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The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

writingruxandrabio.com

81–90 of 192 posts

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#81
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are literally people in the UK in jail for tweets deemed to be incitement to violence. Maybe you think it's a good thing! I don't care! But it's ridiculous to argue over the facts on the ground.

What were the tweets?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yl7p4l11po

> Lucy Connolly, 42, whose husband serves on Northampton Town Council, pleaded guilty in September after posting the expletive-ridden message on X the day three girls were stabbed to death in July 2024.

> She was released from HMP Peterborough earlier after she was handed a 31-month prison sentence in October at Birmingham Crown Court.

Like this one? I mean this is not some hard to find secret.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During covid, the FDA testified to congress that they were putting the vaccines on an approval fast track that would not reduce safety or efficacy. Why is this not the standard approval track?

For example, running very large trials in a short time is very high effort.

Worth it

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#83

As someone who has looked at things like Renewable energy deployments within the UK, this is a pattern that seems to be quite pervasive across all industries. The byzantine web of planning approvals, goose counting, public outcry that you have to deal with to deploy essentially a relatively small solar farm is monstrous. What that results with is that the only people capable of creating & managing these processes hav…

Maybe one solution for this issue would be some kind of “developer’s ombudsman” that is an affordable public service to 1) help people navigate the bureaucracy and 2) produce a report recommending streamlining of rules where possible. This avoids “cutting down all the laws to punish the devil”. Some regulations are necessary.

> Some regulations are necessary.

Genuine question — is there a common factor across the regulations you'd keep? Because if there is, you could encode that directly instead of maintaining the specific rules. And if there isn't, "some regulations are necessary" isn't really a position yet.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#84
I too, like everyone one else, often hate the tedious and often absurd, effort that bureaucratic procedures sometimes require, but this story doesn't make any sense to me.

We're talking about a guy who's used AI to make personalized ground-breaking medicine for his dog but says he spent three months typing a 100-pages long document for the red tape. In reality, current AI technology isn't particularly designed to help you making radical medical breakthrough on its own (at least yet), but is extremely proficient when comes to writing text that must just check boxes.

I'm sorry but how does that story not smells like complete bullshit to anyone reading this? Given that the guy telling his story is “an AI entrepreneur”, I'm almost 100% sure that the story is almost entirely made up for self-promotion.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#86

I'm glad this is getting more attention! I posted the original reporting from The Australian yesterday - it's a good primer. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47379740 https://archive.is/pvRaG

99% sure it's BS though.

How can anyone believe that a guy could use a text-generating AI to design a novel cancer treatment, but not write some compliance document?

Come on!

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#87
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe one solution for this issue would be some kind of “developer’s ombudsman” that is an affordable public service to 1) help people navigate the bureaucracy and 2) produce a report recommending streamlining of rules where possible. This avoids “cutting down all the laws to punish the devil”. Some regulations are necessary.

> Some regulations are necessary. Genuine question — is there a common factor across the regulations you'd keep? Because if there is, you could encode that directly instead of maintaining the specific rules. And if there isn't, "some regulations are necessary" isn't really a position yet.

“Tear it down and see what breaks” is one strategy. I would suggest another based on the principle of Chesterton’s fence:

https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

The point of the ombudsman I suggested is that it’s hard to encode a simple rule in a sentence or two. You need to be familiar with the process so you’re not relearning the same lessons over and over.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe one solution for this issue would be some kind of “developer’s ombudsman” that is an affordable public service to 1) help people navigate the bureaucracy and 2) produce a report recommending streamlining of rules where possible. This avoids “cutting down all the laws to punish the devil”. Some regulations are necessary.

Another bureaucracy to help people navigate the existing bureaucracy? Are you missing a "/s"?

No. The companies that hire lawyers to navigate government bureaucracy have their own internal bureaucracies. So the status quo is not “no bureaucracy”.

It seems that in any sufficiently complex thing there will be some irreducible amount of bureaucracy. So it’s reasonable to make that irreducible set of rules more accessible.

Re: The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure

#89

There’s a lot to be said about the seemingly overbearing nature of the majority of FDA/ISO standards that result in the mass amount of hurdles that need to be jumped before a treatment is available, but that’s mainly due to institutional trauma from past events (thalidomide, primarily) as well as the fact that treatments are not simply binary. The options are not just “does not work” and “makes patient better,” there…

During covid, the FDA testified to congress that they were putting the vaccines on an approval fast track that would not reduce safety or efficacy. Why is this not the standard approval track?

a) Risk vs. reward -- not that I'm saying we're making the right balance decisions, but the correct speed depends on that balance in general.

b) The current administration is extremely unlikely to make vaccine approvals faster. If anything their instincts are the other way around.

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