People are not all bad, and not all good, and not the same all the time. You can intensely focus on all the bad and choose to view the world through those lens, but I prefer to look at the good also, and assume that people are not solely without concern for others.

At this scale it doesn’t really make sense to think in terms of good and bad people, but good and bad cultures. Scandal after scandal is a sign of a bad culture, and steps should be taken to correct it.

At this scale, I would expect the inevitability of scandal after scandal. My only hope is the culture gets more and more transparent, and the scandals continue to be exposed.

Ignoring negative outcomes makes you vulnerable to negative black swan events.

You should not ignore negative outcomes. And you should not ignore positive outcomes.

Yes, there's lots of money involved in FDA approvals. Yes, there has been and will continue to be corruption. But over my short life, the access to information has gotten better. The knowledge has gotten better. Most medicines have gotten better.

There was the opiate crisis. There was the nutritional pyramid nonsense. There was the ignorance of sugar and erroneous focus on fat. There was also the shingles vaccine, hep C treatments, fixes to the nutritional recommendations and acknowledgement of problems with sugar.

But I do not have a better option. I certainly am not capable of understanding the human machine by myself. My only hope is that multiple organizations consist of multiple people who are mostly good and mostly right most of the time. And that is something, I think, Americans can be proud about with regards to their civilian agencies.

"big pharma" saves hundreds of thousands of people's lives every year and then gets shit on by people who think they understand how the drug business works because some politician sent a mean tweet about a pharma company.