There are too many people who think their questions are the important ones to be addressed before we are allowed to make progress. The more gates/approvers you add before changes can be made or new ideas tried out, the less likely you are to build great things and build fast. Instead you get slow, bureaucratic, design by committee solutions and the more unique technological directions get shelved. One of my favorite Bezos quotes is about this “even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation”.

This reads as "ready, fire, aim, fire again" being a virtue.

It's not, at mega-human scales.

So who makes the choices then? Who is the group that validates we are ready to try out a new idea?

I dunno, elected ones? That seems like a good start, rather than "one guy with a lot of money".

The career politicians are some of the very last people who should be making choices on what technological directions we should go as a society. You can watch any of the congressional hearings to see the complete lack of understanding of today’s technical landscape, let alone expecting them to determine where we go next. One day I hope to see actual technical people taking on high level elected positions and trying to change this, but for now it’s mostly lawyers who have spent their career trying to poll well and raise money.

If the world wanted Jeff Bezos to lead it, we would have elected him. Would we not?

Who exactly is he to make megascale decisions for the rest of us?

Someone competent who has actually done something, unlike elected officials. Until there is a party that represents and has engineers and technical people as an every day part of their system, not a unique member among a sea of lawyers, we cannot allow politicians to stifle innovation and humanity’s ability to build for the future.

"He made a logistics company, so he should be able to enact megascale experiments on people because why not?"

Respectfully: this reads like the kind of post that would be written by a software developer who thinks being an expert in one thing makes them an expert in many.

I was that person when I was young. I grew wiser. I hope you do, too.

That depends, how many resources are needed to try a new idea?