I trust my herd's ways
Because they have stood the test of time
I may have been giving you a wrong impression. I’ve talked a few times about using my hind legs to kick somebody off of our land. One time, I even mentioned that I’d be prepared to kick to kill. All of that is true. I’ll kick if I’m under threat, but only in that case. There are so many things going on right now that worry me, but life is still good here at the ranch. I don’t just kick everybody around. There are many good people here and I am a good pony. I take care of the people I trust. Bob an Jack can ride me as long as they please and most visitors are welcome to as well. But then there are those visitors who aren’t. Why are they not welcome? Because they have not earned my trust, and for very good reasons.
It seems natural to me not to just trust anybody, be they humans or animals. Mainstream media organizations, which exist to project elite opinions into the broad public, seem to think otherwise. Polls have been indicating for a while that the public has lost trust in government institutions. A poll by Pew Research Center recently confirmed this result in the United States, where only about one in five citizens think that the government acts in their interest “most of the time” and a puny two percent think that the government acts in their interest all the time. Similar observations can be made about different Western countries and about the public’s trust in scientific disciplines, such as medicine and public health, both of which fail to be trusted by more than 40% of respondents.
Elites have been worried about this trend for a while. They are advocating for measures to increase public trust. However, in their self-conceit, they fail to identify that there might actually be underlying reasons for the public’s distrust in agencies, such as an agency divulging demonstrable falsehoods or the agency failing to do its job to protect the public. One good example is the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which has had a great track record at assuring that a certain aircraft meet all safety standards prior to certification for commercial flights. Until 2019, that is. In the most recent case of certification of a commercial jetliner, Boeing’s 737 MAX series, it only took two crashes that killed a few hundreds of passengers before a flaw was detected in the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which forced the plane’s nose down unless overruled by the pilot. Boeing’s prodigy child was consecutively grounded for about two years, until the flaw was fixed and the plane was recertified. Given this recent track record, I would have less confidence in the FAA the next time they certify a new jetliner… At the same time, there is a very simple solution to increase my trust in the FAA. That is, by making sure that I have the impression that it acts in the interest of the public, instead of in Boeing’s. Similar observations can be made about other US based agencies, as well as about their counterparts in other countries.
Instead of advocating for steps to increase agencies’ transparency or reliability, elites seem to have set off on the path to blame erosion of trust in them on “misinformation.” The United Nations, which continues to fail to deliver on its core mission to prevent war, instead has started to pretend that, rather than bullets and bombs, “misinformation kills people” and a “pact” is needed to counter online “misinformation.” At the same time, they still fail to prevent war, or to stop ongoing conflicts. Similarly, in a medical context, fresh British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer once stated that “misinformation kills people” and that “if need be, we can pass emergency laws” to censor content critical of certain medical interventions, such as vaccines. He is not the only one having made such statements. Until late 2021, social media company Discord, mostly popular among gamers and developers, had a very open debate policy, as its name suggests. However, by late 2021, the company decided to ridicule its own name by implementing a content moderation policy that would only allow comments in line with the most recent policy from the health authorities. In practice, this implied that users would violate Discord’s policy if they did as much as mention that health authorities had said something different from the latest guidance just a day earlier. Moreover, Discord would sanction accounts that “undermined trust in health authorities, such as the FDA approval process.” Today, they have relaxed these standards by a smidge, but it is still not allowed to have an open discussion on statements from organizations like the World Health Organization on their platform.
All of these elements fit into the pattern of authorities pushing towards a culture in which an open conversation is deemed “harmful” and in which they believe that serious matters can best be sorted out and decided by a “technocracy,” rather than by a democracy. There are many reasons to resist the so-called merits of a “technocratic government,” though. To arrive at a potentially functional technocracy, the technocrats need to act with integrity and put the public’s interest above their own. Moreover, they should both have the grits and the technical skills to make the right decisions. Right now, we see agencies failing in each of these aspects. Some members of regulatory bodies receive royalties from the industries they are supposed to regulate. Regulatory bodies are also prone to the broader societal trend in which people expect that the answer to any question, even on very complex matters, is just a few mouse clicks away. This results in an unwillingness or inaptitude to accomplish lengthy, pesky analyses, just like the ones that are required in regulatory approval.
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The reason why a “technocratic” government will never work, is very simple: its members are humans, with human flaws, such as greed, lack of integrity, laziness, or entitlement. For those reasons, the government can only be kept in balance by external forces. Such forces can be independent reviewers, press, auditors, legislators or the judicial branch. We need all of these forces to be independent of the ruling government. Unfortunately, this is less true today than it was just twenty years ago. The result is evident. Twenty years ago, freshly certified jetliners did not fall from the sky. Now they do.
I’m not here to lament all the time. You’ll remember that here at the ranch, we fix things and that we don’t “fix” broken fences by imposing a tax on horse farts. So, let’s suggest a better way to set up regulatory approval. We can easily make the process of regulatory approval more objective and transparent by crowd-sourcing it and by creating a process germane to peer review in the scientific community, albeit more rigorous. We should require that every new entity to be certified be subjected to an approval process that involves review by at least five teams. One team can be set up by the applicant (corporation) and a second team can consist of members of the government agency, as would be the case today. However, there should also be teams representing one or more of the applicant’s competitors, at least one team that consists of academic subject matter experts and one team of mixed, independent experts. It would be a prerequisite that none of the team members of the academic and independent teams receive any funding from the applicant(s), nor hold any financial interest in them.
The regulatory approval process should be paid for by the applicant(s). The government agency’s role then becomes twofold: at first, to manage the approval process: to make sure that each of the teams receives an appropriate portion of the funding and to set up regular meetings and milestones and to align deliverables. Secondly, the government agency still manages its own team. However, certification can only be obtained if four out of five teams agree. This may sound involved, but when potentially thousands of lives are at stake, we do not have an option other than to be rigorous and we also cannot afford any form of corruption.
This new process could readily be implemented in other branches of government: let the government be there to guide and assist the assessment, yet not as the final decision maker. In today’s world, though, there are attempts at the opposite. For instance, the World Health Organization intends to move the decision making process for health policy up to a set of unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats at the global level. If passed, that can only lead to unprecedented levels of corruption.
The regulatory approval process put forth here would work well for any product with a large societal impact, such as modes of transportation, dangerous manufacturing processes, novel techniques or products in agriculture or in the food supply chain, as well as medical procedures, including pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. The latter happens to be another area where we have recently aborted rigour. Yes, Discord, we have. Please update your content moderation guidelines, because, as it stands, we have no clue of what the long term effects of some recently approved products will be. We could only have investigated long term risks by carrying out longitudinal studies, but, as it happens, those cannot be conducted at “warp speed.” Yet unfortunately, this is another area where we cannot afford to be sloppy, nor corrupted.
I am a good pony. When I was young, I took several equine vaccines. I know one thing for sure though. As long as the approval process is what it is, I don’t need any new ones. And here is another thing. My trust in this process will not increase if it becomes illegal to discuss its flaws. Rather to the contrary. Until we return to objective standards and reliable, transparent approval processes, I will stick to ivermectin. It is a great dewormer. As to the planes, I can only hope that they don’t crash on my head.
(To the interested reader: I have recently been posting short comments and preview snippets on X. A warm welcome to every reader who joins the herd there!)
I love your writing wild horse, I’m going to use this as a foundation for my letters to politicians on the misinformation bill they are debating. Your horse words soothe me.