If you keep posting unsubstantive comments or flamebait to HN, we will ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Banning someone for expressing opinions you disagree with falls in line with some very bad history.

My comment wasnt unsubstantive by any definition of the word. There are countless examples of the govt doing things to lose trust and that is the root cause of many of societies issues.

Banning people from a forum for expressing that thought seems counter to the guidelines you post.

The issue isn't agreeing or disagreeing. I don't have the energy to agree or disagree with most comments that get posted here. If that sounds odd, imagine how weary you'd be after doing this thirty thousand times, which apparently I have by now.

The comment was against the site guidelines. Provocative, grandiose claims on controversial topics are flamebait.

You pay hardly anything to the agency -- their fees are a rounding error compared to all your other costs. And while it's valuable for some jobs to have on your resume that you used to work there, so many people have done so over the years that it doesn't raise any salaries; it's merely that for certain regulatory roles it's good to have someone who knows what it's like to receive the filings so you can make them clear.

It's utterly unlike the legislator->lobbyist revenue model or, say, the Department of the Interior where the regulators were doing drugs and having sex with employees of the companies they were regulating. It's more like "oh, you worked on DevOps at $LARGE_COMPANY_X, our needs are similar to theirs." Not the magic path to riches.

When employees at the FDA leave and take positions at one of the companies they had a hand in approving something for, at an increased salary. The appearance of impropriety is blatant.

Regardless of it actually happening or not it looks terrible. This should never happen

> Regardless of it actually happening or not it looks terrible. This should never happen

I understand the problem you're describing, but consider what you're asking for: people with competence and experience should be barred from taking jobs that require competence and experience? Non-competes have the same problem.

Think of it like a judge. You should be recusing yourself of anything that looks improper.

Public servants have a higher standard they need to adhere to and they simply aren't, it is endemic in the public space.

Public servants are not compensated for that higher standard.

I’m not “compensated” financially when I pick up litter I encounter when walking around but that doesn’t dissuade me from doing so.

When picking up trash substantially impacts your lifetime earnings, that might matter.

I am not in this field, but I guess that as an employee at the FDA you approve drugs for all the big pharma companies, which aside from the FDA are the major employers that value their skillset. It may be that if you prohibit FDA employees to transition to one of the big pharma companies, you're telling them that they can either work at the FDA forever or have to leave their field

Yes, there is a price to pay for being a public servant.

You realize they're not actually servants, right?

"Take a job with the Fed, sign up for a lifetime of lower income so that HN can nod sagely about avoiding the appearance of impropriety" is a recipe to get no one to ever work for the government.

The attitude they aren’t servants to the public is part of the problem

“Hand in approving” is an important factor: approval is such a complex process no one person is really decisive, except possibly at the very very beginning.

Drug companies used to hire multiple trucks simply to deliver their submissions.

> Me and most of America think the FDA approves things according to the highest bidder.

Why do you think this?

Here is one example

https://ivn.us/2013/02/11/the-revolving-door-fda-and-the-mon...

Revolving doors between regulators and industry can raise conflict of interest concerns, but this is not at all the same problem that you alluded to above.

Sure it is. Stocks and salaries are definitely financial incentives.

Highest bidder of what?

That really isn’t the truth though. What should be done?

Transparency, in all levels of government.

And quit equating money to speech. Lobbying is legalized bribery and everyone knows it.

That's not true. Trust is a major issue and is directly responsible for anti vaxxer movement. Major corporations and media outlet have made bending the truth (PR spins etc) a legitimate common place practice. Any talking head you see on television /other media is not genuinely trying to convince you. They are all hired hands which will say whatever it takes to produce the results their employers demand. The amount of half truths exaggerations and out right lies we encounter daily is staggering. We thought critical thinking might be the answer, but the overwhelming quantities of adversarial content makes a critical thinker into a conspiracy theorist. If alot of experts lie and tell half truths to benefit themselves why should you believe any expert?

This is nonsense. The anti vaxxers place far more trust on someone who is known to have falsified data, and committed egregious malpractice.

