For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people.
Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly similar problems. Details differ and some things are better (and others worse!) but overall: it's not that different.
I don't know about all the individual topics that are mentioned. I'm not an expert of blood cancer and I'm guessing the author isn't either, but ... maybe it's not that simple? The "Preclinical proof-of-concept study" from August 2023 doesn't really sound like "we've solved it, end of story" to me.
"We could fix everything, we just don't" seems far too simplistic. "Everything" encompasses quite a lot, and "I looked at this for a few hours/days and I figured it all out" is classic mistake that people make. Almost everything is conceptually simple. Actually doing it tends to be harder because all those details you didn't account in the high-level overview often do matter.
I've lived in a few places around the world. By far the best-run one was the Isle of Man, which (when I lived there) had a population of around 30K. It has an independent parliament (Tynwald, the oldest continuous parliament in the world), and it makes its own laws.
The government has very little graft. Politicians seemed to genuinely work for the benefit of their constituents [0]. I always attributed this to the fact that they lived in the communities they served, and the people they socialised with were affected by the decisions they made.
The UK has the problem that the politicians are insulated from the people they ostensibly serve. Especially the Tories. They have displayed contempt and arrogance beyond belief.
This is all, as you say, a problem of scale.
[0] One illustration of this is the Manx implementation of social security vs the UK. When the Manx government set up national insurance contributions, they paid them into a separate fund (https://www.gov.im/about-the-government/departments/the-trea...) which is under control of the treasury. The UK just poured the national insurance contributions into the general taxation pool.
The Manx fund (and by extension their health service) is rolling in money. The UK NHS is broke. The Manx system is proof that there were more than enough contributions to the NHS to keep it adequately funded. But the UK politicians spent the contributions on other things, because they could.
Isle of Man does have the benefit that its economy is based on international tax evasion, money laundering, online gambling etc sleazy stuff that essentially siphon off money from places where the actual labor is conducted.
How do you distinguish this from, say, the US which runs a trade deficit of around $1 trillion?
Is your problem with Isle of Man the specific industries or businesses that drive revenue there, or the siphoning off of money/labor from other places?
US does the siphoning with quite a different method, mostly by enforcing the petrodollar using the huge military. It could probably use this money a lot better if wellbeing of the citizens is the benchmark.
Sleazeball havens like Isle of Man (and many others) by the merit of creating international legal loopholes.
West in general siphons off money/labor from other places.
Not a fan of these, but this wasn't really the point. The point was that Isle of Man has the advantage of not having to do much work of their own to keep the economy rolling so it's not necessarily comparable.
They literally just charge a flat tax rate and no corporation tax. It's not really a legal loophole.
There are hoops they make people jump through - if you're a company wanting to relocate then you must have one Manx director. If you're a person then you must actually live there.
The Manx used to make their money from smuggling. This is cleaner.
"The country has a long history of sociopathic ideation on its socioeconomic participation within a larger global economy, typically as a parasite to vice."
It is not just this. There are many small municipalities around the world where mayor/local council does not act like this. Most of things come down to voters. Their culture and breadth of views.
Or is there a source of funds in the Isle of Man that is not applicable to the rest of the world? Like, if it was applied to the rest of the world the funds would stop going to the Isle of Man?
Is there also something not present in the Isle of Man that elsewhere is a sink for money?
Something you would have to stop incentivising in other places if you want to have them "rolling in money", but that many people can't bring themselves to do?
The main thing is that when you impose a tax on people in order to achieve a goal, that income is not then put into the general taxation pool for politicians to spend as they wish, but kept in a separate fund that can only be used to fund the thing it was levied for. If we had more of that we'd have less problems like the NHS.
Thomas Paine in Common Sense also describes that is preferable to have constituents from the places and with work in the community they live in. Congress only has 2 years for this reason as well, to be a reflection of the community they live in.
I don't think he was blaming it on the two-party system. He was just explaining how the two-party system is one of those obviously broken mechanisms that effectively blocks against replacing it with one of the better alternatives.
The general category of issues he highlights, should be well known to people who have lived in and observed our real world and society for a while.
It is possible to produce USB-C cables that are robust and last - I know as I own some. But I also own and buy some that LOOK 'robust' but are fragile and stop working within a few months. The vendors make most money by optimizing for LOOKING robust (which is what I am 'demanding'), but in reality making a fragile product, so I anyway have to buy more.
For medicine, he is also obviously right - tons of resources are poured into developing 'money-making' medicines for 'money-making' diseases, by commercial companies. And comparatively little money is expended solving diseases which are harmful but not candidates for making money. As an example, investors prefer chronic diseases where you need periodic medicine, and aren't attracted to 'single-use cure' medicines.
He is really just pointing to, that a lot of the worlds problems aren't needing an inventor to solve them technically, they are needing politicians and a political movement to drive the will to solve and change them.
I recommend reading Machievelli's 'The Prince', for people who suffer from naivety.
> He was just explaining how the two-party system is one of those obviously broken mechanisms that effectively blocks against replacing it with one of the better alternatives
I think this is self evident. How the hell US is heading to next Biden vs Trump. Again?
How can anyone claim its that those are the best possible choices - or good choices? Trump is a fraud clearly claiming he is one and biden is barely capable to string two sentences together.
The key issue in US politics is that the Democrats have achieved a monopoly on reasonable governance. The right has completely abandoned moderation in favor of active malice. That means it doesn't matter who the Democrats put up for election. A fucking golden retriever would get my vote, because the GOP is committed to overt evil.
That's not to say the Democrats are saints, or even not also evil. Most of them are in it to line their own pockets. But at least they're doing that without actively trying to make things worse. So they're approximately adequate.
Voting third party introduces massive risk that the mustache-twirling, overtly fascist sympathizing party takes power, which isn't acceptable to most reasonable people. Which is why we need to get rid of first-past-the-post voting, but unfortunately those same parties that are currently entrenched in power are the only ones with the power to make that reform.
> biden is barely capable to string two sentences together.
A speech impediment is not necessarily an impediment to governance ability. Please, criticise him for the things he's actually done wrong (being a politician, I'm sure those are many), not for a life-long disability.
Speach impediment? He is old. He keeps forgetting things around him, looses his thought mid sentence. Was caught with cue card written for a 'child'[0], his 'handler' on many occasions whisk him away when he starts rambling [1].
I don't know how people are unable to acknowledge basic fact you can see for yourself.
Would you like to be in a car driven by Biden? Or a company run by trump?
> Please, criticise him for the things he's actually done wrong
Thats the thing. I don't believe biden is making any decisions, the show is run by whatever people around him (i presume leadership of dem party).
It is the similar story with trump. Plenty of evidence, testimonies and leaks from his office. Him complaining that the reports are too long and should include his name in it and point how given matter relates to him. He was also caught multiple times when his aderol was running off.
Difference is to manipulate trump you had to flatter him and appeal to his vanity or outright make him money (corruption).
I am not left or right. I am just stating what everyone is able to observe. The system is not run by people you pick. The choice is between two puppets and whoever can control them (some more some less directly).
The idea of big government used to be that presidents and parties are not able to enact changes as quickly due to bureaucracy and resistance of governmental agencies and institutions.
But now the presidents are not even interested (trump) or capable of that (biden).
Its suppose to be democracy not a cardboard cutout with democracy painted on it.
> Speech impediment? [list of things that are not speech impediments]
When I'm concentrating hard on a tricky problem, I often forget my surroundings. I've been known to get distracted mid-sentence, and I would love if somebody would discreetly interrupt me when I go off on unnecessary extended tangents. I write myself cue cards one might give a child because I learned how to write cue cards while I was a child, and it's a pretty good system that works for me – but, because my vision is good, I can write them small enough to palm discreetly. I would not want to be in a car driven by me.
None of these things render me unfit for governance, organising, leading people, or understanding laws. In fact, I dabble in all of these things and, where I'm practised, I'm not half-bad. (Not exceptional, mind, but mostly competent.) I can even give speeches that appear memorised, given a month to write and a week to rehearse.
I am not yet old, so nobody calls me senile. But if such attitudes are what I have to look forward to, even if I myself do not change at all, I think we should improve society somewhat.
> > Please, criticise him for the things he's actually done wrong
> Thats the thing. […]
Thanks! This looks like it's about politics, not ableist ageism. (No comment on the validity of your criticism.)
