Innovation Versus Time and Culture Bound Normality

Scott Alexander at SlateStarCodex riffs off my post on how we laugh at Oregonians afraid to pump their own gas while not looking at our own absurd restrictions on cutting hair, for example, and adds a few of his own:

There are way too many discrepancies in approved medications between countries to discuss every one of them, but did you know melatonin is banned in most of Europe? (Europeans: did you know melatonin is sold like candy in the United States?) Did you know most European countries have no such thing as “medical school”, but just have college students major in medicine, and then become doctors once they graduate from college? (Europeans: did you know Americans have to major in some random subject in college, and then go to a separate place called “medical school” for four years to even start learning medicine?) Did you know that in Puerto Rico, you can just walk into a pharmacy and get any non-scheduled drug you want without a doctor’s prescription? (source: my father; I have never heard anyone else talk about this, and nobody else even seems to think it is interesting enough to be worth noting).

Scott then strikes at the heart of the issue:

So maybe the scary thing about Oregon is how strongly we rely on intuitions about absurdity. If something doesn’t immediately strike us as absurd, then we have to go through the same plodding motions of debate that we do with everything else – and over short time scales, debate is interminable and doesn’t work. Having a notion strike us as absurd short-circuits that and gets the job done – but the Oregon/everyone-else divide shows that intuitions about absurdity are artificial and don’t even survive state borders, let alone genuinely different cultures and value systems.

This is part of what I meant by collective action kills innovation. I wasn’t saying that DARPA can’t work but rather that by subjecting everything to collective action we subject it to debate. discussion and legislation and that slows down innovation, in part because our notions of what is normal are so time and culture bound.

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