A strong bias against Type I errors leads to many more type II errors

From Links to Consider 4/17 by Arnold Kling.  

Scott Alexander writes,

we can’t blame the situation on one bad decision by a 1998 bureaucrat. I don’t know exactly who to blame things on, but my working hypothesis is some kind of lawyer-adminstrator-journalist-academic-regulator axis. Lawyers sue institutions every time they harm someone (but not when they fail to benefit someone). The institutions hire administrators to create policies that will help avoid lawsuits, and the administrators codify maximally strict rules meant to protect the institution in the worst-case scenario. Journalists (“if it bleeds, it leads”) and academics (who gain clout from discovering and calling out new types of injustice), operating in conjunction with these people, pull the culture towards celebrating harm-avoidance as the greatest good, and cast suspicion on anyone who tries to add benefit-getting to the calculation. Finally, there are calls for regulators to step in - always on the side of ratcheting up severity.

A type I error is approving something that is accused of generating a bad outcome. A type II error is failing to approve something that could have had a good outcome. The axis of which Scott speaks builds in a strong bias against type I errors, leading to many type II errors.