Probably not a new take, but it would make an extremely interesting election night if Trump were to run as an independent. Could potentially see states turn yellow
This election year in general is going to be insane to watch
It would almost certainly result in a massive spoiler effect, handing the Democrats a landslide victory, unless the Republicans managed to completely and utterly drop the ball in putting forward a candidate that could beat Trump in at least a few states. That latter scenario would mark the death knell of the Republican party as an institution, leaving a power vacuum that Trump-aligned fascists would fill with an even further right party.
First-past-the-post voting makes the 2 party system inevitable.
The US two party system isn't that obviously broken. Americans like to say it's broken, but they often aren't that familiar with the alternatives.
You could have FPTP but with more than two parties, like the UK does. The downside of this is that the reason there are more than two major parties in the UK is that the parties are much more closed off to outside influence, and due to the presence of a major independence movement (something banned by the Constitution). In the USA it's considered entirely normal and possible for complete outsiders to run in party primaries, take over that party and then become President. This cannot happen in the UK because none of the parties have open primaries. Small movements towards more internal party democracy by Labour have been rolled back in recent years, because they allowed in non-centrist types like Corbyn who were popular with the base but not with the electorate. Still, it could be implemented in the USA. "All" you need to do is end the system of party primaries and voting for President, to allow party insiders to select their own leadership. And if you want a big independence party then change the Constitution to allow cessation.
You could have PR, like most of Europe does. Then you'd have lots of parties. The downside of this is that it guarantees that politicians can never actually do any of the things they campaigned on doing, with the result that politicians tend not to take policy development seriously. Parties end up standing for extremely vague positions even during election campaign periods, knowing that there's no point in having specific ideas as they'll all be mashed up in coalition negotiations anyway. Because the system is in some sense inherently unstable you have a lot of government collapses, and the promised benefits of representing everyone's views better doesn't happen in reality. Instead what happens is that every party just ends up being at a different point on the 1D ideological spectrum, and all the left and "center" parties form coalitions against the right wing party to deny them any representation at all, even if it means the government becomes deadlocked and can't do anything.
Overall the US system isn't perfect, but it's also not the great weakness Americans like to claim it is. The two parties are sufficiently loose and broad tents that they shift with the political winds easily, and it means Americans are able to go in an "fix" the parties if they drift too far from what is actually wanted. A big part of the meltdown over Trump is that the party insiders were reminded of this against their will. A big part of the meltdown over Sanders vs Clinton was that Americans actually like this aspect of the system and the left felt it was being denied to them.
> The downside of this is that it guarantees that politicians can never actually do any of the things they campaigned on doing
That's a bold and total wrong claim.
> with the result that politicians tend not to take policy development seriously.
Ah that's why Europe is such a shithole and the US is an enlightened kingdom.
> Parties end up standing for extremely vague positions even during election campaign periods
That is just wrong. Parties often commit to specific things.
> Because the system is in some sense inherently unstable you have a lot of government collapses
That's why Angela Merkel was only in her position for 2 years.
> and the promised benefits of representing everyone's views better doesn't happen in reality.
Ill taking anyway, thanks very much.
> Instead what happens is that every party just ends up being at a different point on the 1D ideological spectrum
Again, that's just false. The represented views are way broader then what you get in other systems. Sure you don't have anarchist parties and Nazis but that's because those are minority views.
> left and "center" parties form coalitions against the right wing party to deny them any representation at all, even if it means the government becomes deadlocked and can't do anything.
That's a very, very broad generalization. And even if its the case, its not necessarily wrong. If 25% are far right wing and 75% are strongly against that far right wing, then that should be reflected in the government.
> Overall the US system isn't perfect, but it's also not the great weakness Americans like to claim it is. The two parties are sufficiently loose and broad tents that they shift with the political winds easily
Having 2 parties is the outcome of an election process that is fundamentally broken and sometimes its a legally enforced duopoly. To claim that isn't fundamentally broken in terms of translating broad popular views into government is simply wrong. The European system are also broken in various ways but they are far better.
> Ah that's why Europe is such a shithole and the US is an enlightened kingdom.
The USA is both richer and more democratic than Europe. You will need to accept this fact before mocking the Americans.
Europe is a place where most countries are partly run by Brussels, which is a totalitarian system. Consider the energy that Americans put into their Presidential elections vs the entirely secret and inexplicable process that led to von der Leyen being able to legislatively control Europe. People may not like Biden or Trump but they can at least explain the process through which they became President, and it is at least theoretically democratic. Nobody outside of Germany even knew who vDL was before she suddenly turned up as the most powerful woman in Europe.
> That is just wrong. Parties often commit to specific things.
Which nobody takes seriously because the best that can be hoped for is for the party to enter coalition, at which point everything is up for negotiation and they are guaranteed to have to discard many of their commitments.
>> Because the system is in some sense inherently unstable you have a lot of government collapses
> That's why Angela Merkel was only in her position for 2 years.
Merkel is an excellent example of the problem: after a deadlocked PR election she presided over an entirely mandateless caretaker government that lasted half a year, because German politicians couldn't form a workable coalition. In theory she was meant to do nothing during this time and simply preserve the status quo, but that is impossible to constitutionally enforce and in fact she continued to rule exactly as before, including signing Germany up for new foreign policy commitments.
The USA simply never has the problem of the previous president continuing to rule after losing support in an election. It is a problem largely unique to PR (the UK went through a coalition setup in 2010 but it only lasted 5 days).
> even if its the case, its not necessarily wrong.
The primary point of PR is to try and ensure the views of minorities are represented. If you disagree with that goal, you may as well just support the much simpler and more stable FPTP system.
I don't really want to get into a big argument. Government organization is a gigantic field with lots of questions and we would have to go into more detail. Both systems have lots and lots of issue. I don't like the EU and have no interest in defending it either.
> The USA is both richer and more democratic than Europe. You will need to accept this fact before mocking the Americans.
Politics and government organization has something to do with that, but not everything. If the US had the current government style after WW2 then they would be equally or more successful then they are.
If its more democratic is questionable on lots of fronts, specially comparing with individual countries and not the EU specifically.
And frankly GDP is one thing, I rather live in most places in Europe either way. And I much rather live in the richer parts of Europe then in the US and I much, much rather live in poor part of the Europe then the poor parts the US.
Problem is that incentives, especially financial incentives, have so much control over our democracy. Why don't we fix the housing crisis? Because homeowners will vote out politicians who reduce their house value. Same answer for why we don't fix global warming, farming subsidies, carried interest loophole.
For everything wrong like this, there's a small but determined group of people who will defend the status quo, versus a much larger majority who actually do want to fix things but this majority has a political will that is diluted and disorganized and can't be concentrated into political leverage. So in practice the smaller group has the power.
Things don't change abruptly so society can protect itself from lunatics.
Whatever examples you can come up with for "why don't we solve this faster we have the solution", can be counter argumented with the fact that your solution can turn out to be strictly worse and have unintended side effects. Many times in history we thought we had solutions for things and then we didn't. If society, or "the system" is too easy to change, then anyone can take power and mess it up for everyone else equally as fast.
A slow changing system is preferable if you want to self protect against it, even if some avoidable misery is sometimes around due to this lag it's way better than someone blasting through everything because they know better.
This seems like classic immature "but why don't we change everything and do a revolution" which does not take into account the negatives of that or that the revolution will go like someone else wants to, not you - and these things only work if "you can control everything" which is basically why communism has not worked. A battle of competing incentives seems way better than some guy deciding he knows better about everything and if he can only "coordinate everyone" he can "solve everything". That's called a dictatorship, which comunist states tend to.
The problem with communism isn't the revolution, that part has worked incredibly well. It's the fact that the communists don't know what they actually want. I've seen them argue against almost every concrete concept or idea that is falsifiable, but has a decent track record of improving people's lives, because it compromises their all or nothing ideology. Xi Jingping said something like "How about we let the ideology slide and try something that works for now" and no, China did not adopt capitalism, they adopted a heavily state controlled market economy with politicians having direct influence over almost every major business with the ability to fire CEOs. If anything, this proves that the western style "anti-statism" ideology that blames all economic problems on government intervention is, like communism, complete bullcrap. Yet you naively hear from people how China has adopted Capitalism, when in reality they broke literally every single rule in both the capitalist and communist books.
It's like the author of this blogpost says. It's hopeless, because we already have the solutions, not because the problems are hard.
I wonder if that's because of communism or because in any country with one party in power for too many years there is a drift to authoritarianism first and eventually to dictatorship. There are examples even in Europe and around it right now.