The anti vaxxers lack of trust in the media has almost nothing to do with what the media may or may not have done to lose trust.

The actual difference is that one side does not have a good explanation for what causes autism, and as a result admits that they don’t have the answers yet, while the other does not have a good explanation as well, but makes up stuff and boasts that they actually do know the answer.

For vulnerable parents who are just looking for some answer, the second side is extremely attractive.

Everything else about lack of trust, and corporate influence, etc is all secondary, and are after the fact justifications.

You dont need that falsified data to come to the conclusion vaccinations in the US are a problem. Remove it from the picture.

Compare the US vaccination schedule to any other develop country. Compare our infant mortality rate.

Aside from the differences in the vaccination schedules what is the US doing different from other developed nations. Keeping in mind infants do little but eat food, sleep and see a doctor.

So it's food or healthcare causing the difference. With WIC and the fact poor people qualify for free medical care it's arguable economics dont play much into this.

so explain why the US is so bad at this ?

> Compare our infant mortality rate.

Part of the problem is that the US uses a weird definition for infant mortality that makes it hard to compare across countries.

But even after accounting for that the US is still worse than other countries, and we don't know why.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4856058/

The NHS vaccine schedule is just as large as the CDC's: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

We're worse at prenatal care. And post-natal care. And there's some serious income inequality problems "poor people qualify for free medical care" doesn't actually obviate things as much as you think it does.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

He has a point. Lately, our federal agencies have really ruined the trust people had in them for so long. Just look at the FAA for instance, not doing their job with Boeing's 737MAX and proving themselves to just be in Boeing's pocket. No one can really trust the FAA any more, and we have to look for European and even Chinese (!) regulators for proper regulation and approving new aircraft before we can trust that they're safe for the flying public to use.

Why is the FDA different? What makes it immune to the sheer corruption that has infected the FAA and other US federal agencies?

And where are foreign drug-regulation agencies anyway? The US isn't the world's gatekeeper to medicine.

Anti-vax stuff aside, the attitude of

>Trust experts or die.

is not a scientific attitude, it is borderline scientism and an appeal to authority. Remember when the tobacco industry paid medical experts such as ENT Doctors to endorse smoking? [0]

The idea that "the rubes" don't have to or shouldn't be allowed to see the data behind FDA decisions and should just trust the experts blindly is completely condescending and is probably a key contributor to anti-vax sentiment and the anti-intellectualism movements you decry.

[0]: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2012/01/big-tobacco-l...

>is not a scientific attitude

True, but asking non-scientists to have a scientists attitude is ridiculous.

This "everyone is a scientist" idea creates the "everyone is a skeptic" situation, except, when a rube is a skeptic, they're not intellectually skeptical, they're using "skeptic" to mean "bias confirmation".

If you're not a scientist (PhD and publishing) then you don't need a "scientific" attitude.

For the other 99%, you don't need a scientific attitude.

If you are diagnosed with cancer and that diagnosis is confirmed by a second doctor, do you need to demand access to your labs so you can review them personally "with a medical attitude"?

No. Frankly, the only way to have a "scientific attitude" is to spend 4-8 years praciticing in academia. If you don't do that, you can't have the attitude.

You can only pretend. Play makebelieve. Be a pretend scientist. And, almost assuredly, ignore real scientists in the process. After all, due to Illusory Superiority (Dunning-Kruger) you will think yourself just as qualified as the experts. So you will overrule them.

Trust experts or die AKA interdependence in a civilization.

>If you are diagnosed with cancer and that diagnosis is confirmed by a second doctor, do you need to demand access to your labs so you can review them personally "with a medical attitude"?

When considering a medication that is being sold to me such as an anti-depressant with possible long-term harmful side effects, I absolutely want to be familiar with the clinical efficacy and peer reviewed literature on that medication to assess the risks of whether it's worth it for myself.

What about opioids? There were some studies conducted by experts and promoted by the Sacklers that said that opioids were not addictive. Surely I don't have a right to be skeptical of those claims because the surveys were conducted by experts, right? I'm not a post-doc researcher, so obviously I can't tell you that OxyContin is habit-forming.

