Blue or Green on Regulation?

Imagine a person who declares they are not blue or green, but are just trying as best they can to judge the truth, and their estimate will change with time and context. Imagine that their behavior appears to fit this description. How will other people treat this person? Will they seek him out as a source of good policy information? Will they hire him or fund his work? Or will they suspect him of really being on the other side, and pretending neutrality as a rhetorical trick?

What bothers me about this challenge is that it is possible for a well thought out regulation to have a net benefit, even after considering the economics, technical limitations, and societal values. But it is also true that your [Government = ordinary human fallibility + poor incentives + organizational overhead + guns] equation suggests that we will never get this well thought out regulation enacted.

So our only choice is either small regs that do very little good in order to avoid doing harm or private solutions that are limited by the [Private groups = ordinary human fallibility + poor incentives + organizational overhead + a few bad actors] equation.

There is a business joke that says you cannot make something idiot-proof, because they can always build a better idiot.

With financial scams, for instance, you can always stop a fool from participating in one particular scam. But if the fool is determined to participate in some scam, somehow, you cannot stop the fool. I think that many fools have that degree of determination.

Bruce Schneier discusses "CYA Security" in his latest Crypto-gram: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0703.html#1 Much of the security reactions that occur are less aimed at achieving safety and more with ensuring that the agency cannot be criticised for not having done its job, even when the reactions are irrational and counterproductive. I guess this is part of the "poor incentives" term of Robins equation.

Security is perhaps one of the most clearcut forms of paternalism, where certain groups are expected to act to protect everyone. It also seems to be more vulnerable to overreactions like above than other forms of paternalism. Perhaps this is because of the larger power distance between the security people and the protected. The former have been given monopolies of coercive power, which means that they are scrutinized more heavily both internally and externally. There is also a psychological effect of power bias and separation from the "civilians" that means that they are less likely to accept disconfirming external information. Finally security problems often involve malign agency, which is something we humans understand in a very different way than other risks.

The health care paternalist who fails to detect and stop a health problem until some deaths occur can usually get away with it by imposing after-the-fact regulations.

I guess this line of reasoning would imply that we should expect paternalism in areas where the "outrage" aspect of risk is higher to be biased towards overreaction.

Note that when someone reads your "if people have a right to be stupid, the market will respond by supplying all the stupidity that can be sold" it does sound rather as though you're making a point about market decisions in particular, not just one of a spectrum of points like "if people have a right to vote for stupid policies, then ambitious politicians will supply all the stupid policies that people can be convinced to vote for." Also, it's not too uncommon for people to play rhetorical (and perhaps internal doublethink) games where people's rationality in market decisionmaking is judged differently than in politics.

Similarly, you could state specifically "when we let members of someparticularethnicgroup vote, they often make uninformed decisions," and believe yourself logically justified by the general truth that they are people and when we let people of any ethnic group vote, they often make uninformed decisions. But I don't recommend that you try making that statement, especially about an ethnic group where it's not too uncommon for people to dump on them in particular, unless you're prepared to raise many, many more hackles than you would by just stating your general point about letting people in general vote.

And even though I give the parallel of another politically charged statement, I don't think this is just people getting irrational around politically charged issues. In ordinary, un-charged situations too, it is normal for people to choose reasonably general forms of their statements when possible, so if you make a narrow statement, it conveys a suggestion that a more general statement doesn't hold. "It's really cold in the living room" means in practice something like "the living room is colder than the rest of the house" or "I am physically unable to leave the living room and don't know about the rest of the house," not "it's really cold in the house."

It's not a completely reliable conversational rule, and it's probably one of the reasons that some wag said that "communication would be more reliable if people would turn off the gainy decompression," but it's not obviously an unimportant or silly rule, either. In fact, if I imagine designing cooperating robotic agents with very powerful brains, very sophisticated software, and very low communication bandwidth, I'd be very inclined to borrow the rule.

Newman, that's a fair point. The way this scenario arose was that someone proposed a specific policy - shops where otherwise banned items could be sold - and I remarked that some poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother would buy Dr. Snakeoil's Sulfuric Acid Drink for her arthritis and die and leave her five orphaned children to weep on national television. I meant it as a remark about the real-world political unfeasibility. However, this evidently struck most people as a Green argument, and I was shortly well on my way to acquiring a reputation as a Green, hence this little position paper.

It would indeed be disingenuous to make a general habit of discussing only the downsides of Blue policy. But when that specific issue does arise, one would like to be able to discuss such a straightforward factual prediction without being labeled a Green. When specific Green policies are proposed, I am just as frank (and vivid) about the downsides, hence I get labeled Blue.

Marc, your description strikes me as a pretty good summary of the mess we're in.

Perhaps this is because of the larger power distance between the security people and the protected.

How do you measure this distance? The FDA has a monopoly, too. Here's another theory: drug companies are a third player. Moreover, they are concentrated interests, so they affect the public choice. (Airlines play a similar role in the security theater, but their interests are more diffuse. Also, getting rid of airline security is a public good, while getting a drug approved helps one drug company relative the others.)

That's not to say I disagree with Anders's psychology, but I discount it because I find it harder to judge than public choice arguments.

I'd consider the question of your position on regulation to be, if you could choose for the government to increase or decrease regulation, but you have no other effect, which would you choose?

I consider myself anti-regulation. If they decreased regulation to the point where increasing it would be good, I'd consider myself pro-regulation.

