Regulation Works

These posts are Version 2 of this material. Please email me with feedback. Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code Restart A Little Psychology How We Got Here More Psychology When the Model is the Harm Privacy, Power, and the Self Who Gets What and Why More Analogies What We Owe the Future Regulation Works Bibliography · Glossary Cognitive Pollution Engineers learn to reason about direct, traceable failures: a faulty valve leads to a boiler explosion or a bug crashes a program. This model frames harm as rare, dramatic, and attributable, but the most serious damage caused by industry hasn’t actually worked this way. Instead, it has been diffuse, cumulative, slow to emerge, and difficult to attribute to any single decision or actor. When leaded gasoline lowered the IQs of an entire generation of children, no single tank of fuel caused a measurable injury. Similarly, no particular cigarette is responsible for any particular cancer death. The harm is real and massive, but it was distributed…