Of course communism as ideology cannot allow competing not communist parties. That would be heresy and the first years after the revolution in Russia 100 years ago show how it goes. Not communist parties are unthinkable by definition so yes, an ideological communist country sets the stage for dictatorship. A communist party in charge for only a few years in a democratic country, not much more than anything else.
> Why don't we fix the housing crisis? Because homeowners will vote out politicians who reduce their house value.
I mean, i don't think this is a good example. Well im sure the homeowner class wanting to protect their investment does play a part, its not like there are obvious solutions to the problem just waiting to be implemented (or at least not ones that stand up to scrutiny)
A better way to put it is, we could fix everything, we just don't, because it is not profitable and not in the interest of the people that have the money to invest in stuff.
I do think there is definitely an element of things being harder than they seem, but it's just an element. The vast majority is the for profit nature of our system, that does not reward making things better.
In my opinion, we always overlook what the natural environment has done for us, almost everything else under our control is a disaster in one way or another or requires very significant effort to keep operating. Anti-biotics overuse, holes in the ozone layer, top soil degredation, climate change, nuclear accidents, microplastics, broken arrows etc.
We're lucky we live in an environment that mostly provides us with the basics to survive. We hope that powerful tech like AI will give us the power to put us in control of our destiny.I think we need to be careful what we wish for because I don't think we actually know what we want.
We can't go backwards now anyway, so best of luck to us.
Cool article though, we seem too like to waddle around in our own shit.
He doesn't even give an example of "ancient human tribes," but modern day nomads whose traditions have also developed over thousands of years. If ancient human tribes were so great at avoiding tragedy of the commons, I would be eating a mammoth steak right now.
The author explained very well what they meant (optimizing for lower risk vs profit) and this has little to do with preserving mammoths. That would be a very peripheral concern (if it was one at all).
It was any kind of fauna that was hunted into extinction when humans moved in.
And its still happening to this day.
I was staying in a tribe village in Thailand, a full day trek into jungle. They had a dirt road connecting them to the rest of thailand but were surrounded by jungle. I was sharing few drinks with people i traveled and locals, and there was small commotion. When asking about it, locals explained that someone saw monkey out in the jungle and people were discussing who should shoot it.
They explained that there is no animals in over 5km around the village as its hunted for the meat the moment its spotted. Basically a deadzone for anything that has enough meat to be worth a shotgun shell.
Its clear as day that everyone in the village would benefit from cooperation but they dont. Humans on average are not rational. And we are barely more advanced than the ancient people. We have better tech, and a bit more empathy. But the wiring is still the same.
I believe it was mainly climate change and loss of habitat during glacial retreat that caused Mammoth and other mega-fauna to die out. Human hunting was likely a minor contributor and nothing like the industrial slaughter of bison.
There is still plenty of tundra in Canada and Siberia where mammoths could still live today. Megafauna survived several cycles of climate change. They went extinct during the cycle when humans arrived.
I am far from an expert but I think optimizing for profit/productivity and relying on a combination of insurance, trade and savings to reduce risk is one of the big productivity boosts in the last few hundreds years.
More to the point, the word "tragedy" in context isn't saying that the end result is neccesarily a tragedy for the people involved. The "tragedy" is our (alleged) inability to have nice shared stable resources, not any specific outcome of any specific resource being exhausted.
Sure - my point was that maybe mammoths weren't viewed as nice shared stable resources, but rather like cruel giants that might destroy your settlement, crops, and family randomly for fun. Sort of like how how elephants are viewed by rural farmer folk in many parts of Africa.
The whole tragedy of the commons was literally made up by a very reactionary dude to justify fucking people over and justify enclosure and privatisation. Historically people have actually had rather complicated and at the same time very effective ways of sustainably managing the commons. It also happens that privatisation is the thing that makes the tragedy of the commons happen.
Historically, people also cut down most of the forests in the Mediterranean for firewood and shipbuilding without even attempting to balance the process, causing major problems for their descendants. Most of this activity predated modern capitalism by millennia.
Historically and currently, people polluted common waters and air with all sorts of agricultural and industrial runoff. Heck, someone around me has been feeding their home fireplace with plastic right now and fifty other families have to smell the acrid smoke.
Historically and currently, people overfished oceanic stocks to total depletion in certain seas.
Historically and currently, people dumped their refuse somewhere behind their village or city, creating rotting heaps of trash.
I don't see anything made up about the tragedy of the commons.
And a lot of those things you list are not tragedy of the commons as stated, but a consequences of the very thing that Hardin was defending - the enclosure of the commons and privatisation. Because privatisation and capitalism both encourage competition, and unsustainable behaviour towards common resources. This is why we see agricultural and industrial runoffs, oceanic stock depletion etc. Historical communities tend to have tools and practices that prevent all of that stuff from happening, practices that have been put aside with colonialism, enclosure and markets ...
Both broad generalizations are wrong. Yes historically many societies have put in place various solutions to the tragity of the commons. But its also wrong that this was always the case and that all these solutions were great.
> It also happens that privatisation is the thing that makes the tragedy of the commons happen.
That is just fundamentally false. Privatization is one potential solution for a Tragedy of the commons. And of course privatization can be done in a fair or an unfair way. Just like every other potential solution.
> I would suggest Elinor Ostrom work on the topic.
Isn't her fundamental restatement of the tragedy of the commons that if the people decide to cooperate, then it doesn't happen? Which is a pretty thorough refutation to the original tragedy of the commons, as we see it in the Econ 101 meme.
Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit, which achieves ... well a tragedy of the commons.
And the second problem is that historically, privatisation has pretty much always been done in an unfair way.
Here work shows of course that the simplistic Econ101 Trategy of the Commons is wrong. And that of course was known long before. Just as in any other field just reading 101 isn't sufficient. This is an old problem in economics and much has been written about.
What her work actually shows is that the determining factor isn't so much if something is private or government or something else but rather about various other factor, like communication, monitoring and enforcement.
> Problem is that privatisation (together with markets, cause the two always go hand in hand) introduces incentives to compete and to exploit
There are tons of resources under private management and private operates are very well capable of understanding that if they simply use up the resource they will hurt their future earnings potential.
In the old school case of common land being zoned off, those lands became private. Those private operators used that land far more efficiently and the result a massive increase in the British population. And guess what, 100s of years later and that land is very often still farmed to this day. They understand that the land has capacity that needs to be restored in various way.
Now one can make the argument if the privatization happened in a fair way. Meaning did all the people who had access to common land get an fair share. That however is a different question.
With farm land this works because based on Ostroms work its pretty easy to monitor, and enforce. Secretly going to another farmers land and planting or harvesting isn't all that viable. In case of fishery rights this get much more complex. Before the invention of barbed wire such simply mechanism didn't work for cattle for example and thus other mechanism were used. However once barbed wire was invented cattle farmers moved to full privatization. See 'The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier' if you are interest in various stories like that.
We can take various other examples. Common forest could suffer tragedy of the commons. But private logging operations have long understood that they need to split up land to have forest at different stages so that they can continually harvest wood for a long time.
Privatization (as in splitting up the resources into various parts) can align the intensives correctly, the damage the resource takes impact your own utility and thus aligns intensives correctly.
So it totally correct to say that splitting up a resource and managing it independent is a potential solution. But I think Ostrom work indicates that we need to look deeper and beyond a one size fits all solution to resource management.
> But private logging operations have long understood that they need to split up land to have forest at different stages so that they can continually harvest wood for a long time.
Private logging operations have started taking a more sustainable view only after a lot of pressure from conservationist groups. And even today, private logging operations are destroying incredibly important forests. Private logging is a good example of why privatisation is so extremely bad about the commons and the environment.
> communication, monitoring and enforcement.
>
Which is a roundabout way of saying government. Privatised, for profit ownership encourages unsustainable exploitation, without much regard for the longer term consequences. Again - forestry is a good example, and so are fisheries. Likewise:
> Privatization (as in splitting up the resources into various parts) can align the intensives correctly, the damage the resource takes impact your own utility and thus aligns intensives correctly.
Again is a roundabout way of saying government. And instead of adding for-profit middle-men here, we can just skip that part and just govern the resources. Then you don't need to deal with a fiddly system of incentives, that will most likely be made weaker by lobbyists representing private interests.
> Now one can make the argument if the privatization happened in a fair way. Meaning did all the people who had access to common land get a fair share. That however is a different question.
Intimately connected to the topic however, since historically, privatisation has always been used in order to enrich the already wealthy. So it is important, because this is the cause for privatisation, and therefore there will be a lot of propaganda and justification on why it needs to happen - which is what we see historically as well.
