True and they wouldn’t deserve it, but the truth is, there are a lot of really awesome effective drugs that either take forever to get approved, or don’t get approved it at all. This kills people, too.
And there are a lot of diseases, like bronchitis, that are easy for a person to diagnose in themselves, and know that they need an antibiotic, but it costs a hundred dollars to see a doctor to tell him what he already knows so he can get the medicine, and if that’s the difference between him paying the rent or not… and, hypothetically, he dies because it goes untreated.
It’s more a propblem of political viability rather than anything else.
And there are a lot of diseases, like bronchitis, that are easy for a person to diagnose in themselves, and know that they need an antibiotic,
And then they misdiagnose it, and antibiotic resistance increases, and then the antibiotic doesn’t work when they need it. Or they diagnose it but miss a warning sign for another disease that a doctor would have noticed and tested for. No thanks, I’d much rather have people who have gone to medical school for years make that decision.
No thanks, I’d much rather have people who have gone to medical school for years make that decision.
And I’d much rather the decision to trust doctors be made by the people to be affected, rather than politicians (who have not done any school / training in particular).
The “people to be affected” are the general public, who suffer when contagious diseases aren’t treated properly, and the general public makes these decisions through elected politicians. Also, these decisions are frequently based on recommendations by administrators with degrees in Public Health.
Some day I hope someone without an axe to grind does an in-depth study estimating how badly people would be harmed with drug regulation v. without drug regulation. I’ve seen the ‘yeah but regulation causes harms’ versus ‘yeah but non-regulation causes harms’ argument before, but I can’t remember seeing anyone try to rigorously and comprehensively quantify the respective pros and cons of both courses of action and compare them.
Have you looked at the academic studies on the topic? Are these the “axe-grinding” “arguments” that you dismiss? Simple comparisons of the US vs Europe during times when one was systematically more conservative seems to me to be a pretty reasonable methodology, but maybe you don’t consider it “rigorous” or “comprehensive.”
Maybe I’m overdoing the scare quotes, but those words were not helpful for me to identify what you have looked at, whether our disagreement is due to your ignorance or my lower standards.
Have you looked at the academic studies on the topic? Are these the “axe-grinding” “arguments” that you dismiss?
I have not, and my comment was not intended to slam whatever genuinely unbiased academic studies of the topic there are.
My comment’s referring to the times I’ve been a bystander for arguments about the utility of pharmaceutical drug regulation, both in real life and online; a pattern I noticed is the arguers failing to cite hard, quantitative evidence or make an argument based on the numbers. At best they might cite particular claims from think tanks or other writers/groups with a political agenda that would plausibly bias the analysis.
So when I say I’ve seen the argument before, I’m not thinking of the abstract debate over whether what the FDA does is a net good or not, or particular pieces of academic work; I’m thinking of concrete occasions where people have started arguing about it in my presence, and the failure of the people I’ve witnessed arguing about it to present detailed evidence.
I haven’t tried to research the topic in detail, so I don’t know precisely what ground the academic studies cover. At any rate, I didn’t mean to claim knowledge of the field and to imply that there aren’t any. I genuinely do just mean that I haven’t seen them, because laymen (including the parent posters in this subthread, at least so far) don’t mention them when they argue about the issue. As I wrote before, I added the ‘axe to grind’ warning not as a preemptive slam on academics, but because I suspect there have already been some overtly partisan analyses of the subject, and I want to discourage people from suggesting them to me.
Simple comparisons of the US vs Europe during times when one was systematically more conservative seems to me to be a pretty reasonable methodology, but maybe you don’t consider it “rigorous” or “comprehensive.”
In this context, what I mean by ‘rigorously and comprehensively’ is that the analysis should satisfy basic standards for causal inference—all important confounding variables should be accounted for, and so on. For example, it would not be ‘rigorous’ to just collect a list of countries and compare the lifespan of those with an FDA-like administration with those that don’t, because there are almost certainly confounding variables involved, and it’s not clear that lifespan is a suitably relevant overcome variable. We might pick a more suitable outcome variable and use a regression to try controlling for one or two confounders, but we still wouldn’t have a ‘comprehensive’ analysis without a list of all of the significant confounding variables, and a way to adjust for them or vitiate their effects.
