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1. Embed this notice
   Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:42:16 JST Cory Doctorow

   Since Trump hijacked the Supreme Court, his backers have achieved many of their policy priorities: legalizing bribery, formalizing forced birth, and - with the *Loper Bright* case, neutering the expert agencies that regulate business:

   https://jacobin.com/2024/07/scotus-decisions-chevron-immunity-loper

   --

   If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

   https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/21/policy-based-evidence/#decisions-decisions

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:42:41 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     What the Supreme Court began, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are now poised to finish, through the "Department of Government Efficiency," a fake agency whose acronym ("DOGE") continues Musk's long-running cryptocurrency memecoin pump-and-dump. The new department is absurd - imagine a department devoted to "efficiency" with two co-equal leaders who are both famously incapable of getting along with anyone - but that doesn't make it any less dangerous.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:42:53 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Expert agencies are often all that stands between us and extreme misadventure, even death. The modern world is full of modern questions, the kinds of questions that require a high degree of expert knowledge to answer, but also the kinds of questions whose answers you'd better get right.

     You're not stupid, nor are you foolish. You could go and learn everything you need to know to evaluate the firmware on your antilock brakes and decide whether to trust them.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:43:02 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     You could figure out how to assess the Common Core curriculum for pedagogical soundness. You could learn the material science needed to evaluate the soundness of the joists that hold the roof up over your head. You could acquire the biology and chemistry chops to decide whether you want to trust produce that's been treated with Monsanto's Roundup pesticides.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:43:13 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     You could do the same for cell biology, virology, and epidemiology and decide whether to wear a mask and/or get an MRNA vaccine and/or buy a HEPA filter.

     You *could* do any of these. You might even be able to do two or three of them. But you can't do all of them, and that list is just a small slice of all the highly technical questions that stand between you and misery or an early grave.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:43:25 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Practically speaking, you aren't going to develop your own robust meatpacking hygiene standards, nor your own water treatment program, nor your own Boeing 737 MAX inspection protocol.

     Markets don't solve this either. If they did, we wouldn't have to worry about chunks of Boeing jets falling on our heads.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:43:42 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The *reason* we have agencies like the FDA (and enabling legislation like the Pure Food and Drug Act) is that markets failed to keep people from being murdered by profit-seeking snake-oil salesmen and radium suppository peddlers.

     These vital questions need to be answered by experts, but that's easier said than done. After all, experts disagree about this stuff.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:43:55 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Shortcuts for evaluating these disagreements ("distrust any expert whose employer has a stake in a technical question") are crude and often lead you astray. If you dismiss any expert employed by a firm that wants to bring a new product to market, you will lose out on the expertise of people who are so legitimately excited about the potential improvements of an idea that they quit their jobs and go to work for whomever has the best chance of realizing a product based on it.

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:44:06 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Sure, that doctor who works for a company with a new cancer cure might just be shilling for a big bonus - but maybe they joined the company because they have an informed, truthful belief that the new drug might *really* cure cancer.

     What's more, the scientific method itself speaks against the idea of there being one, permanent answer to *any* big question.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:44:16 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The method is designed as a process of continual refinement, where new evidence is continuously brought forward and evaluated, and where cherished ideas that are invalidated by new evidence are discarded and replaced with new ideas.

     So how are we to survive and thrive in a world of questions we ourselves can't answer, that experts disagree about, and whose answers are only ever provisional?

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:44:25 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The scientific method has an answer for this, too: refereed, adversarial peer review. The editors of major journals act as umpires in disputes among experts, exercising their editorial discernment to decide which questions are sufficiently in flux as to warrant taking up, then asking parties who disagree with a novel idea to do their damndest to punch holes in it.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:44:36 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This process is by no means perfect, but, like democracy, it's the worst form of knowledge creation except for all others which have been tried.

     Expert regulators bring this method to governance. They seek comment on technical matters of public concern, propose regulations based on them, invite all parties to comment on these regulations, weigh the evidence, and then pass a rule.

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:44:49 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This doesn't always get it right, but when it does work, your medicine doesn't poison you, the bridge doesn't collapse as you drive over it, and your airplane doesn't fall out of the sky.

     Expert regulators work with legislators to provide an empirical basis for turning political choices into empirically grounded policies.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:44:59 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Think of all the times you've heard about how the gerontocracy that dominates the House and the Senate is incapable of making good internet policy because "they're out of touch and don't understand technology." Even if this is true (and sometimes it is, as when Sen Ted Stevens ranted about the internet being "a series of tubes," not "a dump truck"), that doesn't mean that Congress can't make good internet policy.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:45:08 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     After all, most Americans can safely drink their tap water, a novelty in human civilization, whose history amounts to short periods of thriving shattered at regular intervals by water-borne plagues. The fact that most of us can safely drink our water, but people who live in Flint (or remote indigenous reservations, or Louisiana's Cancer Alley) *can't* tells you that these neighbors of ours are being deliberately poisoned, as we know precisely how *not* to poison them.

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:45:16 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     How did we (most of us) get to the point where we can drink the water without shitting our guts out? It wasn't because we elected a bunch of water scientists! I don't know the precise number of microbiologists and water experts who've been elected to either house, but it's *very* small, and their contribution to good sanitation policy is negligible.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:45:48 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     We got there by delegating these decisions to expert agencies. Congress formulates a political policy ("make water safe") and the agency turns that policy into a technical program of regulation and enforcement, so your children live to drink a glass of water tomorrow.

