Comment by wooby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wooby | Hacker News Reader

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What upsets you about other people using their own money to buy placebos, other than the fact that you can't understand why? At this very moment, millions of people across the globe are buying things for themselves you would never buy for yourself.

Has it occurred to you that the health supplement buyer is in a much better position to decide how to allocate their money than you are? You have limited, aggregate information; they have a total view of their own finances and life situation, and are willing to devote their own time to research their personal decision to buy. For example, they might discover through research that a supplement generally regarded as a placebo has a benefit under circumstances known only to the them.

When you limit the choices of others, based only on general information or your personal perspective, you limit the set of choices others may take. If you do this long enough, you might find yourself some day prohibited from buying something you desperately need, because your situation is an exception to some general rule that nobody ever considered.

The FDA might have made sense at a time when most people were illiterate and information was hard to come by. Now that most (at least in the US) are literate, and own smartphones, taking away choices for the benefit of some hypothetical illiterate serves only to worsen the life of the average person.

> The FDA might have made sense at a time when most people were illiterate and information was hard to come by.

The FDA was established at a time when virtually the entire population of the US was literate [1]. While I don't have the heart to look up statistics, I suspect that the US at the time had the highest (or at least among the highest) newspaper penetration of any country, and that newspaper penetration would have been quite higher than today. Public libraries and schools would have been in full flourish too, by that time. My grandparents grew up on farms on the edges of the High Plains--where you would expect to find the most bumpkin of country bumpkins--and illiterate and ignorant they were not.

For someone whose argument is that the federal agency is necessary only because of public ignorance, you sure seem to be modelling that ignorance you think no longer exists. The problem with your argument is that you neglect to reason that both information and misinformation are incredibly easy to come by, and most people are unwilling or unable to differentiate between them.

[1] It is worth pointing out that, if you measure literacy by the ability to read in your native language, Western Europe has been majority literate for over a millennium.

Nobody is arguing that the population of the US was illiterate when the FDA was established. The argument is that it might have made sense at a time when the US population was illiterate, but now that everyone has access to a world of knowledge in the palm of their hand 24x7x365 the FDA does not make sense.

The argument was that the FDA never made sense, not even when it was first established in America, and for precisely that reason -- Americans were not illiterate.

You're right, that last paragraph is a flawed argument. I retract it, and your findings compel me to assert that I think there was probably never a good reason for the FDA.

But it's the second, and weaker, of the two arguments I made. The argument I develop in my first three paragraphs stands.

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