That seems to be ahistorical revisionism. The common land in mediaeval England was literally called "waste" as in a "wasteland". It seems that some ideological academics are now trying to rewrite this history. Wikipedia has been edited into a state of internal inconsistency where it says [2]:
> Millions of acres were "common land", but this did not mean public land open to everybody, a popular fallacy ... Certainly their rights were strong, because the lord was not entitled to build on his own land, or fence off any part of it
So this land wasn't fenced off in any way and the putative "owner" couldn't build anything on it, yet this article argues it also wasn't "open to everybody", despite literally being called "common land" that is the root of the word "commoners".
It also says:
> the commoners' right to graze the lord's land with their animals was restricted by law - precisely in order to prevent overgrazing
... but the citation for this is very curious. It's a book [1] with an abstract that says:
The report of the Royal Commission on Common Lands (of which both authors were members) revealed not only the chaotic state of the laws relating to the commons but also the lack of information regarding their nature, distribution and extent. Some commons being shamefully misused, while some very large tracts are lying idle and serving no useful purpose either economically or for public enjoyment.
... which sounds exactly like the well known tragedy of the commons that supposedly doesn't exist.
Checking the history of the Wikipedia talk page (which is nearly empty) reveals what you might expect: someone engaged in a massive edit war to totally rewrite this page along ideological lines, claiming the classic understanding taught to British schoolchildren was "neomalthusian rubbish", whatever that means. They appear to have simply ground down their opposition, then the whole discussion was deleted by a bot. Nice. Wikipedia has become such a dumpster fire in recent years, it's so sad.
I can't understand what issue you are having. Common land was managed in different ways in different places (chaotic) with local laws granting rights that often restricted scale of access to prevent over-use.
I'm not sure what your point is about waste is because The Lord's Waste was a specific legal designation separate from the more emotive devastated/unusable/excess we might be familiar with.
The assumption that Common Land was unmanaged and owned by all is false but that doesn't mean it was always well managed. Be in no doubt that Enclosure was a horrifying theft of rights from the citizenry and in no way a solution to a Tragedy of the Commons.
> The assumption that Common Land was unmanaged and owned by all is false
How? The source wiki now cites for that claim contradicts it. It says lords owned/managed it but not really - they weren't able to control access or put anything on it (manage it), and none of the commoners were able to manage it either because none of them owned it. How do you think "scale of access" was restricted without basics like fences? Cows don't care about laws.
The point of the tragedy of the commons is that without private property rights, resources get wasted and misused. The common land in mediaeval England is described in the book abstract as having that exact problem - it's either overgrazed and destroyed, or abandoned entirely. The solution was Enclosure, i.e. restoring ownership and building fences around the common areas, which is exactly the solution you'd need to utilize land effectively and prevent overgrazing.
>For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people.
And yet other societies in the present do the right things in a lot of areas even with comparable groups of people.
Not to mention today we have tools like the fast text, voice, and even video communications, the internet, roads, distributed power structures, an educational system, etc. to combat scale issues.
>Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly similar problems. Details differ and some things are better (and others worse!) but overall: it's not that different.
Is it really a wash? Or rather most things are better in other western countries with big economies?
>"We could fix everything, we just don't" seems far too simplistic. "Everything" encompasses quite a lot
Which doesn't really matter, as it's a figure of speach. It means "most things" or even "a hell of alot of things".
I’m not gonna argue that it’s precisely a wash, but I’m not aware of any country without political factions who strongly oppose each other and think the country would be much better if everyone else would just get on board. What can sometimes be true is that multiparty systems make the hardness of problems more legible; if you have 5 different parties with 5 different perspectives on how the education system ought to work, it’s a lot less tempting to think that one perspective is unambiguously correct and it’s only The System that’s stopping us from following it.
The author mentions, for example, that we know “providing free college to everyone would be a good idea”. But we don’t know this, and there are many other rich countries that don’t do it; in some, college is entirely unavailable to people who don’t enroll in the appropriate high school track.
>The author mentions, for example, that we know “providing free college to everyone would be a good idea”. But we don’t know this, and there are many other rich countries that don’t do it; in some, college is entirely unavailable to people who don’t enroll in the appropriate high school track.
We can change this however to "we know that massively cheeper or free college to anyone in the appropriate high school track is better" and it becomes true.
Not necessarily. It's still possible there are confounding factors that led to it's success, unknown to all implementers and observers. Maybe there are other pre-requisites to the success of the implemented education system.
We still know not having millions of people in debt out of university, and not giving millions of others the possibility to even go into university without big spending, is not good - confounding factors or not.
How do we know that a university degree isn't primarily a signalling mechanism? That would make universal university incredibly wasteful of people's most energetic years.
Because people don't just learn to be doctors, physistics, biologists, structural and civic engineers, chemists, and countless of other professions on their own (not in any significant nunber after the 18th century at least), they learn it in university, with a structured curriculum, theoritical tuition, supervision, labs, and so on.
The vast majority of people with degrees will not use that degree in their job. I certainly didn't and looking at my fellow physics or maths grads the same is true of almost all of them.
Not sure what part one wont use. The degree as in "the printed paper"?
Because I guarantee that the "vast majority of people with degrees" in the professions I described and many more, will use the knowledge acquired during their degree in their jobs.
I'm not sure what physics or maths grad doesn't use the math he was taught/practiced/and picked up during his tutoring for the degree.
The implication is that they learn those things before going to university? Or that they learn them in grad school? (as if studying for graduate school is not also university, and as if the prior knowledge acquired during their BSc and such wasn't necessary to understand what they encountered in grad school -- and to have a basic understanding of their field).
> Because I guarantee that the "vast majority of people with degrees" in the professions I described and many more, will use the knowledge acquired during their degree in their jobs.
I agree with this, but think the jobs that use degrees are a small minority. Maybe 20%?
> I'm not sure what physics or maths grad doesn't use the math he was taught/practiced/and picked up during his tutoring for the degree.
I'm a software engineer atm and while I have done some gnarly stuff with directed graphs, I don't think I've used any of my uni maths in my career. A friend of mine went to be an actuary, same thing, A-level maths was used but nothing beyond that. Catastrophe modeller? Same. Civil servant? Same. Hedge fund analyst? Same.
Very very few jobs actually require graduate level maths.
> Or rather most things are better in other western countries with big economies?
Not sure which other countries you're thinking of, but each of then have their own issues. E.g. the UK has insane house prices and its rail is awful (I live here).
Yes, compared to many places in Europe (and even parts of Asia), UK's rail system is pretty bad. But it is still a practical way to get from city to city in the UK. In the US, except for the Washington-NYC-Boston corridor (and maybe the San Diego-Los Angeles route) it isn't really anymore. You can technically take a train from NYC to Chicago, but it will take you longer than the same train trip took 100 years ago! And insane house prices are very much a problem in the US as well.
I wouldn't call it very practical. Unless you want to go to London you're better off driving from a time, cost and reliability perspective. It's bizarre to me that it's much cheaper to fly to Edinburgh or Nice than to take trains...
The ratio of hourly wage to meter of housing is from 2x to 10x worse in the UK than the USS.
It doesn't reek of that for me. The other extreme is to insist on genetic engineering to increase IQ so that we have more "geniuses" with "novel" ideas, when in reality those ideas have been known for a long time and just needed to be put into practice.
AI is also likely to make a huge difference to coordination problems. We can imagine a future in a short while ... maybe a decade or few? ... where we as random citizens can ask an AI we trust to go through the last 30 years of parliamentary records, profile an individual politician's voting record and interpret it according to my personal worldview.
That seems like it'd be a significant change to the game. At the moment, figuring out what someone's record is is still too hard even with sites that are trying to help. I can go to http://politicsthatwork.com/ and see a politician scored 12.8% on "Humane Immigration Policy" which tells me nothing [0]. My views are complex enough that no mass-produced title is going to break things down in a way I'm satisfied with.
But AI will allow that sort of summary where I can describe what sort of features a record should have, with examples of particular bills. I can think of other similar uses too; this'll be a wild era. One person can get through a lot of text all of a sudden. Maybe even fast enough to use it while arguing politics in real time.
[0] Does the dude hate migrants? Love migrants but prefers a welfare-heavy society and wants to try and make it sustainable? Loves migrants but the opposition is playing silly games with bill names? Loves high-skilled migrants? Are the bills being voted only tangentially related to migrants, or strategically entangled with migrant issues? Politics is best understood in context.
