Not sure if this is meant to be satirical, but do people trust kosher hotdogs more? I thought it was something that food manufacturers did because it could be relatively cheap to get certification and opened up ~1% of sales opportunities (roughly the Jewish population percentage in the USA). I've never once thought, as I ate my Costco hotdog (it's a tradition!), that "yes, it is tasty, but is it kosher?" Or about any other food product other than "kosher salt", where the kosher part is more about the texture you need it for. Am I just weird?
I've never thought anything else about Hebrew National hot dogs than "Hey, they served those at a park I went to as a kid"
I've followed the same mindset where I assume that a kosher hot dog is "cleaner" (and have generally leaned toward Hebrew National over other brands).
I'm vegetarian, but before I was, I just didn't trust hotdogs at all. (...Not that useful of a datapoint, but, a datapoint.)
On the question of finance, there was historically a prohibition on usury in Christianity. This was worked around by the triple contract / Contractum trinius.
I have been told that something comparable happens in currently existing Islamic finance: people devise clever schemes that are technically acceptable, though not really in the spirit of what was intended, so they replicate lending-at-interest without technically doing so. (I believe there may also be some regulatory flexibility in choosing which religious scholar you submit your scheme to, being able to select one that is known for looking favourably on such proposals.)
I believe that there are circumstances in which financial services that are in tune with the spirit of some of these rules (rather than just within the letter of them) could be desirable. But people do seem to have a habit of finding ways around them.
They consider themselves in service to God. Abusing the kosher rules or certification would be not just unethical, but a direct transgression against God. I can trust that the rules are applied consistently with the principles.
For the record, I do think this probably correlates, but "I can trust" felt like far too strong of a statement. There are still scandals in religious organizations. More to the point, I can imagine a Rabbi's decisions being not-so-subtly influenced by the industry, in a way which might avoid any feeling of having really violated any important religious duty.
Huh. When you say this, all of a sudden I wonder about the mechanisms and possibilities of "bad Kosher rules" in interesting ways!
I do know that kosher rules are generally intended to ensure food quality. They are a 3000 year old FDA regulatory equivalent.
Like my starting position is "FDA boo!" but also my starting position with low key Kosher stuff is that it "probably doesn't hurt that much and might help and so... sure... why not... maybe yay?"
The rest of this comment is me doing a sort of "public debugging" of my intuitions on these two topics, side by side... engaging in a sort of meta-systematic comparison of two possible regulatory regimes.
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For my "intuitive FDA boo" feeling... I'm pretty sure that a core problem that kept the US from copying New Zealand's early covid success was that we couldn't do the FDA/CDC/OSHA/etc paperwork to allow covid testing to be deployed with airports and long distance travelers fast enough, widely enough.
There are many many wetlabs in the US. We could have recruited them into various testing processes in an early ad hoc way. Many countries DID solve this logistical challenge.
It was NOT a material poverty that hurt us, but rather it was a poverty within our politico-economic sphere, where we seem to LACK the collective agentic capacity to enable people to helpfully redeploy existing resources to address existing new problems.
The FDA is the central bureaucracy which caused this slowness as a core aspect of its essential functions.
So, to "a first approximation" (simplifying some) I blame "covid being endemic in the US" on the FDA's inability to quickly communicate (to those it governed) that for a while its entire gestalt approach to medical regulation was stupid and bad...
...thus some basic/easy medical innovations could not be rolled out quickly enough... thus slow medical innovation (which normally only kills lots of people) killed a REALLY lot of people this time.
In my model here, "the FDA's existence" independently made early covid zero impossible (compared to a counter-factual world where there was no such legal barrier to rolling swiftly rolling out mass covid testing in late 2019 and early 2020).
So the FDA can be said to have "caused covid in the US", which then "caused the death of something like a million Americans".
(Also maybe hundreds of millions have lost 1-8 IQ points, and then maybe there's been some lung damage and so on, but "a million dead" is a round number that puts things like 9/11 and terrorism and school shootings and various wars onto a reasonably objective scale of badness... and shows that many other things were objectively not as bad as covid and thus not as bad as the FDA.)
Given this perspective, I wonder if there were food emergencies that killed a lots and lots of people in the deep past because people under the boot of evil rabbis couldn't get a pass on the "Kosher food checking system" when turning off the Kosher food checking system would have actually made contextual sense and saved many lives?
If so: "boo Kosher rules!" (I guess? Right? Because if something causes bad results, it is bad.)
But I don't know of Kosher rules having such problems. Maybe I just haven't studied Kosher rules enough to realize how many many people they've killed? Maybe I'm just ignorant? But for now I still don't particularly think of "Kosher rules" as having caused such problems.
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Maybe it would be useful to look at differences in the core workings of the regulatory mechanisms?
One thought: it seems likely that in 800 AD there were Kosher rules like now, but probably people could just opt-out of following Kosher rules any time they wanted, like in a famine? Maybe? (Note: this "opt-in" setup is indirect but strong evidence that the persistent following of the rules is essentially safe for various reasons.)
Presumably the priests don't and didn't try to assess a fine for eating in a non-Kosher way or selling non-Kosher food, and if you ignored the fine they don't and didn't lock you in a cage? And if you resisted going in the cage they didn't murder you?
So a core difference here is maybe: with the Kosher stuff, the priests who are experts at figuring out what is Kosher and what is not Kosher are generating an opt-in source of seemingly benevolent expertise about food safety, as a public good, that people can listen to or not, voluntarily.
With the FDA, if you try to ignore their bad advice forcefully enough, they try to murder you and burn your books and so on directly (instead of just "murdering you indirectly", by threatening doctors into not doing medical innovation and so on).
I think this "opt-in" (or at least toleration for opting-out) is a core part of the difference in my feelings.
