[kurthr]

The political uncertainties of western countries where "there is no truth" and "facts don't matter" could easily bring this level of systemic corruption to them as well. People love to rage bait and say how bad it is now, but that seems to have largely led to groups giving up on enforcing norms, and bodes poorly for the future.

[pjc50]

There's a lot of money for the few in systematic corruption! This is something that has to be constantly fought against. R have embraced it entirely, but it's also prevalent on the D side especially in machine-politics cities. Which is why everyone's really so upset about the NY Mayor primary. People have gone on record in the papers about being annoyed that the bribes - sorry, donations - they prepaid to Cuomo are now invalid.

[ggm]

Leo Szilard (he's credited with theorising purposeful fission and patenting core ideas long before the Manhattan project got off the ground) wrote a long time ago about a (dys/u)topia where technocrats made the decisions. He had this idea "the bund" would fix politics by moving decision making to pure evidence based rational methods.

It wouldn't work, but when I see appeals to authority (FDA) enter the room, it's usually to feel superior because its a logical fallacy in argument but the place it actually fits (which btw, is here, in this thread) is that compliance to standards and policing them, is not "argument" it's the "you only had one job" part of the gig.

"yes Mr Kennedy, these friends of yours are very nice at parties, but unfortunately they are neither qualified, nor actually capable of fulfilling their role and so no, you won't be appointing them" is what the Bund would do.

Being able to take a compliance body oversight function and leverage it to remove adjuvents because of one paper, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is precisely whats wrong in the current politicised situation.

If people making generic cancer drugs for use in africa had to be held to the standards in the west, we'd all be better off. I have said elsewhere that if the US rejects flu vaccines because of the mercury, they should be checked for other compliance and standards, and subject to cold chain integrity shipped to economies who usually can't afford them, and can use them.

[potato3732842]

>"yes Mr Kennedy, these friends of yours are very nice at parties, but unfortunately they are neither qualified, nor actually capable of fulfilling their role and so no, you won't be appointing them" is what the Bund would do.

The irony here being that the degree to which Kennedy and Johnson bungled 'nam was in large part a doing of the professionals with their academic attitudes about how foreign policy and war ought to be conducted. Obviously you don't get do-overs with history but it's very possible that Kennedy's preferred cabal of self serving frat bros would have concluded "the Vietnamese are screwed either way but we come out looking better not escalating, dominoes be damned".

>If people making generic cancer drugs for use in africa had to be held to the standards in the west, we'd all be better off.

How can you say that without an understanding of how much it would shrink the market in Africa?

$600 "perfect" insulin vs $50 "good enough" insulin. Metaphorically speaking.

[gsf_emergency_2]

Too mind-fogged to help you out here..

just wanted to point ou his most famous patent, the Einstein-Szilard fridge

(considerably less famous than the Einstein-Szilard letter, so I feel there's another argument for or against technocracy right there)

[ggm]

Because of concerns how toxic ammonia was, and how common leaks. Turned out to be useful many decades later when they were designing the cold chain for the H Bomb before solid duterium/lithium came along.

[elcritch]

Ah yes because technocrats are never prone to groupthink or missing the forest because of the trees, et cetera.

There was a fascinating article I read years back about how much of China’s top leadership had engineering degrees, unlike in western countries. Then the article pointed out how that led to things like the one-child act based on research in the 1970s predicting mass starvation. That one child policy is now leading to possible demographic collapse after causing decades of social strife.

Be careful what you wish for, as you’re possibly a variable which could optimized out.

Alternatively consider the long term ramifications of leaving pandemic responses purely in the hands of unelected epidemiologists whose primary focus is a virus and not the overall welfare of a population. Those are not the same thing after all, even if they seem like it at first glance.

IMHO, alternative means of thinking are needed in a governmental system for the best overall outcomes.

[ggm]

hence (dys/u)topia above. I think Szilard was off his rocker when he proposed this, it was before he had much to do with Teller. I suspect after the events of the bomb, he might have changed his mind.

(he wrote rather bad scifi about talking to dolphins. Somebody else, Pierre Boule wrote it much more sexy/exciting, that became "the day of the dolphin")

[gsf_emergency_2]

He didn't change his mind, he was defeated by other (better socialized) technocrats

https://www.palladiummag.com/2021/03/16/leo-szilards-failed-...