That's basically it. The biggest problem in human society in all era's (including the 21st century) is scaling up.
Once you get past Dunbar's number, whatever your system is, it'll start to run into challenges. Be it a company, an organization, or an entire country.
Objectives become diluted, misbehavior becomes possible, and steerability goes out the window.
Keeping a large group of people focused, well behaved, and capable of change is a huge challenge in any century, and is as ever highly underrated.
When doing research it seems like there's a lot of magical thinking in the field. Finding focussed sources tends to be tricky. Getting people to adopt even the most straightforward of practices even trickier. :-P
> Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly similar problems
There are also plenty of countries with very close to somewhat different systems. Let's take France, where there are > 2 party - more like a dozen, of various sizes and shapes -, and where the president is a direct elect from the crowd.
Sounds far removed from the Lib vs Dem indirect US presidential election? Well, every single time when there's a new contender that does not alight with the typical left vs right mentality they're going to be derided as weasely opinion cherry-pickers with an agenda of selecting voters; "that one can't make up their mind, therefore they're shady: pick a side already!" unanimously shouts the crowd.
Some think it gets further emphasised by the two-round election system: vote for any candidate (who may or may not be tied to a specific party, but hey, guess show you get any reasonable amount of campaign funding), then vote for one of the top two of the previous round (the latter is basically intentional post-WWII design that assumes >50% of the population is sensible enough to kick out an extremist should they get enough of a share on the first round so that the neighbour's history doesn't repeat itself).
I'd argue that it would be essentially the same without it: there's only one winner, and for the winner to carry any weight through their term they need to have some backing in Senate and Parliament, which also gets us into "pass" vs "no pass" law- and decision-making, and so, deep down, a "us vs them"[0][1] situation.
It's not a two party system, yet ultimately it seems like "yes" vs "no" voting always crystallises things into one as an artifact.
That's not to do with the voting system. It's because political disagreement is almost always ideological disagreement, which is one dimensional. See Sowell's analysis in his book "Conflict of visions" for an explanation of why.
I agree, it sounds like people saying "our generation can't live as well as our grandparents", typing it from their mind blowing portable computer on the toilets of an airplane, going to vacations abroad.
Problems are only solved when they're solved, if we didn't fix a problem, either it wasn't a problem or we couldn't fix it just yet: it's not that some people are so mean they prefer the problem to persist because they gain something rather than fixing it to maximize problem solving numbers.
If you can't incentivize society to cure cancer, then THAT is the problem that is impossible to fix just yet, and that person should maybe focus on this ?
Look at cancer. I'm a regular smoker, I'll probably die a lonely death, of cancer, in pain, abandoned by everyone in my life who told me for years I should stop. Why don't I stop ? I can cure my own cancer but I don't, why ? The problem is way deeper, way more complex, than just some rich people abusing me for their profit I feel: I give way more money smoking to the government than I do any cigarette industrial, yet nobody seems to have found a way to cure my cancer, myself included, when we all know it will happen most likely.
Maybe we just can't yet find a way to rewire my brain to never need cigarettes anymore, and the problem is deeper than capitalist profit-seeking ? And if it wasn't a cigarette addiction I had, it would be another one, because what I need somehow is a dangerous vice and that is not an easy thing to make me not want ?
If you care about nicotine and your health, you can just vape. A pure nicotine addiction is way more benign than burnt tobacco, because you aren't breathing in the byproducts of burnt tobacco and additives. Those additives aren't there for nothing, they make the product more addictive than the nicotine alone.
If your solution would work except for some reason, then you don’t actually have a solution. A drill that works in space except for all that vacuum and radiation isn’t actually a space drill. It’s a space drill for some alternate reality, meaning the one you’re not actually in. You haven’t solved the problem. You’re not as good of a problem solver as you think you are, sorry. Stop acting like you’ve solved it. You haven’t.
In the exact same way, any solution that would work “except humans” is a non-solution. Maybe it’s a near solution, or a solution for a different time. But it’s not one right now.
When you find yourself getting angry at the world, it’s worth considering that just maybe you’ve made the approximately easiest mistake in problem solving: underestimating the difficulty of the problem (especially someone else’s problem).
If I ranted and raved about how it’s a crime against humanity we don’t already have underground moon bases, you would just think I’m unhinged. Sure, it’s theoretically possible, but problems don’t get solved at the speed of my imagination.
“But if we had perfect coordination…” yeah, well, if it didn’t take so much energy to leave Earth’s orbit, we’d do it more often. But it does, so we don’t. We also don’t have total software security and all cancers cured. I’m sorry. Everyone is doing their best.
The author almost, but not quite, reached the point where they realize they contradict themselves: Claiming that socialized healthcare would cure cancer, but not explaining how to move the US to socialized healthcare (nevermind that countries with socialized healthcare haven't cured cancer either). Claiming that we could lay fiber cable to every house, but not how to actually do it. Claiming that an alternative voting system would improve policits, but not how to move to an alternative voting system.
The "solution" presented here is a first step in _mapping_ the problem and doesn't even begin to solve anything.
There are two unexamined assumptions in the article: first that the “we” in “we can solve everything” is synonymous with “government,” and next that “we” know the correct answers.
The former is a very twentieth century notion. The identification of government with society (“we”) went hand in hand with the idea that government should have power in every domain of human life and co-opt or liquidate every competing authority like academia or media or church. Here, it’s that “we” the government should take over healthcare (although regulatory approval of a cancer treatment was cited as one obstacle) and fiber-laying instead of leaving those to non-governmental authorities. Carl Schmitt in the early twentieth century had a great term for such a totalizing government: the Totalstaat. It’s not clear, however, that a Totalstaat is actually a good idea. Governments have never solved many problems at all—-homelessness comes to mind—-and it’s not clear that a government seeking to expand its power into previously non-governmental domains will serve its own interests best by solving problems rather than by providing treatments that abate problems without solving them. Treating a problem expands a state’s authority while preserving the problem as a reason for further government action; solving a problem would end that authority by ending the reason for it. Winning a war, for example, used to remove the need for a standing army until the twentieth century saw the invention of a “cold war” and “war on terror” and a perpetual standing army to treat the unsolved problem of a lingering threat. It’s not clear that this increase in government power was a good thing.
Secondly, the idea that “we” (government) “know” the answers is hubris. The author claims that “we” know it would be good to send everyone to college for free, but is that actually best for everyone? Or does that just turn college to more high school, lower the quality of education, waste a lot of people’s time, slow down the creation of families and negatively impinge on demographic trends, etc? “Knowing” the solution presupposes knowledge of second-order effects, and people are generally very bad at that. Thinking that a total state “knows” the best solutions to problems is a good way to impose lots of (potentially negative) second-order effects without much recourse to do anything about it, since this total state has all the authority and no longer has competing authorities to check its hubris.
> ... competing authority like academia or media or church
These are beholden to themselves, their owners, and to a deity, while the government (in theory at least) is supposed to be beholden to the governed.
There are many problems solved by a government, it's easy to ignore them because we assume they are a given and only think about the marginal issues that ail us at present.
> Governments have never solved many problems at all—-homelessness comes to mind
North Korean dissidents in South Korea disagree strongly with your claim: several of them publicly expressed their shame to see such a rich country failing to fulfill this very basic human need when their super poor communist country of origin had no such problem. Homelessness is a society-wide self-inflected wound: it could be stopped in a few years, but that would be landlord gentry's biggest nightmare.
> Homelessness is a society-wide self-inflected wound: it could be stopped in a few years, but that would be landlord gentry's biggest nightmare.
I think you are making the same mistake as the author of the article. Can you describe the steps necessary to solve homelessness, without resorting to "steps" that simply describe a condition that won't be fulfilled, such as "people have to..." or "the government has to..."?
Or, in other words, let's assume that I want to solve homelessness. What do I have to do for that?
You would need to introduce an equilibrium encouraging money system and prevent the extraction of land rents. Those things are never going to happen, because they are too obvious of a solution.
The current money system heavily discourages equilibrium formation, which allows disequilibria like the geographical concentration of money to occur, which in turn make it harder to earn money outside of large city hubs with expensive real estate. It is not possible for these homeless people to move away and earn a living on their own, because it would mean distancing themselves from where the jobs are moving towards. However, even if you make jobs available outside of expensive locations, there are still going to be people who need to live in the expensive location for whatever non job related reason. Those still need a solution to densify the existing location so more people can live there. That is why you need to prevent land owners from extracting benefits created by the collective surrounded the plot of land.