I don't think it is just "food vs medicine"? Like... I can think of a place that puts people in jail for doing food wrong (with no opt-out) and the lack of an opt-out for that seems to kill people even faster than the FDA kills people (perhaps because food is more important to get right than medicine): Venezuela.
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Or maybe another difference here is that "medical innovation" is itself a factor?
Like: reasonable humans currently have a strong desire for medical innovation to get better than it is "now".
By contrast, Kosher laws are basically static, and food innovation is generally not urgently needed?
Illustration: It isn't like every current human will starve to death of hunger if we don't somehow invent a cure for hunger with some totally new food that doesn't exist yet, and which Kosher laws are preventing the invention of.
Whereas: future medicine might "cure death" (or raise life expectancy a lot or whatever), and present medicine definitely can't do this yet.
So every incremental slowness in the scientific advance of medicine "causes" the death of people in the medium future who might have been saved from involuntary death if medical innovation had been faster.
This asymmetry in the importance and need for innovation might be another reason why the FDA is very bad, but Kosher food advice is probably not that bad.
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One interesting thing is that I didn't change my mind much about either Kosher rules or the FDA, and I also have a hunch that reading these musings would not change anyone's mind if they didn't basically already agree with me in the first place.
Maybe I'm somehow "not doing it right" with this whole process of forming accurate beliefs and plans that convince others based on the soundness of my reasoning, the truth of the relevant observable facts, and normal instrumentally convergent preferences for obviously good things (like life, health, low cost, speed, efficiency, fairness, freedom, etc) over obviously bad things (like death, sickness, expenses, slowness, waste, unfairness, slavery, etc)?
But I don't see an obvious place where I'm misapplying some key principle or making a clear mistake :-/
Here's an extremely related episode about Nathan's from the History Channel, addressing signaling.
If ever there were an industry that no one in their right mind would trust, it's hot dogs. First rule of hot dogs: you do not want to know what's in it. But in this unsavory industry, Hebrew National stands out. The slogan on the company's site summarizes their advantage well:
And indeed, people do trust Hebrew National's hot dogs.
This is more remarkable than it might seem at first glance. Consider the problem from the perspective of a hot dog company. This company wants to carve out a niche: they will produce high-quality hot dogs, and sell them at a correspondingly higher price. Many people will happily pay extra to know that their hot dogs do not contain ground-up lucky charms, bits of fur, or the occasional lost dog. But how can the company communicate their quality to prospective consumers? How can they convince the public of the superior quality of their hot dogs? What claim could they make which an unscrupulous competitor could not copy?
This is the problem known in game theory as signalling: one party wants to communicate their superior quality to another party, but in order to do so they must send a signal which their unscrupulous competitors cannot easily copy. A certification body can solve this problem. Consumer Reports, for example, provides unbiased analysis of a wide range of products. Unfortunately, this solution is subject to attack in the real world by exploiting the limited information capacity of consumers. Any company can (and does) invent arbitrary metrics by which their product performs best. A less cynical interpretation is that each company stakes out a niche, claiming that their product is the best for X. If you want X, you buy that company's product. Just within hot dogs, we have Ballpark's "Angus", Applegate's "Organic", Nathan's "Bigger than the Bun", Oscar Meyer's "Selects", and several brands of "Premium Jumbo". Many of these brands have multiple lines of hot dog servicing different niches. Consumers with limited attention to devote will ignore most of these, and most are useless anyway. Thus the true signals of quality are drowned out by the noise of their competitors.
If a company is to charge extra for a truly superior product, then they need a more dramatic way to signal quality. Hebrew National does this by invoking kosher rules. Implicitly, the entire weight of the Jewish religion backs the quality of their product. The kosher rules force the company to produce high-quality hot dogs, and lets them communicate their high quality even in the noisy environment of the modern supermarket.
But what does that even mean? I don't actually know the kosher rules. I remember a few bits and pieces... no hooved animals, separate meat and dairy, something about which cuts of meat are acceptable... but I don't know most of it. Yet I'm willing to accept kosher standards as an assertion of quality, at least in the unpalatable hot dog industry.
I do know that kosher rules are generally intended to ensure food quality. They are a 3000 year old FDA regulatory equivalent. They are interpreted by an active rabbinical community, which makes sure that the word and spirit of the rules are properly applied to new foods and new food processing technology. The result is a regulatory framework which is roughly understood and highly trusted by laypeople, even though most of us do not have a detailed knowledge of the rules! Just as important, I know that the whole community of people who observe, certify and maintain kosher rules is highly trustworthy. They consider themselves in service to God. Abusing the kosher rules or certification would be not just unethical, but a direct transgression against God. I can trust that the rules are applied consistently with the principles.
We have two key elements here. First, a regulatory framework based on simple principles (food that wouldn't be bad 3000 years ago, plus some purely ritual aspects). Second, a highly trustworthy community to work out the details of the rules in keeping with the principles. The result is a certification which laypeople interpret as high quality, even in a market cluttered with questionable claims of quality.
The utility of kosher rules as a regulatory body suggests that these properties could be useful for regulation more generally. As Hebrew National demonstrates, the regulation need not be state-mandated, though the kosher rules may offer some insight there too.
One obvious analog is Islamic banking. The most notable rules of Islamic banks are that they cannot charge interest and they cannot gamble. In practice, contracts are structured to achieve a similar effect to interest, but the consumer sees a number of benefits. Foreclosure is rare, and risk in general is kept low. Many risky investments are considered gambling, and are forbidden. An Islamic mutual fund could see enormous success in the Western world, offering a bank-like investment with positive return and a religious guarantee of low risk. Such a fund would certainly not have invested at all in subprime loans.