One rigorous and comprehensive way to evaluate the question, although not a very realistic one, would be a global randomized trial. We might agree on a set of outcome variables, carefully measure them in every country in the world, randomly assign half the countries to having an FDA and the other half no FDA, and then come back after a pre-agreed number of years to re-measure the outcome variables and check for an effect in the countries with an FDA.
Now of course we don’t have that dataset, so if we want evidence we have to make do with what we have, perhaps by comparing the US and Europe as you mention. That could be a pretty good way to test for a positive/negative effect of drug regulation, or it could be a pretty bad way, but I’d need to hear more details about the precise method to say.
Maybe I’m overdoing the scare quotes, but those words were not helpful for me to identify what you have looked at, whether our disagreement is due to your ignorance or my lower standards.
I’m not sure what you believe we’re disagreeing about. I think you might have gotten the wrong impression of my intentions—I wasn’t trying to score points off RomanDavis or Houshalter or mattnewport or anyone else in this thread, or imply that drug regulation is obviously good/bad and only an axe grinder could think otherwise. At any rate, if you have citations for academic studies you think I’d find informative, I’d like them.
The disagreement was just that you seemed to say (by the phrasing “some day”) that there had not been any good work on the subject.
The only such paper I remember reading is Gieringer. That link is to a whole bibliography, compiled by people with a definite slant, so I can’t guarantee that there aren’t contradictory papers with equally good methodology.
I genuinely do just mean that I haven’t seen them, because laymen (including the parent posters in this subthread, at least so far) don’t mention them when they argue about the issue.
I’m reminded of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who gives the impression of having fabricated the papers assessing him, but they’re real.
Fair enough. Thanks for the Gieringer 1985 cite; it’s 25 pages long so I haven’t read it yet, but skimming through it I see a couple of quantitative tables, which is a good sign, and that it was published in the Cato Journal, which is not such a good sign. But it’s something!
I had noticed that you said that. I was originally not going to draw attention to the paper’s source, but it occurred to me that someone might then have asked me whether I was aware of the paper’s source, referring to my earlier claim that I wanted to discourage people from offering me overtly partisan analyses. So I decided to pre-empt that possible confusion/accusation by acknowledging the paper’s origin from a libertarian-leaning journal.
Yeah, I was thinking of bringing up examples myself, but because of the various axes involved, bringing one up might not be terrible effective.
Another person (I think it was cousin_it) brought up the idea that it should come down to a bet. If we bet ten dollars, and one of us kept arguing after the evidence was in and the bet was lost all it would come down to is, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”
EDIT:Also someone went and down voted the crap out of me. Who’d I make mad and why?
Yeah, I was thinking of bringing up examples myself, but because of the various axes involved, bringing one up might not be terrible effective.
Yup. I thought of the ‘without an axe to grind’ proviso because I expect some politically-aligned think tanks out there have already published pamphlets or reports arguing one side or the other, but I wouldn’t be inclined to take their claims very seriously.
EDIT:Also someone went and down voted the crap out of me. Who’d I make mad and why?
Yes, it looks like almost all the comments related to the government policy issue got downvoted. This is annoying in that, I at least thought that it was a calm, rational discussion which was showing that political discussion isn’t necessarily mind-killing. I’m particularly perplexed by the downvoting of comments which consisted of either interesting non-standard ideas or of comments which included evidence of claims.
The downvote limit is 4 times your karma yes? So if the total downvote for the thread was around 60 points, the individual would only need to be around 15 karma.
Yes. It was originally equal to your karma but some of us had already spent that many downvotes and the point of the policy wasn’t to stop established users from being able to downvote.