I'm reading through all of Eliezer's posts chronologically, as well as reading Luke's comments when he did the same. I just came to this post and had to do a double take when I read this:

Imagine, for a moment, that much of what the Greens said about the downside of the Blue policy was true - that, left to the mercy of the free market, many people would be crushed by powers far beyond their understanding, nor would they deserve it. And imagine that most of what the Blues said about the downside of the Green policy was also true - that regulators were fallible humans with poor incentives, whacking on delicately balanced forces with a sledgehammer.

Close your eyes and imagine it. Extrapolate the result. If that were true, then... then you'd have a big problem and no easy way to fix it, that's what you'd have. Does this universe look familiar?

Click

Holy. [Expletive].

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.

Yes, people will die horrible flaming deaths and they don't deserve it. But it's worth it so I don't have to walk to work in the morning.

In my humble opinion, even Eliezer sometimes forget that making an argument more shocking doesn't necessarily make it more correct - more "honest" in a generic fashion, maybe, but abstract "honesty" and practical adherence to one's values (or utility function for utilitarians) can be totally different things. I asked my dad, who drives quite a lot, and he absolutely would ban all private transportation - in cities at the very least. So would I. That we can say something that reflects awful facts without embellishing it does not absolve us of an inch of moral responsiblity! You should think long and think carefully and feel sorrow and anguish for at least a moment - not as an intuition pump to sway your judgment, but to remind yourself of what you want to want and value to value. Forgive me if I find this bit (if it's meant literally and not to shock the audience into thinking) to be a naked ethical failure - or at least dangerous laziness - on EY's part.

(That's not to say that I disapprove of the rest of the article, or am in denial about the horrible reality of it! It's an excellent article with just this one low point in my eyes. "If that were true, then... then you'd have a big problem and no easy way to fix it, that's what you'd have. Does this universe look familiar?" - sure, that's so, but if anything it's worse and more reprehensible to use sloppy, spur-of-the-moment ethical judgments in such a hostile environment, especially if those judgments happen to favor your peace of mind and convenience.)

One thing I desperately want to devise is some method, at least partial, of incentivizing bureaucrats (public or private) to act in the most useful manner. This is, by its very nature, a difficult challenge with lots of thorny sub-problems. However, I think it's something LWers have been thinking about, even if not always explicitly.

But think to yourself, in the silent privacy of your thoughts if you must: And yet they will still die, and they will not deserve it.

And then another silent afterthought: "Oh," you think, "Letting bad things happen, even when I have some stupid principle to justify it, is still bad!"

^ It was a different topic, but basically, that's how I became a consequentialist.

So, your "moral judgments" are based on premises like, "Malicious people deserve to get hurt"?

That doesn't follow. Those could be conclusions, not premises.

but any individual bureaucrat has an unlimited incentive to say no. Regulators have no career motive to do any sort of cost-benefit calculation - except of course for the easy career-benefit calculation. A product with a failure mode spectacular enough to make the newspapers will be banned regardless of what other good it might do; one-reason decisionmaking.

That ignores how the FDA actually works in practice. A lot of regulators go into privat sector jobs after being at the FDA. Being nice to corporation is the way to get a high paying private sector job after being at the FDA.

Take a look at the Ranbaxy scandal. If you look at what the FDA actually does in the real world there plenty of reasons to criticise it that don't have anything to do with being pro or against regulation.

I think medicine is a very particular field of regulation. Examples from this field would generalise extremely poorly as soon as you move them in any field where a released product doesn't directly save lives or isn't designed to improve life quality.

An industry not being free to dump pollutants of unknown effect on the environment will harm marginally its own profit. This profit correlates pretty poorly with people's wellbeing, even the jobs such an industry provides aren't strongly correlated with the industry having to spend less on filters and waste disposal. But unknown chemicals dumped in the environment can reasonably be expected to correlate negatively a lot more with people well being.

The article quoted for the FDA states that the European regulatory institutions related to drugs are outperforming FDA, releasing more drugs while keeping deaths low. So the FDA seems to be an institution failing in over regulation, but that doesn't really makes evidence against regulation, especially if you consider the the European Union has an overall approach that is more leaning toward regulation than the USA. 

The question isn't "regulation: yes or no" but "regulation: how and how much". 

I don't  think the "regulation bad" side have any people that would argue for "zero regulation". We can all clearly imagine how fast things would go downhill with that. The debate should be understood as "do we have too much regulation or not at the moment?", but even that question is stupid.

Different fields of technology and industry require different approaches, because mistakes caused by over-regulating and under-regulating would have very different costs. So it would be plain madness to simply argument for "more regulation" or "less regulation" unless you had extremely good evidence that all systems were currently skewed in the same direction, which is not the direction evidence if flowing at all.

It's not just that people need to have a more rational attitude toward regulation, listing all the pro and cons honestly when deciding, if you put all those pro and cons in the same "regulation good or bad" bucket you already lost the battle for rationality and gave in to an ideological false dilemma, a dilemma that has really poisoned American culture from what I've seen.

Also: simply stating that "well, government officials would act in their interest, so regulation won't ever be reliable, nothing we can do about that" strikes me as motivated stopping. People are actually know to reliably try  doing a good job or caring about the lives their decision will end or save, if you don't dip them in a cut-throat politics environment too much.

If the incentives to do a good job are poor you can work to improve them, and also give them better tools than a sledgehammer to intervene, and knowledge about the delicate forces they're messing with. 

You don't even have to wait for promotion-hungry regulators to decide to go against their interest and reform their own system. You can have promotion-hungry politicians or utility-hungry citizens try to do that for them by perfectly selfish reasons, and yeah, you'd of course get another imperfect system who still has to react to public outcry and was shaped by other interests, but you still can try to improve from the current situation.