     Musk and Ramaswamy have set out to destroy this process. In their *Wall Street Journal* editorial, they explain that expert regulation is "undemocratic" because experts aren't elected:

     https://www.wsj.com/opinion/musk-and-ramaswamy-the-doge-plan-to-reform-government-supreme-court-guidance-end-executive-power-grab-fa51c020

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:45:57 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     They've vowed to remove "thousands" of regulations, and to fire swathes of federal employees who are in charge of enforcing whatever remains:

     https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/20/24301975/elon-musk-vivek-ramaswamy-doge-plan

     And all this is meant to take place on an accelerated timeline, between now and July 4, 2026 - a timeline that precludes any meaningful assessment of the likely consequences of abolishing the regulations they'll get rid of.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:46:14 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     "Chesterton's Fence" - a thought experiment from the novelist GK Chesterton - is instructive here:

     > There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away."

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:46:27 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     > To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:46:34 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     A regulation that works might well produce no visible sign that it's working. If your water purification system works, everything is fine. It's only when you get rid of the sanitation system that you discover why it was there in the first place, a realization that might well arrive as you expire in a slick of watery stool with a rectum so prolapsed the survivors can use it as a handle when they drag your corpse to the mass burial pits.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:46:47 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     When Musk and Ramaswamy decry the influence of "unelected bureaucrats" on your life as "undemocratic," they sound reasonable. If unelected bureaucrats were permitted to set policy without democratic instruction or oversight, that *would* be autocracy.

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:46:56 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Indeed, it would resemble life on the Tesla factory floor: that most autocratic of institutions, where you are at the mercy of the unelected and unqualified CEO of Tesla, who holds the purely ceremonial title of "Chief Engineer" and who paid the company's true founders to falsely describe him as its founder.

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:47:07 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     But that's not how it works! At its best, expert regulations turns political choices in to policy that reflects the will of democratically accountable, elected representatives. Sometimes this fails, and when it does, the answer is to fix the system - not abolish it.

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:47:17 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     I have a favorite example of this politics/empiricism fusion. It comes from the UK, where, in 2008, the eminent psychopharmacologist David Nutt was appointed as the "drug czar" to the government. Parliament had determined to overhaul its system of drug classification, and they wanted expert advice:

     https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:47:52 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     To provide this advice, Nutt convened a panel of drug experts from different disciplines and asked them to rate each drug in question on how dangerous it was for its user; for its user's family; and for broader society. These rankings were averaged, and then a statistical model was used to determine which drugs were *always* very dangerous, no matter which group's safety you prioritized, and which drugs were *never* very dangerous, no matter which group you prioritized.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:48:05 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Empirically, the "always dangerous" drugs should be in the most restricted category. The "never very dangerous" drugs should be at the other end of the scale. Parliament had asked how to rank drugs by their danger, and for these categories, there were clear, factual answers to Parliament's question.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:48:14 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     But there were many drugs that didn't always belong in either category: drugs whose danger score changed dramatically based on whether you were more concerned about individual harms, familial harms, or societal harms. This prioritization has no empirical basis: it's a purely political question.

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   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:48:22 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     So Nutt and his panel said to Parliament, "Tell us which of these priorities matter the most to you, and we will tell you where these changeable drugs belong in your schedule of restricted substances." In other words, politicians make political determinations, and then experts turn those choices into empirically supported policies.

     *This* is how policy by "unelected bureaucrats" can still be "democratic."

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:48:31 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     But the Nutt story doesn't end there. Nutt butted heads with politicians, who kept insisting that he retract factual, evidence-supported statements (like "alcohol is more harmful than cannabis"). Nutt refused to do so. It wasn't that he was telling politicians which decisions to make, but he took it as his duty to point out when those decisions did not reflect the policies they were said to be in support of.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:48:38 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Eventually, Nutt was fired for his commitment to empirical truth. The UK press dubbed this "The Nutt Sack Affair" and you can read all about it in Nutt's superb book *Drugs Without the Hot Air*, an indispensable primer on the drug war and its many harms:

     https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/drugs-without-the-hot-air-9780857844989/

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:48:46 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Congress can't make these decisions. We don't elect enough water experts, virologists, geologists, oncology researchers, structural engineers, aerospace safety experts, pedagogists, gerontoloists, physicists and other experts for Congress to turn its political choices into policy. Mostly, we elect lawyers. Lawyers can do many things, but if you ask a lawyer to tell you how to make your drinking water safe, you will likely die a horrible death.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:49:17 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     That's the point. The idea that we should just trust the market to figure this out, or that all regulation should be expressly written into law, is just a way of saying, "you will likely die a horrible death."

     Trump - and his hatchet men Musk and Ramaswamy - are not setting out to create evidence-based policy. They are pursuing policy-based *evidence*, firing everyone capable of telling them how to turn the values espouse (prosperity and safety for all Americans) into policy.

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     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 19:49:22 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     They dress this up in the language of democracy, but the destruction of the expert agencies that turn the political will of our representatives into our daily lives is anything but democratic. It's a prelude to transforming the nation into a land of epistemological chaos, where you never know what's coming out of your faucet.

     eof/

   • Embed this notice
     Alien BOB (alien@fosstodon.org)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 20:17:49 JST Alien BOB

     in reply to

     @pluralistic thanks for a terrific and in some ways also terrifying write-up!

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 21:14:40 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     • Comrade elronxenu

     @elronxenu No, that badly misses the point. You couldn't master all of those subjects unless you lived to the age of 1,000.

   • Embed this notice
     Comrade elronxenu (elronxenu@mastodon.cloud)'s status on Thursday, 21-Nov-2024 21:14:41 JST Comrade elronxenu

     in reply to

     @pluralistic You could do all these things, but you're lazy and hard of thinking, and the newspapers are full of people saying opposite things, so you learn to distrust all experts and only believe what the Dear Leader tells you with your own eyes and ears. You filter all new information through your existing prejudices and whether or not the information supports the Dear Leader.