4 ms·

This argument seems a little, I dunno if I have the right word for it - pointless? Picking on doctors seems popular when it comes to professional regulation, b

This argument seems a little, I dunno if I have the right word for it - pointless? Picking on doctors seems popular when it comes to professional regulation, but in reality we do this every day for everything that is non-trivial that we can't fully understand ourselves. So we bring doctors under state regulation (rather than self-regulation via the AMA) - who will run this regulatory agency? I hope your answer is "doctors" because any other answer is nuts, and would remind me of the Cultural Revolution where the distrusted intelligentsia were systematically ousted from positions of authority and replaced with proletariats. And then millions of people died from insane agricultural, industrial, and medical policy... All professions that are non-trivial are always going to be largely self-regulating, because its members are the only people qualified to regulate it. Which isn't to say that this doesn't pose risk for corruption and conflicts of interest, or that self-regulation shouldn't answer to the population at large, but the idea that this delegation is somehow sycophantly or somehow inherently bad is... silly. The regulatory systems we establish - whether self-regulating or regulated via state policy - are a bargain. They're imperfect but there is no other way about it, unless you want to go down the path of having architects dictate medical policy or doctors dictate building codes. (though I do detect the sentiment of "software engineers should dictate everything" a lot on HN) This whole blog post has shades of anti-intellectualism that creeps me out a bit - that assume that the intelligentsia must be malicious, and that they have somehow subjugated the rest of society to their whims. We've heard this rhetoric before, and it didn't lead anywhere good.

jjaredsimpson 11y ago
>This whole blog post has shades of anti-intellectualism that creeps me out a bit - that assume that the intelligentsia must be malicious I don't agree. I think the point of the article is about the nature of the exchange. >in this supposed bargain, what we give the professionals is concrete and clearly valuable, while what they give us (over what we’d get without the deal) is vague and very hard for us to check. and >There is actually no bargain, there is just the rest of us submitting to professionals’ prestige. Cheaper yet outcome-effective substitutes to expensive professionals have long been physically available, and yet we have mostly not chosen those substitutes due to our eagerness to affiliate with prestigious professionals. I don't see an argument to change regulatory structures in the article.

jjaredsimpson 11y ago

>This whole blog post has shades of anti-intellectualism that creeps me out a bit - that assume that the intelligentsia must be malicious I don't agree. I think the point of the article is about the nature of the exchange. >in this supposed bargain, what we give the professionals is concrete and clearly valuable, while what they give us (over what we’d get without the deal) is vague and very hard for us to check. and >There is actually no bargain, there is just the rest of us submitting to professionals’ prestige. Cheaper yet outcome-effective substitutes to expensive professionals have long been physically available, and yet we have mostly not chosen those substitutes due to our eagerness to affiliate with prestigious professionals. I don't see an argument to change regulatory structures in the article.