total effect of it’s actions, not just it’s narrow domain. The NRC has to consider the coal pollution each requirement will cause, etc. Autonomous car regulators need to consider all the crashes a flawed autonomous car software stack will prevent, not just the few it will still cause.
Sovereign immunity happens to remove one of the feedback mechanisms.