I don't understand this argument. The goal is not to be intrinsically "slow", but to be suitably "careful". If you can be as careful as needed, but execute that careful process in such a way that no time is wasted, that's a win. The two are separate questions.
To put it differently: high-security systems programmers don't move their fingers more slowly on the keyboards because "going slow is better". They put checks in place, and they take as much time as is needed to do things right, but padding that time just for the sake of "slowness" helps nobody.
> Government is also inefficient by design. Imagine the gov’t pivoting to different laws every week - it would be completely unsustainable and would drive people crazy.
Speed of change has nothing to do with efficiency of implementation. I'm talking about writing laws that are efficient for companies to deal with, not streamlining the law-passing process so that legislators themselves are unburdened. It's a totally separate thing.
> inefficiency can be a feature...for big companies because it creates a slow and expensive hurdle for smaller competitors
This is true, and could be part of the reason this problem hasn't been addressed. But corporate lobbyists are just one of the many forces influencing legislation, and formalizing ideas around "efficient regulation" would only shed even more light on bad-faith attempts at making laws less efficient for the purpose of moat-building.
> To put it differently: high-security systems programmers don't move their fingers more slowly on the keyboards because "going slow is better". They put checks in place, and they take as much time as is needed to do things right, but padding that time just for the sake of "slowness" helps nobody.
"Being careful" doesn't necessarily lead to slowness directly, but making the carefulness verifiable (and making that verification, by an external stakeholder, mandatory) usually does.
This approach (regulation and inspection by a government agency) is generally how society makes actors internalize otherwise external costs, but there are other variations such as government codes and standards.
Fine-grained mandatory process specification is usually the least desirable route to safety, but that's often what companies end up asking for in return for giving them a pass when the process inevitably fails to prevent a bad outcome with a large blast-radius.
However, in some specific circumstances where you don't have another means, directly enforcing slowness in some way may be your best option for at least limiting the damage caused by a failure, even if it doesn't reduce the chances of an error (though sometimes it does that too). Vehicle speed limits are one example, rate-limits on transactions (or comments) are another. In other circumstances, requiring speed (eg. monitoring with a fast response time, quick deployment of a fix) may be the right choice for limiting the damage a failure can cause.
I don't understand this argument. The goal is not to be intrinsically "slow", but to be suitably "careful". If you can be as careful as needed, but execute that careful process in such a way that no time is wasted, that's a win. The two are separate questions.
To put it differently: high-security systems programmers don't move their fingers more slowly on the keyboards because "going slow is better". They put checks in place, and they take as much time as is needed to do things right, but padding that time just for the sake of "slowness" helps nobody.
> Government is also inefficient by design. Imagine the gov’t pivoting to different laws every week - it would be completely unsustainable and would drive people crazy.
Speed of change has nothing to do with efficiency of implementation. I'm talking about writing laws that are efficient for companies to deal with, not streamlining the law-passing process so that legislators themselves are unburdened. It's a totally separate thing.
> inefficiency can be a feature...for big companies because it creates a slow and expensive hurdle for smaller competitors
This is true, and could be part of the reason this problem hasn't been addressed. But corporate lobbyists are just one of the many forces influencing legislation, and formalizing ideas around "efficient regulation" would only shed even more light on bad-faith attempts at making laws less efficient for the purpose of moat-building.