You somewhat misquote the FDA fatalities estimate. It is not that the FDA prevents 5000 fatalities; it’s that the extra delay by FDA, compared to european regulators (EMA), prevents at most 5000 fatalities per decade.
Total absence of regulation would result in a drug industry that is only concerned with soundbites, drug colouring, and trademarks. Through most of our history, the medicine worked just like this.
There is something which is very hard to estimate about drug regulation.
It’s relatively easy to estimate how much the regulation costs in added delay, and the amount of lives that could be saved if the (finally found to be efficient) drug was available earlier.
It’s a bit harder, but still possible, to estimate how much the regulation protects by looking at the drugs that were finally found to be dangerous, and estimating how much people they would have killed or damaged if they would have been released.
But it’s almost impossible to estimate how much the existing regulation will make the drug corporations to change their own internal practice. That’s the most efficient kind of regulations : regulation that, most of the time, aren’t enforced by cops and courts, but by people directly. Drug companies taking more care about preventing side-effects in the drugs in the whole process, just because they know that at the end the FDA will veto a drug that’s too dangerous.
Like with traffic regulation : the real effect of speed limits and red light is not measured by the number of people who end up being without a drivers’ license because they got caught too many times, and can’t endanger others anymore. But about the people who respect the red light and speed limits because of the law, but wouldn’t without it. And it’s very hard to estimate those.
There is one more factor, but in opposite direction: would you be more careful if there was nobody banning the medications? Do you read about medications now before you use them, and would you do that if there was no government doing tests?
Your argument sounds to me like pro-minimal-wage argument, with the similar mistake: there are always two sides defining product/price, and one cannot think only about one of them and have good predictions.
This is a creepy story, but not a contra-argument for my point: these people were thinking that government ban bad medications, so they were not careful at all. I would like to see some study which tests how careful people are when they know someone else is taking care of them.
If there were no government to regulate medications, I think that people would make companies which would test these medications and which would give them scores, or something like that.
So the reason relatively few lives are saved by banning drugs is because, as a consequence of the regulation, not many dangerous drugs are being produced. Interesting.
Total absence of regulation would result in a drug industry that is only concerned with soundbites, drug colouring, and trademarks. Through most of our history, the medicine worked just like this.
We can’t know that. Regulation is not the only means by which information about what drugs are useful and who can be trusted can be disseminated. If the FDA was not around it could well be that a non-regulatory body would have developed to fulfill this role.
The fundamental problem of both FDA and such non-regulatory body is that the drug industry got the money to fake the signals. The valid argumentation must be substantially more effective at convincing public than invalid argumentation, for it to work at all.
(I do not think btw that people must be protected from themselves.)
This is basically the primary issue. It is possible for a hostile or simply incompetent drug company to spam the information sources of people with false or misleading information, drowning out the truth. The vast majority of humans in our society aren’t experts in drugs, and becoming an expert in drugs is very expensive, so they rely on others to evaluate drugs for them. The public bureaucrats at least have a strong counter-incentive to letting nasty drugs out into the wild.
Furthermore, it can take some time to realize a drug isn’t working, and the placebo effect is going to be in full force to make that even harder. By the time you realize you were sold snake oil, you may already be dead. “Reputation” may not be of use here, as fake drugs are much cheaper to develop than real ones, so the cost of throwing an old trademark or company shell under the bus every few years is minimal, especially compared to the cost of discovering that for individuals. Consider also the time in man-hours that must be spent hunting for information and evaluating safety, not just of the drugs themselves, but also the reputations of the private verification firms, by all individuals that need drugs. The FDA is cheaper.
Edit: I should say that “in my estimation, the FDA is cheaper.” It’s only back-of-the-napkin math. I generally take the position that we should protect people from themselves to the degree that it is reasonably practical to do so. We have all failed due to ignorance, irrationality, or inattention at some point. Of course, when someone tries to break open your high-voltage power line to steal the copper inside, well...
This comment and its parent are both true. And, strangely, we seem to exist in an universe where there are both known useful drugs and a lot of drugs of unclear benefit.