You're basically arguing for blind trust on the part of the patient, which is very disempowering.

It's very understandable when you present unquestioning obedience and credentialism worship as the only alternative to taking active steps towards being empowered, why people would tell the "experts" to fuck off and trust their own common sense instead as Taleb describes [0]

[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...

Experts are incentivised to be dishonest like everyone else. It's the appeal to authority rather than facts that fuels distrust in agencies.

I'm inclined to agree with you, however the FDA has problems with a lack of transparency. A pharmaceutical company can run 20 studies, and show one result to the FDA that shows safety and efficacy with p < .05. We already have an irreproducibility crisis in science. Medical studies, more than any other type of science, should be pre-registered with the FDA, and the results of those studies should be made public, regardless of their findings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-registration_(science)

https://www.xkcd.com/882/

Good way to convince people...

Call them stupid ;)

You were never going to be convinced otherwise by a rational argument. You've literally dismissed the credibility of the American government and the entire field of medicine in a single comment.

Of course I did. After watching the govt and the FDA in action for 5 decades, detassling corn for Monsanto, watching Monsanto sue farmers into submission, seeing increased rates of cancer autism and other issues. Being told everything is ok.

Then I travel the world eating food in other countries and notice the difference in my health. I see the cancer rates in Africa.

You say I am uneducated and stupid. I say I have experience and that experience doesnt jive with your experts statements.

So yeah.... prove you are trustworthy

My argument would be to look into the studies made by numerous universities from all around the world, not just American ones. I have no business telling you whether or not you should trust American government entities, it's not my country. But the world has had medicines and universities for longer than the United States has existed.

You do realize the EU has banned many many things allowed by the FDA because of their studies ?

Isn't that a good thing from your perspective?

My point was that if you don't trust the FDA, there are literally hundreds of other medical and educational institutions you could look to for information.

No one has said everything is ok.

Just by claiming we are being told “everything is ok” you are showing the absolute lies and false straw men and disingenuousness that is at the centre of the anti vax movement.

Somehow you don’t apply even close to the same standards to the anti vax side, where the only evidence is proven to have been falsified.

Also, Anti vaxxers claim they are sick of experts, yet are unwilling to show even the slightest bit of curiosity. Have they seen any iron lungs lately? Maybe they should go talk to their grandparents about the scourge of polio, and how Salk and Sabin were heroes in their time because of their efforts in making the polio vaccine possible.

You don’t even need to go that far in history. Just read current events about measles, and how it’s popping up in precisely the pockets of the US where the anti vaccination movements are strongest, whether it’s religious nutjobs in Texas and Brooklyn, or Hollywood hippie nutjobs in California.

I have more empathy for people who are intellectually stunted and now buy into conspiracy theories. They really never had a choice. If the US or their parents had provided them with sufficient education, maybe it would have been different, but it's hard for me to get as mad at them as you are.

On the other hand, the doctor who knows better, but chooses his own pocket book over the well being of millions is far less empathetic in my mind.

Both people suck in their own way, but I'm less inclined to get worked up about the former.

Why does the truth have to be packaged for believably?

I'm not asking you to change your mind, I'm stating reality.

They are actively resisting scientific data, analysis, and research that overwhelmingly supports vaccines. They may not be stupid, but they are acting like it by putting their beliefs and bias over fact.

I'll stick with actively malicious over stupid as anti-vax is actually crippling and killing people by increasing the spread of diseases that were prevented or eradicated.

How else do we describe the misunderstandings of the uneducated.

Can you blame a high school grad for seeing 1 vaccine death and not understanding those are extremely low probability vs death due to disease?

I think everyone should know Math, but if they cannot, they should defer to professionals.

The stupid can't be convinced anyway. All that remains is to point them out to others.

No, the trust is not gone, and the opinions of an uneducated fringe groups such as the anti-vaxers do not represent the majority in any way. The only reason they get any coverage is because of the perverse click-bait atmosphere of news. Its the tabloidization of news.