Again, the solution is too obvious for anyone to care about it. We can't demonize people, we can only demonize their ability to do bad things and set the incentives up in such a way that "greedy" people and "morally good" people do the same thing.
If you wanted the same answer in short: Demurrage currencies and land value taxes. Too simple to be believable.
> You would need to introduce an equilibrium encouraging money system and prevent the extraction of land rents. Those things are never going to happen, because they are too obvious of a solution.
If these two action items are "never going to happen", as you say, then they are not (part of) a solution. Like the author of the article, you have just started mapping the problem.
> If you wanted the same answer in short: Demurrage currencies and land value taxes. Too simple to be believable.
If things are as simple as you claim, why don't you describe a plan to overcome the obstacles and actually implement the two changes you described?
This is such a lazy argument. You can't write out in this moment how to solve this <insert large problem here> therefore it's too complex to solve.
It's all about incentives. Our society is incentivized to make a few people rich, not to solve these sorts of problems. If we wanted to solve them, we would. But that's not profitable, so it's not "worth" it.
Humans never had the technological capabilities we have today, which could solve most, if not all, of these problems. But because of our current economic system we rather spend trillions on advertising instead of reducing human suffering.
It's sad to realize that, unlike any other time in history, we as a society choose to not solve these issues.
> This is such a lazy argument. You can't write out in this moment how to solve this <insert large problem here> therefore it's too complex to solve.
I wasn't arguing that the problem is too complex to solve, and in fact I don't see any evidence that it is.
Instead, I am arguing that the replies in this thread who claim that the problem is "simple", "not rocket science" etc. underestimate the problem's complexity, and challenged them to present a solution if they think it is simple.
> This is such a lazy argument. You can't write out in this moment how to solve this <insert large problem here> therefore it's too complex to solve.
Au contraire: not only can he do that, he is (currently) unlikely to be able to do otherwise.
Culture is an extremely powerful force, one that is typically very difficult to detect (culture frowns upon self-criticism, forces the subject to be changed, moderators/experts to step in and enforce the Overton Window to restore order, etc).
> Or, in other words, let's assume that I want to solve homelessness. What do I have to do for that?
Build housing would be a great start! Markets don't care about low-profit cheap small apartments, so there's no supply and the demand isn't being met, so it's the mission of the state to step up and compensate this market failure.
Then you can also tax properties based on their occupied land area, which incentives the private sector to build higher density, which is much cheaper in terms of infrastructure cost and cost of living as well.
Then you'll stay with homeless junkies and vets, for which you'll need social workers and dedicated structures, but you could also try fixing your social issues and wage less wars and the number of people to take care of will plummet and become more similar to what you can find in other developed countries.
> Build housing would be a great start! Markets don't care about low-profit cheap small apartments, so there's no supply and the demand isn't being met, so it's the mission of the state to step up and compensate this market failure.
Let's start here. What are the steps needed to get the state to do this? Is the money for it taken from other places, or by increasing the deficit, or by raising taxes? How do you convince other politicians of your plan? Where is the land taken from?
Again, this seems only like a first step in mapping the problem.
These are secondary concerns: you need to agree to the end goal before you can even reach them, and the biggest problem is that many, if not most, affluent people don't want to solve the problem in the first place for either ideological and/or financial reasons, which in the American plutocracy means this will never happen.
If you agree to the end goal, you can pick whatever answer you like to your financing question, it's not really more important than “what color should the buildings be” as the cost would be a small fraction of say IRA or the yearly defense budget, or Trump's tax cuts.
The legitimate question being: what to do with the plutocracy, and to that question I'm afraid I don't think you Americans will see democracy ever again untill you are willing to get back to your revolutionary roots and take it (or at least make the oligarchs scared enough to give up part of the power, which is the best case scenario TBH).
> (...) and the biggest problem is that many, if not most, affluent people don't want to solve the problem in the first place for either ideological and/or financial reasons, which in the American plutocracy means this will never happen.
There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding in this discussion, because to me it seems like we're jumping from "this is really simple" to "it can't be done" and back. Which is it -- is it simple, or is it so complex that it's impossible?
You are indeed misunderstanding, not only my arguments but also the arguments in the original article, so let me rephrase it:
1. Many problems, including homelessness, are relatively straightforward to solve for a willing State entity in a developed country. Everyone in power that says otherwise is simply lying. This is the “this is really simple” part.
2. The people that get elected and are ruling are not willing to fix these problems. And the reason they aren't is that it's really hard for someone who is willing to actually get elected because of the plutocratic nature of the system. This is the “really hard” part. It's not that it's complex, it's that the interest of the people is fighting against the ideology and economic interests of the ones who have the political power to get someone elected.
See, there's no contradiction at all, and reminding people that “yes, we can in fact have nice things” is actually a political strategy to try overcome #2.
> Or, in other words, let's assume that I want to solve homelessness. What do I have to do for that?
In Finland at least this was (mostly) solved by, you know, giving homeless people homes. Ones owned by municipalities. Decided by elected representatives. Who were elected by voters who care about more than their own ass on this quarter.
This is really not rocket science or fusion power stuff.
I was assuming that the original topic was about the US, so my apologies if we were just talking about different countries here. So to be more precise: Is the problem a simple one in the US? If so, what is the solution?
Or, in case you were referring to Finland's solution being a solution "template" for the US, what are the steps to implement that solution in the US?
If a totalitarian state that doesn't care about its people at all and cannot even manage to properly feed its population can do it, then surely the biggest economy in the world can do it too.
The true conditions of poverty in North Korea are shrouded in secrecy, with reports of famine, starvation, and human rights violations. The extent of homelessness is unknown, but defectors' stories don't paint a good picture. Homelessness affects children ("Kotjebi") and elderly individuals, often abandoned due to an inability to support them. The government denies their existence, and homeless individuals are rounded up, their destination unknown.
Also, the US basically solved an earlier version of this with the 1936 Rural Electrification Act. In 1936, many rural communities and farmhouses in the US had no electricity while it was standard in towns and cities for decades. It was decided that having electricity was just something everyone should have access to and we were willing to pay the price to make that happen. Eventually it even made sense economically besides morally because many rural areas eventually became suburbs. We could do the same with fiber. It's not some utopian idea.
Absolutely not everyone is doing their best, and not everyone's best effort is in the common best interest. Healthcare works in Scandinavia, Germany, France and some other places. It doesn't in the US. That's not a law of nature.
There are shades of grey between no coordination and perfect coordination, and every step in the right direction makes things better. Care, make changes locally, vote accordingly, and you will move the needle.
I hear your point - if humans are part of the problem then an effective solution has to allow for humans in the loop.
I'd extend that thought to be more narrow though. Local human political and economic factors need to be allowed for.
So, for example, a medical solution will be different in a country that practices medicine for profit over those places where medicine is non profit.
Equally the "can't build nuclear energy" problem us solved in places where public opinion counts for nothing, and environmental concerns are, um, less concerning. [1]
If one focuses on the profit motive though, then the article is correct (it seems to be written for a US context) - we mostly don't fix the problem because someone is profiting immensely from the problem existing.
[1] avoiding for the moment the merits of said concerns, which -may- be over-described for other political reasons.
> So, for example, a medical solution will be different in a country that practices medicine for profit over those places where medicine is non profit.
There are some differences, but doctors still need to eat, equipment needs to be purchased, etc. Making medicine non profit isn't going to cure cancer.
I’d say something similar. But, I don’t think the value is in talking about why X is the way it is. The value is in knowing the next obstacle to overcome. Having a space drill except it needs higher voltage than the station supplies is what I mean by “near-solution”. So now you need to lower the voltage need or increase the supply.
Here’s where things go wrong. You’ve identified the next obstacle, and it is likely going to need time and attention to solve. It’s worthy of respect in a “respect your enemy” sort of way. But when the near-solution is engineering and the obstacle is social, people adopt this harumph attitude. Making glib statements like “we could, but we just don’t”. I don’t think that does anything to actually help solve the problem. It reduces a tremendous amount of someone else’s work to an annoyance.
This is the exact same as an idea guy coming in and expecting the engineers to “just implement it”. This is not an effective way to motivate people or enact a vision.
> I think it’s worthwhile to be able to say “we could solve the problem if it weren’t for X” so we can talk about why “X” is the way it is.
Fully agree. But we shouldn't confuse “we could solve the problem if it weren’t for X” with a solution. It is a starting point to understand the problem better, and a first step on the journey towards a solution.
