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> This kind of system has consistent led to regulatory capture by the licensed industry. That is indeed the intention. To counteract the financial incentives o

> This kind of system has consistent led to regulatory capture by the licensed industry. That is indeed the intention. To counteract the financial incentives of shareholders (which result in bridges collapsing or data breaches) with the financial and legal incentives of a special class of employees - licensed engineers. The reasons this works better than letting people sue after the accident has already happened [1] is because that it gets the incentives right. In sue-after model the responsibility before an accident has happened to make the product safe is quite diffuse across the whole organization, and the decision makers (C-suite) do not in fact have the expertise to determine if the product is unsafe. Giving licensed engineers veto powers over the entire C-suite and the shareholders is indeed how you concentrate responsibility at a single point. This type of licensing model has worked wonders in civil engineering, electronics engineering, law, medicine etc in improving safety standards for the public. Software engineering is not special. [1] Think letting the victims of the bridge collapse suing as the only method of preventing bridge collapses. This is not how things operate.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> To counteract the financial incentives of shareholders (which result in bridges collapsing or data breaches) with the financial and legal incentives of a special class of employees - licensed engineers. But now you have a special class of employees whose incentives are wrong in the opposite direction. They make decisions that are overly conservative, because they lose their license if the bridge collapses but by design no one can overrule them if they unnecessarily make the bridge cost four times as much. This not only makes the bridge cost many times more, it thwarts the original intention because now building new things is so expensive that we avoid doing it and instead continue to use the old things that are grandfathered in or maintained well past the end of their design life, which is even less safe in addition to being less efficient. This is why so much of our infrastructure is crumbling -- we made it prohibitively expensive to build new. > This type of licensing model has worked wonders in civil engineering, electronics engineering, law, medicine etc in improving safety standards for the public. And these things are now unaffordable as a result. Ordinary people have been priced out of legal representation and are being bankrupted by medical bills. It's not a solution, it's just a new problem. > Think letting the victims of the bridge collapse suing as the only method of preventing bridge collapses. This is not how things operate. The reason this doesn't work in that specific case is that the damage from a bridge collapse can easily exceed the entire value of the bridge-building company, so then if you go to sue them they just file bankruptcy. Which they know ahead of time and then don't have the right incentives to prevent the damage. That hardly applies to the likes of AT&T, which is not going to be bankrupted by a large damages award, but is going to want to avoid paying it out. > In sue-after model the responsibility before an accident has happened to make the product safe is quite diffuse across the whole organization, and the decision makers (C-suite) do not in fact have the expertise to determine if the product is unsafe. Neither are they expected to. They're expected to hire someone who does, but then they have the incentive to balance the cost against the harm, so they neither end up with the incentive to abandon quality nor the incentive to make everything prohibitively expensive. A real issue here is limited liability. The CEO comes in, hires low quality workers or puts them under unreasonable time constraints, gets a bonus for cutting costs and is then at another company by the time the lawsuit comes. Forget about licensing, make them personally liable for what happened under their watch (regardless of whether they still work there) and you'll get a different result. Limited liability should be for shareholders, not decisionmakers. That way the same party suffers both in the case of unreasonably high costs and in the case of unreasonably low quality and doesn't have a perverse incentive to excessively sacrifice one for the other.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  >But now you have a special class of employees whose incentives are wrong in the opposite direction. They make decisions that are overly conservative, because they lose their license if the bridge collapses but by design no one can overrule them if they unnecessarily make the bridge cost four times as much. This is not a bug. Having fewer bridges that don't collapse is better than having one fall over every day which is what's happening with data leaks now.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    It's a bug. You can't make everything cost more without bound or ordinary people can no longer afford to make rent. There has to be balance.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      You can't make houses cheap without bound either, you turn them into death traps quite quickly. Everything related to personal data is currently at the slum without firecodes level. But it also has a few unregulated nuclear reactors in the mix.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        This is the excuse used to justify the regulatory capture. There is a mile of difference between simply having fire exits vs. minimum parking requirements, de jure or de facto minimum unit sizes and density constraints. You need something that can distinguish these things, not something that provides the trash choice between none of them or all of them together.
        llm_trw 2y ago
        Using regulatory capture as an excuse why we can't stop babies from eating lead is the most brain dead take from the American left since they replaced class with race.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> To counteract the financial incentives of shareholders (which result in bridges collapsing or data breaches) with the financial and legal incentives of a special class of employees - licensed engineers. But now you have a special class of employees whose incentives are wrong in the opposite direction. They make decisions that are overly conservative, because they lose their license if the bridge collapses but by design no one can overrule them if they unnecessarily make the bridge cost four times as much. This not only makes the bridge cost many times more, it thwarts the original intention because now building new things is so expensive that we avoid doing it and instead continue to use the old things that are grandfathered in or maintained well past the end of their design life, which is even less safe in addition to being less efficient. This is why so much of our infrastructure is crumbling -- we made it prohibitively expensive to build new. > This type of licensing model has worked wonders in civil engineering, electronics engineering, law, medicine etc in improving safety standards for the public. And these things are now unaffordable as a result. Ordinary people have been priced out of legal representation and are being bankrupted by medical bills. It's not a solution, it's just a new problem. > Think letting the victims of the bridge collapse suing as the only method of preventing bridge collapses. This is not how things operate. The reason this doesn't work in that specific case is that the damage from a bridge collapse can easily exceed the entire value of the bridge-building company, so then if you go to sue them they just file bankruptcy. Which they know ahead of time and then don't have the right incentives to prevent the damage. That hardly applies to the likes of AT&T, which is not going to be bankrupted by a large damages award, but is going to want to avoid paying it out. > In sue-after model the responsibility before an accident has happened to make the product safe is quite diffuse across the whole organization, and the decision makers (C-suite) do not in fact have the expertise to determine if the product is unsafe. Neither are they expected to. They're expected to hire someone who does, but then they have the incentive to balance the cost against the harm, so they neither end up with the incentive to abandon quality nor the incentive to make everything prohibitively expensive. A real issue here is limited liability. The CEO comes in, hires low quality workers or puts them under unreasonable time constraints, gets a bonus for cutting costs and is then at another company by the time the lawsuit comes. Forget about licensing, make them personally liable for what happened under their watch (regardless of whether they still work there) and you'll get a different result. Limited liability should be for shareholders, not decisionmakers. That way the same party suffers both in the case of unreasonably high costs and in the case of unreasonably low quality and doesn't have a perverse incentive to excessively sacrifice one for the other.

llm_trw 2y ago
>But now you have a special class of employees whose incentives are wrong in the opposite direction. They make decisions that are overly conservative, because they lose their license if the bridge collapses but by design no one can overrule them if they unnecessarily make the bridge cost four times as much. This is not a bug. Having fewer bridges that don't collapse is better than having one fall over every day which is what's happening with data leaks now.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  It's a bug. You can't make everything cost more without bound or ordinary people can no longer afford to make rent. There has to be balance.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    You can't make houses cheap without bound either, you turn them into death traps quite quickly. Everything related to personal data is currently at the slum without firecodes level. But it also has a few unregulated nuclear reactors in the mix.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      This is the excuse used to justify the regulatory capture. There is a mile of difference between simply having fire exits vs. minimum parking requirements, de jure or de facto minimum unit sizes and density constraints. You need something that can distinguish these things, not something that provides the trash choice between none of them or all of them together.
      - llm_trw 2y ago
        Using regulatory capture as an excuse why we can't stop babies from eating lead is the most brain dead take from the American left since they replaced class with race.