I hope someone without an axe to grind does this; if there are axes involved, its much more likely to turn out supporting whatever the person thought before, i. e. not strongly correlated with how people are hurt or helped by regulation
True and they wouldn’t deserve it, but the truth is, there are a lot of really awesome effective drugs that either take forever to get approved, or don’t get approved it at all. This kills people, too.
And there are a lot of diseases, like bronchitis, that are easy for a person to diagnose in themselves, and know that they need an antibiotic, but it costs a hundred dollars to see a doctor to tell him what he already knows so he can get the medicine, and if that’s the difference between him paying the rent or not… and, hypothetically, he dies because it goes untreated.
It’s more a propblem of political viability rather than anything else.
And then they misdiagnose it, and antibiotic resistance increases, and then the antibiotic doesn’t work when they need it. Or they diagnose it but miss a warning sign for another disease that a doctor would have noticed and tested for. No thanks, I’d much rather have people who have gone to medical school for years make that decision.
And I’d much rather the decision to trust doctors be made by the people to be affected, rather than politicians (who have not done any school / training in particular).
The “people to be affected” are the general public, who suffer when contagious diseases aren’t treated properly, and the general public makes these decisions through elected politicians. Also, these decisions are frequently based on recommendations by administrators with degrees in Public Health.
Some day I hope someone without an axe to grind does an in-depth study estimating how badly people would be harmed with drug regulation v. without drug regulation. I’ve seen the ‘yeah but regulation causes harms’ versus ‘yeah but non-regulation causes harms’ argument before, but I can’t remember seeing anyone try to rigorously and comprehensively quantify the respective pros and cons of both courses of action and compare them.
Have you looked at the academic studies on the topic? Are these the “axe-grinding” “arguments” that you dismiss? Simple comparisons of the US vs Europe during times when one was systematically more conservative seems to me to be a pretty reasonable methodology, but maybe you don’t consider it “rigorous” or “comprehensive.”
Maybe I’m overdoing the scare quotes, but those words were not helpful for me to identify what you have looked at, whether our disagreement is due to your ignorance or my lower standards.
I have not, and my comment was not intended to slam whatever genuinely unbiased academic studies of the topic there are.
My comment’s referring to the times I’ve been a bystander for arguments about the utility of pharmaceutical drug regulation, both in real life and online; a pattern I noticed is the arguers failing to cite hard, quantitative evidence or make an argument based on the numbers. At best they might cite particular claims from think tanks or other writers/groups with a political agenda that would plausibly bias the analysis.
So when I say I’ve seen the argument before, I’m not thinking of the abstract debate over whether what the FDA does is a net good or not, or particular pieces of academic work; I’m thinking of concrete occasions where people have started arguing about it in my presence, and the failure of the people I’ve witnessed arguing about it to present detailed evidence.
I haven’t tried to research the topic in detail, so I don’t know precisely what ground the academic studies cover. At any rate, I didn’t mean to claim knowledge of the field and to imply that there aren’t any. I genuinely do just mean that I haven’t seen them, because laymen (including the parent posters in this subthread, at least so far) don’t mention them when they argue about the issue. As I wrote before, I added the ‘axe to grind’ warning not as a preemptive slam on academics, but because I suspect there have already been some overtly partisan analyses of the subject, and I want to discourage people from suggesting them to me.
In this context, what I mean by ‘rigorously and comprehensively’ is that the analysis should satisfy basic standards for causal inference—all important confounding variables should be accounted for, and so on. For example, it would not be ‘rigorous’ to just collect a list of countries and compare the lifespan of those with an FDA-like administration with those that don’t, because there are almost certainly confounding variables involved, and it’s not clear that lifespan is a suitably relevant overcome variable. We might pick a more suitable outcome variable and use a regression to try controlling for one or two confounders, but we still wouldn’t have a ‘comprehensive’ analysis without a list of all of the significant confounding variables, and a way to adjust for them or vitiate their effects.
