Comment by gigatree
3 days ago
Have you considered that those experts might have perverse incentives? It’s not a secret that the very regulators whose job it is to make sure we don’t eat poison are the same people who sell the food. But sure feel free to “trust the experts”, I’ll be over here doing my best to not eat things made out of coal tar (even if someone in a lab coat says it’s okie dokie).
Every single thing in our society has perverse incentives. Every single person who ever sells you something has incentive to sell you as little as possible for as much money as possible. Every single employer has incentive to pay you as little as possible for as much labor as possible. But that's not how things end up happening, because other forces are at play.
People who worked their entire life in an industry and became experts on it, then become regulators for the same industry, have incentives to favor their industry, sure. But who else should be regulating the industry if not the expert in that industry? If you get someone who is not an insider, wouldn't they just fail at regulating, because they have no idea how it works? Also, the people who put someone in that position, isn't there a chain of accountability there? There are many people working side by side with the "evil person trying to enrich themselves". Bad acts come out. Incentives tend to balance each other out. It's not wrong that part of a regulator's job is to find a balance as to not destroy an industry while regulating it.
> But that's not how things end up happening, because other forces are at play.
Is it really not how things end up happening? We must be living in two different realities. The greater the power, the higher the likelihood it becomes corrupted. With such a high incentive to give into corruption, you can’t just hand-wave it away with “but I’m sure it gets balanced out by something”. Your local family doctor might be a good enough person to help you get better without expensive drugs, but the head of a large institution? Fat chance.
That feeling you just expressed of higher trust to your local doctor than to a head of a large institution: it came from having a pretty good idea what your local doctor does, and no idea what a head of an institution does. The growing problem with cynicism in our society is not because there's evidence of corruption, it's because nobody knows how anything works, but everybody gets fed "look at these bad incentives" by pundits (especially alternative media ones) all day. Everything is complex. Just because it is doesn't make it nefarious.
An institution's whole point is to be a system where you don't have to trust individuals. It's a way to deal with complex nature of our reality. People should really learn what institutions are, how they function, what accountability mechanisms they contain, instead of blaming them based on conjecture. "Look, this bad thing happened. And this person has this bad incentive. Now we know the whole story." We don't.
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