Thanks for your response.
This is however supposed to be the community founded by a guy who spent two years writing variations on the theme: "do not rationalize away that feeling that something 's off!" and litterally wrote the book on inadequate equilibria. So while social pressure and common human failings explain away some of it, it still seems weird that no one is writing about having the same reaction.
I mean, there hasn't even been anyone using the catchphrase: "FDA delenda est!"
Has to the non law-abiding nature of said companies. Is it notably more common than in any other highly regulated field? Do car producers get away with cheating more or less regularly for instance?
I'd like to register how WEIRD this is as regards my previous model of the world. The existence of protection from liability was a known fact, but the INexistence of obligations for basic placebo tests wasn't.
I'd also like to register how much this looks to me like an inadequate equilibrium and how little chance it seems to me there would be of a competent society choosing to create a system where products are produced by companies with such low demands of validating tests, under oversight by government agencies funded by their contributions and whose personnel is regularly the same as theirs, give or take a few years of career, and then administered to a population who are regularly under legal obligations to use these products and who are legally prohibited from seeking reparations from damages incurred if said products end up being unsafe.
I'd finally like to register the fact that neither of the other two comments currently posted seem to have had such red alarm bells pop up in their mental processes or did not even notice when said alarm bells rang. I understand seeking reasons for the current equilibrium, but I'd like to think you start off by noticing it seems broken rather than searching for reasons to rationalize it. Of course, it may simply be that nothing said in the post was news to the other responders.
I'd still like to ask, "would you agree that, at the very least, this seems like a very broken system, even if there may exist very good reasons why it is broken in such ways?"
Interesting experience: I attempted to read the sequences ~10 years ago but kept getting sidetracked and put out of order by clicking all the links. This time, I decided to try again, but forced myself to read each post in order. All this to say that I read this post chronologically close to after reading "your strength as a rationalist". I can't evaluate how relevant this fact is, but I had alarm bells ringing in my head when reading the statements 3, 4, and 5. 4 especially was so incoherent to my model that I immediately thought there had to be a trick. Basically, my model:
I'm not certain of how I did the first time I read this post, but I'm quite certain I didn't do as well. So I'm wondering if I've gotten stronger or if it's due to the reading order.
Quick question: isn't the US depending on China for most or all of its rare earth processing ?
I'd argue the complexity of information gathering and crappy UI of voter punishment or reward are more relevant to politics. A good model of where to start might be an efficient market of many educated actors being able to fix the political power of polticians the same way current markets fix the price of stocks today. There's already a relatively open field for actors willing to become journalists or podcasters so the media moving piece in the current system is less systematically broken. It's also a component in sufficient other systems that are less broken than politics that we should expect it possible to keep the current media and still have better efficiency that today be attaignable.
Not sure how to implement the specifics, however...
The greatest positive effect of this article on my psyche is to actually allow me to conceive of a time period BEFORE anyone located the seat of the mind inside the brain or even inside the skull. It even goes a long way towards allowing me to put myself in the headspace of one who believed the heart to be the master organ. In short, it shines a light on how non obvious the elements of common knowledge are.