One rigorous and comprehensive way to evaluate the question, although not a very realistic one, would be a global randomized trial. We might agree on a set of outcome variables, carefully measure them in every country in the world, randomly assign half the countries to having an FDA and the other half no FDA, and then come back after a pre-agreed number of years to re-measure the outcome variables and check for an effect in the countries with an FDA.
Now of course we don’t have that dataset, so if we want evidence we have to make do with what we have, perhaps by comparing the US and Europe as you mention. That could be a pretty good way to test for a positive/negative effect of drug regulation, or it could be a pretty bad way, but I’d need to hear more details about the precise method to say.
I’m not sure what you believe we’re disagreeing about. I think you might have gotten the wrong impression of my intentions—I wasn’t trying to score points off RomanDavis or Houshalter or mattnewport or anyone else in this thread, or imply that drug regulation is obviously good/bad and only an axe grinder could think otherwise. At any rate, if you have citations for academic studies you think I’d find informative, I’d like them.
The disagreement was just that you seemed to say (by the phrasing “some day”) that there had not been any good work on the subject.
The only such paper I remember reading is Gieringer. That link is to a whole bibliography, compiled by people with a definite slant, so I can’t guarantee that there aren’t contradictory papers with equally good methodology.
I’m reminded of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who gives the impression of having fabricated the papers assessing him, but they’re real.
Fair enough. Thanks for the Gieringer 1985 cite; it’s 25 pages long so I haven’t read it yet, but skimming through it I see a couple of quantitative tables, which is a good sign, and that it was published in the Cato Journal, which is not such a good sign. But it’s something!
I said my standards were lower. My point was that your original comment could be taken for having read this and dismissed it.
I had noticed that you said that. I was originally not going to draw attention to the paper’s source, but it occurred to me that someone might then have asked me whether I was aware of the paper’s source, referring to my earlier claim that I wanted to discourage people from offering me overtly partisan analyses. So I decided to pre-empt that possible confusion/accusation by acknowledging the paper’s origin from a libertarian-leaning journal.
Yeah, I was thinking of bringing up examples myself, but because of the various axes involved, bringing one up might not be terrible effective.
Another person (I think it was cousin_it) brought up the idea that it should come down to a bet. If we bet ten dollars, and one of us kept arguing after the evidence was in and the bet was lost all it would come down to is, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”
EDIT:Also someone went and down voted the crap out of me. Who’d I make mad and why?
Yup. I thought of the ‘without an axe to grind’ proviso because I expect some politically-aligned think tanks out there have already published pamphlets or reports arguing one side or the other, but I wouldn’t be inclined to take their claims very seriously.
Whoever did it, it’s not just you.
Me too. Around 30 points in around 10 minutes. I’m flattered.
My guess for all this is that someone found the whole conversation off-topic and mind-killing. Which seems to justify downvotes.
Did either of you perhaps post in any of the threads replying to billswift?
Yes. I think someone downvoted extra comments elsewhere for effect based on the magnitude and speed of the karma hit.
Yes, it looks like almost all the comments related to the government policy issue got downvoted. This is annoying in that, I at least thought that it was a calm, rational discussion which was showing that political discussion isn’t necessarily mind-killing. I’m particularly perplexed by the downvoting of comments which consisted of either interesting non-standard ideas or of comments which included evidence of claims.
It must be a relatively high karma user given the fact that downvotes are limited by total karma. Perhaps they’d care to explain themselves.
The downvote limit is 4 times your karma yes? So if the total downvote for the thread was around 60 points, the individual would only need to be around 15 karma.
Yes. It was originally equal to your karma but some of us had already spent that many downvotes and the point of the policy wasn’t to stop established users from being able to downvote.
I’m not sure. I’ve never actually run into it.
I hope someone without an axe to grind does this; if there are axes involved, its much more likely to turn out supporting whatever the person thought before, i. e. not strongly correlated with how people are hurt or helped by regulation