Technocracies tend to be more accountable than cults of personality and even nontechnical intellects (Kissingers) there's that

[elcritch]

Ah it wasn’t quite clear if you were for or against the notion.

Bad dolphin sci-fi sounds a bit too much for my tastes. Though it’s often the border line crazy folks who give us some of the best ideas or stories. Though they also often need refinement by, uh, more standard people. I say that as an ADHDer who sometimes benefits from the same.

See more rational for needing mixed viewpoints!

[selimthegrim]

Is John C. Lilly good dolphin sci-fi?

[Nasrudith]

There is a punchline to the one child policy and all of the problems and suffering it caused. They could have just encouraged having kids later in life like at 25 instead of ar 18 and reduced it with fae fewer side effects. With exponentials compounding over time, delay is as good as reducing the count and far less invasive - scientests and engineers should have known that! Not a funny punchline but one all the same. But China chose a path of maximum violence and minimal personal choice.

Really the biggest problem with a technocracy is that power corrupts, and that people already refuse to admit when they were wrong because it would be detrimental to themselves. Make the metrics of what is right the key to power, especially with no objective arbiter and you'll see shit pretty much indistinguishable from Lysenkoism. As seen with the Great Leap Forward and its 'immovations' in agriculture, it is a road towards madness, not an accelerated path to progress.

Might makes right and war in general have many, many, many things wrong with them and should not be looked towards as some sort of ideal. But such conflicts forces objective verification of the technologies, tactics, and strategies and force science to be real to succeed. You cannot rely upon Lysenkoism to feed your armies because it is not real. If you insist that bullets cannot harm you because of your breathing techniques even if you convinced others of your bullshit it won't save you from a gun. But conversely if you insist you are protected from bullets by the right ceramics and kevlar even those who sneer at you for "using pottery for armor" if it blocks bullets and absorbs kinetic force it is right and thus "scientific" in a way.

[GuinansEyebrows]

american right-libertarianism is a thought-terminating ideology. "government bad, only private sector good" presupposes that we can't collectively provide services to residents/citizens, even when that's proven very effective in other countries.

[firesteelrain]

I don’t see how. FDA is widely respected.

[thfuran]

The FDA has been approving generics from factories known to have repeatedly failed prior audits or had products recalled for quality issues without re-inspecting the factories or inspecting the drugs on import. And they're doing it via a special process that bypasses the ordinary review process and over the objections of many of the inspectors.

[reginald78]

Was just reading about this one a few weeks ago, I couldn't find the article again but I believe it was based around the book Bottle of Lies. Basically the political pressure to keep drugs available and costs down has them looking the other way. And it has been going on since at least the Obama administration IIRC.

[nathan_compton]

15 years ago the president was widely respected.

[hinkley]

16 years ago not so much.

[amluto]

In both cases, the FDA was generally run and staffed by non-political people who were at least vaguely competent. I have plenty of issues with how the FDA operated, but it didn’t matter much who was president.

Today, most of the Cabinet positions are held by people who love to talk, who are generally extremely wealthy and/or well connected, and who are generally unqualified for their jobs. And, even more relevantly, they have been very heavily interfering in the operation of their respective departments.

[s_dev]

Not after the opioid crisis in the US. That was the job of the FDA to prevent that exact scenario. They approved Purdue Pharma opioids for non-chronic usage when European/Canadian regulators did not. Hence why the crisis was largely contained to the United States.

[nickff]

Canada has had many opioid-related overdoses and deaths: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/substance-related-harms/op...

The numbers seems roughly proportional to US opioid deaths (though I haven’t taken a detailed look, and there may be differences in the way deaths are categorized): https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...

[protocolture]

Is it?

Australia wont import FDA certified beef. For great reason.

[firesteelrain]

I think you mean USDA.

Australia doesn’t allow most USDA beef because of strict biosecurity rules.

Australia’s one of the world’s biggest beef exporters. There’s not much incentive for them to open the door to a competitor unless the protocols align perfectly.

[protocolture]

So the FDA has no hand in Beef?

[firesteelrain]

To my knowledge no