Total absence of regulation would result in a drug industry that is only concerned with soundbites, drug colouring,
and trademarks. Through most of our history, the medicine worked just like this.
Some would say it still does.
There is a third alternative though. You are, of course, familiar with Underwriters Laboratories?
Oh, I see that Wedrifid has started down that road.
And ultimately the question isn’t whether people SHOULD be protected from themselves. The question is, in anything vaguely resembling a modern, pluralistic democratic society CAN people be protected from themselves.
See the Heinlein quote about bread and circuses. A Tai-Chi instructor of mine years ago instructed that the ground is hard because it loves you. It wants you to learn not to fall down so as to learn balance and how to walk and run and move well. I’m not sure that’s really a rational way of looking at things, but there is some utility there.
Well, I am quite a bit of libertarian myself, but not to such extent.
The independent labs still need big G to wield big stick to protect trademarks. And perhaps still need anti-trust law.
Furthermore, there is a bit of problem with advertisement. Free speech is extremely important, but advertisement makes me think of Langford’s basilisk . In the universe of Langford’s basilisk stories—are you protecting people from themselves by getting rid of the basilisks? Clearly not. But what if the people felt as if it was their free will, to buy product, after seeing a basilisk? As a part of basilisk’s function? The Heinlein’s approach assumes strong notion of free will.
The modus operandi in advertisement is that you do not have free will. In the advertisement based version of Newcomb, omega makes ads so that that you’ll buy 2 boxes. The first for a million, and the second for a thousand. And they both will be empty. But you’ll be happy. (note, that’s meant to be humour).
(Note that I currently deal with ads from the other side—the selling side. And I myself made ads for living. So my hidden agendas are towards advertising, not against. And i’m somewhat exaggerating evil impact of ads here. The ads don’t work on everyone, but they certainly do bias your ‘free will’ in the ways that you’d rather not. And yes, we sell great products using ads, too)
In the universe of Langford’s basilisk stories—are you protecting people from themselves by getting rid of the basilisks? Clearly not.
I think I might not be understanding your post correctly, but in the universe of these stories, seeing the nastier basilisks literally kills you instantly. Getting rid of the basilisks absolutely protects people—see for instance comp.basilisk FAQ.
The point is that you have to censor images out there to protect people. And in our universe, seeing the basilisks makes you buy stuff. When does it cross from protecting people from basilisks, to protecting people from themselves?
Well, statistically. I am not sitting thinking what exact hue will break your brain better, but I put damn good effort into doing some advertisment video, right now, for cinemas. (the rendering runs take a while, which makes me go on lesswrong, which makes me addicted to lesswrong, vicious cycle). And i use fractals a lot to model natural phenomena for ads. Thats my specialization (besides game programming).
When I was considering whether or not I objected to various types of advertising, it seemed like a substantial question to consider would be information asymmetry, since that seems to be a substantial part of ads.
For instance take the following advertisement:
Buy one get one free.
And then much later in small print Items ring up at 50% off regular price. (After all, it doesn’t help you sell as much of a profit if they just buy one, there is no reason to specifically call attention to this.)
And then not even stated on the page And by “regular price”, we mean what other people might consider a fake price that the goods are at only the legally minimum required amount of time so that we can claim that they have been discounted, because people love getting discounts and we know this.
Or for anecdotes, the “regular price” of a store brand of Diet soda I buy frequently is now 1.19. I don’t think I actually remember ever seeing it at that price. It is always at a “discount” However, it is now more expensive than it used to be. They can raise the price and discount at the same time.
It seems like in general, a lot of these kinds of sales tactics are specifically related to information asymmetry.
Now, this kind of information asymmetry can be reduced.
For instance, consider an app where you can scan the barcode and get a rescalable graph of the price which shows the information about the price over time, or if you wanted to be thorough, information about the price over time at rival stores.
That’s just going from one data point to two, and retail establishments are already objecting because it is hurting their sales. Imagine if you could instantly generate a three dimensional graph which compared the past year of prices over time at 10 stores and the reason for discounting. All of that is publicly available information. And it wouldn’t require any new hardware to make such an app. So it seems very likely it might happen in the future.
