I think in practice allowing them to be sued for egregious malpractice would lead them to be more hesitant to approve, since I think people are much more likely to sue for damage from approved drugs than damage from being prevented from drugs, plus I think judges/juries would find those cases more sympathetic. I also think this standard would potentially cause them to be less likely to change course when they make a mistake and instead try to dig up evidence to justify their case.
Daniel_Eth
This is probably a good thing—I’d imagine that if you could sue the FDA, they’d be a lot more hesitant to approve anything.
Yeah, that’s fair—it’s certainly possible that the things that make intelligence relatively hard for evolution may not apply to human engineers. OTOH, if intelligence is a bundle of different modules that all coexistent in humans and of which different animals have evolved in various proportions, that seems to point away from the blank slate/”all you need is scaling” direction.
I think this is a good point, but I’d flag that the analogy might give the impression that intelligence is easier than it is—while animals have evolved flight multiple times by different paths (birds, insects, pterosaurs, bats) implying flight may be relatively easy, only one species has evolved intelligence.
So just to be clear, the model isn’t necessarily endorsing the claim, just saying that the claim is a potential crux.