Don't get me wrong, I agree, but aren't all solutions to problems situated in reality conterfactual to some degree. To the extent of my knowledge, isn't it all deterministic. To enact a stategy is to presume a free agent, individual or collective, acts according to that strategy. The act of communicating that strategy is in essence to convince those interests align with the outcome to act accordingly. We deal with imperfect information, it could be possible that someone, or a small group can unilaterally disseminate a strategy that drives wider cooperation, but those are probably unknown unknowns far too complicated to decipher by any cooperating party.
Of course this isn't it. Warp drives and luxury space communism seem to be something we could only stumble into.
I agree, factually, with almost all the content of this article, although I find its tone a little grating.
There's a joke online - "nobody speaks more confidently than a 15 year old who has smoked weed twice explaining how to smoke weed to a 15 year old who hasn't smoked weed before" - nobody writes an angrier blog post than someone who has watched two YouTube videos about a subject.
Doing the work to improve society is boring and slow. It's talking to people in the community. It's local politics. It's generational shifts. It's a warm smile to the older person in the store, in the hospital, as we try to move the needle ever so slightly in the right direction.
There's a default assumption that progress is inevitably slow, but I don't think it's obvious that it has to remain that way. I think it's worth challenging our assumptions and really trying to dig in and figure out why certain processes are slow, and if it's possible to do anything to improve upon them.
Lately I've been asking researchers why progress in their field seems so slow from the outside, and if they could explain what kinds of barriers prevent them for going faster. From what I've learned so far, the barriers are usually institutional and political, they're rarely slowed down by technical reasons.
Perhaps that is selection bias? Perhaps the science people just like to blame the non-science people for the problems. Blaming the other side is one of the most fundamentally human things to do.
> We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost.
That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Of course we can fix everything, we could also do everything in the universe, but the question is at what cost? So here's my modest proposal:
> I am here to remind you that it will only get worse unless we do something.
The problem isn't painful enough. Have you ever had a tough time convincing your team to address some looming problem, the problem actually manifests, and surprise! It becomes top priority.
COVID was a great example of this. When the problem is painful enough we as a society can do a lot. So maybe instead of the Sisyphean task of "fighting the good fight", maybe we just ... make it more painful first?
You are implying the cause of illiteracy is the lack of funds. It is not so - in fact, the very worst schools often spend per pupil the same as the very best ones, or at least very close to it. Throwing money at the problem is not the solution - it would cause the worst schools spend even more and keep churning out ignoramuses. The bad schools are bad not because they can't find money to become good but because the whole system there is broken and it can't be fixed by just giving the same incompetent, ignorant and apathetic people more money to waste.
The literacy issue and lack of proper education can almost always be traced back to the local family life, specifically single parent households. Households that don’t have two present parents are unlikely to be able to afford the time to enforce school attendance and homework. If you want to fix the education problems, start by fixing the breakdown of the family unit.
Put another way, the reason some schools spend twice as much money but have worse outcomes is because the children in those schools are starting from much farther back. There isn’t a reasonable amount of money you could throw at the problem school to solve the issue.
Not really, bad teachers often start good. Then after getting senority\tenure they ??? and become bad. But the rules don't allow you to get rid of them. Even if you could, they stick together.
of course I write the above as if we can objectivly evaluate teachers. I'm not sure if we can. I had my share of what I thought were good and bad teachers: in the end I'm a successful engineer which matters far more than how I felt about any teacher. What we really know is overall they were good enough, but not how any individual played a part
Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Over the years, I have reads dozens of articles from young enthusiastic teachers coming into bad schools with the starry eyes and the determination to fix it all. The system inevitably chews them up and spits out a jaded exhausted cynic. Has nothing to do with the lack of salary.
We still lost with nothing to show for it but debt for generations, millions of unnecessary deaths, and the TSA. Enjoy the debt service, “support the troops,” and millimeter wave backscatter scans without your shoes.
If you think there was any risk in the Middle East invading the US after September 11th, that is an exceptionally weak position to take. No one is invading the US, it’s either terrorist attacks you can’t defend against due to the asymmetric nature or ICBMs. Making peace with that is emotionally expensive but financially cheap. America has no appetite for emotional fortitude at nation state scale. Cheaper to send economically disadvantaged enlisted to the sandbox on expensive military industrial complex chariots and have a superbowl halftime show in their honor. At least the cannon fodder is wising up if the recruitment crisis is to be believed.
Terrorist attacks are defendable against. But anyway, you don't need to defend against terrorist attacks as much if you convincingly show terrorists you can come to their home and blow it up if they try.
The next time you’re in line at TSA, at a public event (sporting, concerts), at a major transportation hub, any large gathering of people, think about this position you’ve taken. There is a multiple victim shooting event almost every day in the US, and your argument is terrorist attacks can be defended against? We can’t even protect the country from ourselves. These outcomes are a choice.
> In a 2017 US study, researchers found that the average police response time was around 10 minutes. Department of Homeland Security research revealed that the average duration of an active shooter incident at a school is 12.5 minutes yet the average response time for law enforcement is 18 minutes.
> There is a multiple victim shooting event almost every day in the US, and your argument is terrorist attacks can be defended against? We can’t even protect the country from ourselves
The reason for shooting is related to civilian population carrying weapons. It's tragic but it is also a thing that would make attacking US super impractical.
Remember that Russia is super close to US geographically. It's not such a massive project to throw enough troops east and start with Alaska. So why not? Well, US (thanks its insane military budget that you so denounce) would see it coming years in advance and but even with zero warning every other house they encounter on the way will have well prepared people stoked with assault rifles.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand the strategy of terrorists. They are looking to provoke a violent overreaction in order to radicalize the populace. It is a response to our ability to blow them up, and not one we have developed an antidote for.
Sure, but those rich elites themselves like to live well and somehow it turns out they when it comes to their own they really don't like to die or see their big prosperous families die. You can't rule radicalized impoverished populations if you yourself are dead. Letting them see that their target can retaliate in this way is not cheap.
Given current events, I don't understand how you can hold this view? We've recently seen a truly horrifying terrorist attack, and the response was as brutal as you would expect. Surely the people who planned and executed it knew that better than we do, since presumably it's their business to know such things.
Surely that's a constructive proof that this notion is mistaken?
> We've recently seen a truly horrifying terrorist attack, and the response was as brutal as you would expect.
Indeed. And the reason why such an attack happened is because the people who did the attack were the ruling government body of 2 million people for almost 2 decades, and were left to their own devices to build up a large scale attack, involving 1 thousand+ combatants.
And in a few months, those combatants and military infrastructure will be destroyed and not much of a threat.
It turns out that killing your enemies leaves them no longer able to attack you. And leaving them alone and in charge of a psuedo country, lets them built up the capacity to harm you.
Uhm, no, they are not the "ruling body," I think you should revisit the fundamental facts of the situation and reevaluate your perspective.
To be frank your comment has a really disturbing undertone of bloodlust. I don't know a nice way to say that. You should really reexamine what your attitudes are here and how you came to them, this is not an appropriate way to discuss the deaths of thousands of people.
> Uhm, no, they are not the "ruling body," I think you should revisit the fundamental facts of the situation and reevaluate your perspective.
After Israel voluntarily withdrew its military and displaced all Jews out of Gaza, Hamas painted it as "powerful Hamas won" to get elected and since then is in fact the ruling party in Gaza territory (even if not very popular among the citizens there anymore for obvious reasons). What are the alternative facts?
They're a fig leaf and asset [1] for those who use them as an excuse for collective punishment and genocide. With predictable and predicted [2] results.
That's great. The claim was "the reason why such an attack happened is because the people who did the attack were the ruling government body of 2 million people for almost 2 decades". And that's transparent nonsense in service of the colonialists committing genocide right now. Do you disagree?
My claim was that Hamas is the ruling body in Gaza, which is a simple fact. It responded to a comment saying that Hamas was not the ruling body in Gaza. That comment was false. Your political advocacy isn't relevant to what I'm saying.
Bazelel Smotrich is a fringe right-wing character, reviled by a significant fraction of Israelis and even more so by Jewish people in the US. Along with Itamar Ben-Gvir, he found his way into Netanyahu's cabinet after Netanyahu lost support from a significant chunk of conservative Israelis in the wake of legal scandals, which included a recently-repudiated attempt to disempower Israeli courts in an effort that was in part designed to keep him out of prison owing to an unusually strong corruption case against him. Netanyahu clung to power by building a coalition of lunatics like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
The US State Department just today issued a statement saying that the Israeli government, and Netanyahu himself, have repeatedly reassured the US that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir aren't speaking for Israel.