Then you could have customers who upon seeing your ad would say: “Well, I could buy this TV here at Best Buy at 50% off for 400 dollars, but Belmont TV is probably going to have it for 300 dollars when they have their birthday sale in a few days, so I’ll wait and then ship it from there.”
This app seems like it would be a good thing to have.
That’s a bit longer than I thought it would be, but it does seem to cover the bases. What do you think?
When does it cross from protecting people from basilisks, to protecting people from themselves?
Can you clarify why that transition is particularly significant?
Often when people use the phrase “protecting people from themselves” it’s meant to connote that this is something we shouldn’t do, as contrasted with protecting people from one another, which (it is implied) we should do. Is that what you’re trying to connote here?
If so, then I don’t think such a line is terribly significant.
Protecting people from one another can be a higher priority in cases where the incentives for harming others are higher than the incentives for harming oneself (which is frequently true in the real world) but that’s ultimately just a shortcut, not a fundamental dividing line. Useful in practice, but problematic to generalize a theory from.
I totally agree; I was more referring to the problem with libertarianism. Example:
Someone makes ads for some quack cure. For example, radium. People die. Libertarianism says, it’s those people’s problem, we can’t protect them from themselves.
Someone makes basilisk fractal that only works on some people. Some people die. Libertarianism agrees that information killed them.
Now, for some reason the former falls under their own will, and the latter, under non their own will (even though it is their neural network killing them).
Then genes are discovered, that strongly correlate with susceptibility to the advertising. Or parenting style. Or school environment. And suddenly, in both instances, people die, because they were shown carefully constructed visual (and auditory, for tv ads) input, due to their innate proneness to being damaged by inputs.
(I myself don’t really make marketing concepts, I just do some of the art.)
edit: okay, i’ll steel man this a little… it can be argued, that the people who die of ads, they could have somehow compensated for their innate failure, while people who die of basilisks can’t. Well, suppose one can do basilisk-training, with a milder basilisk, which makes one much more immune to effects of basilisk. But most people don’t do that, because they don’t need it.
That distinction [which libertarianism makes] does strike me as inconsistent and arbitrary. (and if one is to evaluate values of different types of information, etc etc, that’s utilitarianism).
You somewhat misquote the FDA fatalities estimate. It is not that the FDA prevents 5000 fatalities; it’s that the extra delay by FDA, compared to european regulators (EMA), prevents at most 5000 fatalities per decade.
Total absence of regulation would result in a drug industry that is only concerned with soundbites, drug colouring, and trademarks. Through most of our history, the medicine worked just like this.
There is something which is very hard to estimate about drug regulation.
It’s relatively easy to estimate how much the regulation costs in added delay, and the amount of lives that could be saved if the (finally found to be efficient) drug was available earlier.
It’s a bit harder, but still possible, to estimate how much the regulation protects by looking at the drugs that were finally found to be dangerous, and estimating how much people they would have killed or damaged if they would have been released.
But it’s almost impossible to estimate how much the existing regulation will make the drug corporations to change their own internal practice. That’s the most efficient kind of regulations : regulation that, most of the time, aren’t enforced by cops and courts, but by people directly. Drug companies taking more care about preventing side-effects in the drugs in the whole process, just because they know that at the end the FDA will veto a drug that’s too dangerous.
Like with traffic regulation : the real effect of speed limits and red light is not measured by the number of people who end up being without a drivers’ license because they got caught too many times, and can’t endanger others anymore. But about the people who respect the red light and speed limits because of the law, but wouldn’t without it. And it’s very hard to estimate those.
There is one more factor, but in opposite direction: would you be more careful if there was nobody banning the medications? Do you read about medications now before you use them, and would you do that if there was no government doing tests? Your argument sounds to me like pro-minimal-wage argument, with the similar mistake: there are always two sides defining product/price, and one cannot think only about one of them and have good predictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamina_therapy
Read and weep.
This is a creepy story, but not a contra-argument for my point: these people were thinking that government ban bad medications, so they were not careful at all. I would like to see some study which tests how careful people are when they know someone else is taking care of them.
If there were no government to regulate medications, I think that people would make companies which would test these medications and which would give them scores, or something like that.
