Upcoming appearances (cont'd):

* #Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

* #PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
crowdsupply.com/teardown/portl…

* #PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
stores.barnesandnoble.com/even…

* #NewOrleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
contraflowscifi.org/

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For every big, consequential technical question, there are conflicts, both minor and major, among experts who seem to be qualified and honest. Figuring out which expert to trust is essentially the same problem as answering the question for yourself.

But despite all these problems, you are almost certainly alive as you read these words. How did that happen?

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It's all down to referees. In our public policy forums, we entrust publicly accountable bureaucrats to hear all the claims of all the experts, sift through them, and then publish a (provisional) official truth. These public servants are procedurally bound to operate in the open, soliciting comments and countercomments to a public docket, holding public hearings, publishing readouts of private meetings with interested parties.

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Having gathered all the claims and counterclaims, these public servants reason in public, publishing not just a ruling, but the rationale for the ruling - why they chose to believe some experts over others.

The transparency obligations on these public servants - whom we call "regulators" - don't stop there, either. Regulators are required to both disclose their conflicts of interest, and to recuse themselves where those conflicts arise.

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Finally, the whole process has multiple error-correction systems. Rules can be challenged in court on the grounds that they were set without following the rules, and the expert agencies that employ these regulators have their own internal procedures for re-opening an inquiry when new evidence comes to light.

The point of all this is to create something that you, me, and everyone we know can inspect, understand and verify.

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I may not have the cell biology chops to evaluate claims about MRNA vaccine safety, but I *am* equipped to look at the *process* by which the vaccines were approved and satisfy myself that they were robust. I can't evaluate the contents of most regulations, but I can certainly tell you whether the box the regulation shipped in was made of square cornered, stiff cardboard:

pluralistic.net/2024/03/25/bla…

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That's why the vaccine question was so tough. The opioid crisis had shown the procedure to be badly flawed, and the fact that neither the FDA nor Congress cleaned house *after* that crisis meant that the procedure was demonstrably faulty. Same goes for getting in a 737 MAX. The issue isn't that Boeing made some mistakes - it's that the FAA lets Boeing mark its own homework, even after Boeing was caught cheating:

pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boe…

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I'm not qualified to tell you how many rivets a jet plane's door-plug should have, but I can confidently say that Boeing has demonstrated that it doesn't know either, and the FAA has demonstrated that it has no interest in making Boeing any better at resolving this question.

It's no coincidence that our political process has been poisoned by conspiratorialism.

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America's ruling party is dominated by conspiracy fantasists who believe in all kinds of demonstrably untrue things about health, public safety, international politics, economics and more. They were voted in by an electorate that is similarly in the grips of conspiratorial beliefs.

It's natural to focus on these beliefs, but that focus hasn't gotten us anywhere.

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Far more important than *what* the Republican base believes is *how* they arrive at those beliefs. The Republican establishment - politicians, think-tankies, pundits, newscasters - have spent decades slandering expert agencies and also corrupting them, making them worse at their jobs and therefore easier to slander.

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Market fundamentalism insists that "truth" is to be found in markets: if everyone is inserting radium suppositories, the government's has no business forcing you to stop stuffing radioactive waste up your asshole:

pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/jus…

Rather than telling restaurants how often their chefs should wash their hands, we can let markets decide - merely require restaurants to display their handwashing procedures, and then diners can vote with their alimentary canals.

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To the septic goes the spoils! Of course, the government also has no business deciding whether their disclosures are truthful - isn't that why we have a First Amendment? So while we might require restaurants to display their handwashing procedures, we're not going to send the signage cops down to the diner to bust a restaurant for lying about those procedures.

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