My article on David Reed is in Salon. Salon today is running “The Myth of Interference,” an article I wrote about David Reed’s idea that the federal policies intended to prevent radio signals from interfering are based on bad science…. [Joho the Blog]
With this concluding quote from Reed
“The best science is often counterintuitive,” says Reed. “And bad science always leads to bad policy.”
Definitely worth reading, both for its specific message about a different way to think about regulating radio and the deeper issues of how to think about the interaction between policy making and technology development and evolution. I would tweak Reed’s final comment to read “a bad understanding of science always leads to bad policy.”
I sometimes wonder whether we wouldn’t have better policy if policy makers took the same care to not over-design their solutions that Reed and his colleagues took when they formulated their end-to-end argument.