So the reason relatively few lives are saved by banning drugs is because, as a consequence of the regulation, not many dangerous drugs are being produced. Interesting.
We can’t know that. Regulation is not the only means by which information about what drugs are useful and who can be trusted can be disseminated. If the FDA was not around it could well be that a non-regulatory body would have developed to fulfill this role.
The fundamental problem of both FDA and such non-regulatory body is that the drug industry got the money to fake the signals. The valid argumentation must be substantially more effective at convincing public than invalid argumentation, for it to work at all.
(I do not think btw that people must be protected from themselves.)
This is basically the primary issue. It is possible for a hostile or simply incompetent drug company to spam the information sources of people with false or misleading information, drowning out the truth. The vast majority of humans in our society aren’t experts in drugs, and becoming an expert in drugs is very expensive, so they rely on others to evaluate drugs for them. The public bureaucrats at least have a strong counter-incentive to letting nasty drugs out into the wild.
Furthermore, it can take some time to realize a drug isn’t working, and the placebo effect is going to be in full force to make that even harder. By the time you realize you were sold snake oil, you may already be dead. “Reputation” may not be of use here, as fake drugs are much cheaper to develop than real ones, so the cost of throwing an old trademark or company shell under the bus every few years is minimal, especially compared to the cost of discovering that for individuals.
Consider also the time in man-hours that must be spent hunting for information and evaluating safety, not just of the drugs themselves, but also the reputations of the private verification firms, by all individuals that need drugs. The FDA is cheaper.
Edit: I should say that “in my estimation, the FDA is cheaper.” It’s only back-of-the-napkin math.
I generally take the position that we should protect people from themselves to the degree that it is reasonably practical to do so. We have all failed due to ignorance, irrationality, or inattention at some point. Of course, when someone tries to break open your high-voltage power line to steal the copper inside, well...
This comment and its parent are both true. And, strangely, we seem to exist in an universe where there are both known useful drugs and a lot of drugs of unclear benefit.
Some would say it still does.
There is a third alternative though. You are, of course, familiar with Underwriters Laboratories?
Oh, I see that Wedrifid has started down that road.
And ultimately the question isn’t whether people SHOULD be protected from themselves. The question is, in anything vaguely resembling a modern, pluralistic democratic society CAN people be protected from themselves.
See the Heinlein quote about bread and circuses. A Tai-Chi instructor of mine years ago instructed that the ground is hard because it loves you. It wants you to learn not to fall down so as to learn balance and how to walk and run and move well. I’m not sure that’s really a rational way of looking at things, but there is some utility there.
Well, I am quite a bit of libertarian myself, but not to such extent.
The independent labs still need big G to wield big stick to protect trademarks. And perhaps still need anti-trust law.
Furthermore, there is a bit of problem with advertisement. Free speech is extremely important, but advertisement makes me think of Langford’s basilisk . In the universe of Langford’s basilisk stories—are you protecting people from themselves by getting rid of the basilisks? Clearly not. But what if the people felt as if it was their free will, to buy product, after seeing a basilisk? As a part of basilisk’s function? The Heinlein’s approach assumes strong notion of free will.
The modus operandi in advertisement is that you do not have free will. In the advertisement based version of Newcomb, omega makes ads so that that you’ll buy 2 boxes. The first for a million, and the second for a thousand. And they both will be empty. But you’ll be happy. (note, that’s meant to be humour).
(Note that I currently deal with ads from the other side—the selling side. And I myself made ads for living. So my hidden agendas are towards advertising, not against. And i’m somewhat exaggerating evil impact of ads here. The ads don’t work on everyone, but they certainly do bias your ‘free will’ in the ways that you’d rather not. And yes, we sell great products using ads, too)
I think I might not be understanding your post correctly, but in the universe of these stories, seeing the nastier basilisks literally kills you instantly. Getting rid of the basilisks absolutely protects people—see for instance comp.basilisk FAQ.
The point is that you have to censor images out there to protect people. And in our universe, seeing the basilisks makes you buy stuff. When does it cross from protecting people from basilisks, to protecting people from themselves?
