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Comment by actionfromafar | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, maybe the system didn't over-react. There are still bozos out there, unfortunately. But better to pay the cost in commitees than in blood.

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We pay for those committees in blood too, of people who could've been saved by new treatments or devices, but died while the R&D was bogged down in all those bureaucratic rituals.

Since either way, we pay in blood, the question is really about finding the right balance.

True. When is the time to remove from checklists, and when is the time to add to them. If the feedback-loop isn't properly closed, you get imbalance.

Thing is removing checklists very rarely happens. Almost nobody votes "Yes, let's have a bunch of deaths in the name of (potential) progress". But on the other hand the great majority enthusiastically supports adding more rules and regulations to "save lives".

The system is unbalanced by default.

Sadly, heaps of paperwork with checklists does relatively little to protect safety in the end. Everyone just spends a lot of time filling out paperwork to justify whatever thing they want to do. At least when it comes to corporations and regulator oversight, the companies ultimately will continue to do whatever harm they were doing they just have to dedicate a large fraction of their resources to creating loads of paperwork that proves how compliant they are.

Actually corporations are naturally balanced by the free market: the competition and their customers (whose needs they must serve in order to even exist) keep them very well in check.

Regulations pretend to "improve" this but inevitably skew the balance to the side of safety, leading to ossification, stagnation, loss of competition and lack of innovation.

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