Well, statistically. I am not sitting thinking what exact hue will break your brain better, but I put damn good effort into doing some advertisment video, right now, for cinemas. (the rendering runs take a while, which makes me go on lesswrong, which makes me addicted to lesswrong, vicious cycle). And i use fractals a lot to model natural phenomena for ads. Thats my specialization (besides game programming).
When I was considering whether or not I objected to various types of advertising, it seemed like a substantial question to consider would be information asymmetry, since that seems to be a substantial part of ads.
For instance take the following advertisement:
Buy one get one free.
And then much later in small print Items ring up at 50% off regular price. (After all, it doesn’t help you sell as much of a profit if they just buy one, there is no reason to specifically call attention to this.)
And then not even stated on the page And by “regular price”, we mean what other people might consider a fake price that the goods are at only the legally minimum required amount of time so that we can claim that they have been discounted, because people love getting discounts and we know this.
Or for anecdotes, the “regular price” of a store brand of Diet soda I buy frequently is now 1.19. I don’t think I actually remember ever seeing it at that price. It is always at a “discount” However, it is now more expensive than it used to be. They can raise the price and discount at the same time.
It seems like in general, a lot of these kinds of sales tactics are specifically related to information asymmetry.
Now, this kind of information asymmetry can be reduced.
For instance, consider an app where you can scan the barcode and get a rescalable graph of the price which shows the information about the price over time, or if you wanted to be thorough, information about the price over time at rival stores.
Basically, like the app in this link, but even more so: http://www.psfk.com/2012/01/amazon-retail-showroom.html since that only compares to Amazon’s current prices.
That’s just going from one data point to two, and retail establishments are already objecting because it is hurting their sales. Imagine if you could instantly generate a three dimensional graph which compared the past year of prices over time at 10 stores and the reason for discounting. All of that is publicly available information. And it wouldn’t require any new hardware to make such an app. So it seems very likely it might happen in the future.
Then you could have customers who upon seeing your ad would say: “Well, I could buy this TV here at Best Buy at 50% off for 400 dollars, but Belmont TV is probably going to have it for 300 dollars when they have their birthday sale in a few days, so I’ll wait and then ship it from there.”
This app seems like it would be a good thing to have.
That’s a bit longer than I thought it would be, but it does seem to cover the bases. What do you think?
Can you clarify why that transition is particularly significant?
Often when people use the phrase “protecting people from themselves” it’s meant to connote that this is something we shouldn’t do, as contrasted with protecting people from one another, which (it is implied) we should do. Is that what you’re trying to connote here?
If so, then I don’t think such a line is terribly significant.
Protecting people from one another can be a higher priority in cases where the incentives for harming others are higher than the incentives for harming oneself (which is frequently true in the real world) but that’s ultimately just a shortcut, not a fundamental dividing line. Useful in practice, but problematic to generalize a theory from.
I totally agree; I was more referring to the problem with libertarianism. Example:
Someone makes ads for some quack cure. For example, radium. People die. Libertarianism says, it’s those people’s problem, we can’t protect them from themselves.
Someone makes basilisk fractal that only works on some people. Some people die. Libertarianism agrees that information killed them.
Now, for some reason the former falls under their own will, and the latter, under non their own will (even though it is their neural network killing them).
Then genes are discovered, that strongly correlate with susceptibility to the advertising. Or parenting style. Or school environment. And suddenly, in both instances, people die, because they were shown carefully constructed visual (and auditory, for tv ads) input, due to their innate proneness to being damaged by inputs.
(I myself don’t really make marketing concepts, I just do some of the art.)
edit: okay, i’ll steel man this a little… it can be argued, that the people who die of ads, they could have somehow compensated for their innate failure, while people who die of basilisks can’t. Well, suppose one can do basilisk-training, with a milder basilisk, which makes one much more immune to effects of basilisk. But most people don’t do that, because they don’t need it.
That distinction [which libertarianism makes] does strike me as inconsistent and arbitrary. (and if one is to evaluate values of different types of information, etc etc, that’s utilitarianism).
Yup, the distinction you’re describing sounds pretty inconsistent and arbitrary to me as well.