Neither Smotrich nor Ben-Gvir were in power in 2005 (Smotrich might still have been in school), when Sharon disengaged from Gaza, and dispossessed Israeli Gazan settlers. Nor were they in power in years where Netanyahu was recorded saying Hamas was his preferred partner in Palestine. Put simply: Smotrich isn't the reason Hamas rules Gaza.
Regardless: Hamas took power in Gaza in 2006, in a combination of coercive force and a public election. It has not allowed elections since then. Until recently, Hamas was the dominant security force in Gaza, and the governing authority.
I appreciate your context but not really sure what it adds. I know who all the players are and I know how many left-leaning Americans and secular Jews feel about religious people, I think you are presenting a very one sided view of things, but that's not really relevant. I was interested in what johnnyworker was really trying to say, as it's not really coherent at the moment.
My interpretation of their subtext: that you may believe Gaza is/was ruled by Hamas, but it doesn't count, because Netanyahu's governing coalition found Hamas preferable to the PA, to the point where they arranged some amount of funding for Hamas. Thus, in reality, the governing authority of Gaza was Israel.
(I do not buy into this narrative).
I'm only adding this because you said you didn't know what I was trying to add before. It's totally reasonable to want 'johnnyworker to just tell you in their own words what they're trying to say.
How is that not civil? And if someone says "it seems you're excusing killing Jews", I actually do have to respond to that. You see problem with one and not the other, that's noted.
Can you please stop haranguing people like this? If your arguments are as strong as you clearly feel they are (for instance: you have responded to people challenging them by simply repeating them verbatim), you should be able to make them without this kind of incivility.
A casual survey of the site suggests that, if one is forced to distill the conflict down to two simple sides, "Israel" and "Palestine", the side you fall in enjoys majority support among commenters on HN. You do that side no favors by writing so shrilly about it.
If you're going to call out this person multiple times, will you acknowledge that the other commenters are also haranguing them? They were responding here to a comment deliberately twisting their words. They were responding elsewhere to a comment that accused them of supporting murder. You even replied to that one, without identifying it as "uncivil."
I agree this conversation has gone off the rails, but you're putting it all on one person quite unfairly.
If you're unwilling to call people out in an even handed way, I think it's better to just send the link to dang and let him do it. Otherwise it creates the appearance of abusing civility to silence just one particular party when everyone is throwing mud. (I don't think that's your intention, to be clear. Just that it creates the appearance.)
This is a fascinating take: what do you suggest the proper response would be to the current event you referenced in light of your opinion that any response will only radicalize the local population?
First let me say, I'm not trying to make a policy prescription. I'm pointing out what I thought was a misconception about how terrorism works.
But to answer your question, I have absolutely no idea. I follow a military news YouTuber named Ryan McBeth, and something he says that makes sense to me is that effective strategies present adversaries with dilemmas rather than problems, where each option is terrible but you have no choice but to pick one. The reason terrorism is effective, to the extent that it is effective, is that no one has discovered an effective means to counter it.
When I initially engaged with you in this conversation I did so because you appeared to be discussing things honestly but based on other comments you've made here its clear you are in fact trying to push an agenda that denies reality and instead excuses murder.
You forcefully made a claim that was totally false that essentially firmly excused murder. I see you finally kinda corrected in it a follow up, but of course the follow up will not get nearly as much attention as the very false initial statement.
I think you should take a step back and engage differently. You say you're here to engage in good faith, but you're interpreting people's statements with very little charity. It seems like you're very quick to jump to the conclusion that someone who says something you don't like is a supporter of mass murder, you've accused two people in this thread. Which is both uncharitable and straight up flamebait.
Remember, Hamas was openly throwing rockets at Israel and probing its defenses for years. (From outside it may sound unreal but for many years even in fancy glittering Tel Aviv people are really familiar with air defense sirens and sitting in air defense shelters because they do it a few times a year.) You can't say that about US.
So two things how I hold this view.
First in all those years Hamas didn't manage to make a dent in Israel. Which makes me really think even Hamas leaders didn't expect this attack to go this far. But it so happened Israel was unprepared with its military all busy defending illegal Jewish settlements on the West bank. Maybe they got complacent. Or a conspiracist might say Netanyahu set it all up (but I doubt it). Whatever it was, Hamas did way more damage than anyone expected so things got out of hand
And second in all these years of throwing rockets, smuggling weapons and all the stuff they were getting away with they got no serious retaliation. Paradoxically because Israel's defenses were so good. So maybe Hamas also got a bit complacent and thought they are immune camping there under civilian hospitals and schools.
Your first sentence is correct but I don't think the second tracks. US is surrounded by massive bodies of water and has no land border with a hostile nation. Invading it is not very practical. The tendency of civilian population to carry weapons may be a bigger deterrent to invasion.
It can sound cheeky but perhaps the biggest thing you have to show for it is overall more free and less murdery world thanks to people wanting to prosper and stuff. Going to war is suddenly unappealing (unless you are very small and have nothing to lose, but then you do less damage comparatively).
Are you alluding to Allies vs Axis? Because I don't think US have invaded a country unilaterally in that war.
It would be similar if Mexico/Canada/Cuba together declared war at US and then Russia joined them. Because then sure Russia can have a decent chance of successfully invading US across a sea and then strong military could make a difference. But Mexico and Canada won't and countries who could are inconveniently far. This is why I say lack of attempted invasions may be more thanks to good geopolitical situation and civilian population equipped for defense than strong military.
It would be hard to argue that Afghanistan lost that much. Although I guess they "won" (if you call what happened winning. )
But the "war on terror" wasn't a "traditional war". It wasn't like some landing by foreign forces at Venice Beach. It was a manufactured political construct that served political purposes.
It handily created a jobs program called the TSA. Which is grossly over equipped to confiscate shampoo. All the world has airport security. Very few places have (or need) TSA levels of intrusion.
The "war on terror" was indeed lost. It was lost when the US became "terrified". In all of the troubles the IRA couldn't do that to the UK. Endless bombs just resulted in "carry on".
In the US the war continues all the time. The TSA bears witness to this.
But at this point it employs so many people, doing meaningless, unskilled work, that you may as well treat it as a jobs program.
$8 trillion is ambiguous and forces me to understand whether you're using long or short scale (particularly for me, coming from a long scale culture, it trips me up often) [1]. I've often wondered though why scientific notation or SI prefixes have never caught on for currency. 8 T$ or $8e12 feel both shorter and less ambiguous.
> 8 T$ or $8e12 feel both shorter and less ambiguous.
To be honest, I wrote it out longhand because I think it's important not to make it feel shorter or somehow less significant. It is an enormous sum of money that humans are not equipped to comprehend, so anything we can do to covey the scale more clearly is important.
> > We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost.
> That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much.
No it doesn't, and we already paid for it at least four times over. The large-scale ISPs (and even small-scale ones) have been given $400,000,000,000 by Congress since the 1990s until now to bring broadband Internet to people in America. They still didn't get it done. They didn't get it done because they used the money to buy back stock and give themselves bonuses after wiring up a few hundred thousand homes at most: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
And the reason we paid for it at least four times over, is because the Pentagon commissioned a study some time ago on the amount of money required to bring a strand of fiber-optic cable to every home in America. They estimated it to be around $50,000,000,000 to $100,000,000,000.
There are a lot more problems we can solve with more severe punishments and more certainty of being punished. We can solve even more with re-instituting shame in our society. This idea that nothing is shameful is not only disgusting, but objectively stupid... and we can see where it's led us.
Oft repeated but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 lays out a compelling argument that maybe the government didn’t actually hand out $400B in subsidies/tax breaks but instead it’s an artifact of how the researcher for the book chose to classify profits but that you could make an alternative pitch. I’m not well-versed enough in the law to know but it sounded like this person did research vs quoting a summary of the book by its author.
Not disagreeing with the rest, but if the other poster was correct it may be worth correcting the record on whether or not we actually did attempt to fund building fiber throughout America.
Personally, I don't find it "mind boggling", but rather in-line with reality. Large mega-projects usually suffer major delays, massive cost over-runs, complications due to unforeseen events, and are at a high-risk for corruption. It is hard to believe we now have a handle on what it takes to do accurate costing of such large ambitious public infrastructure projects.
A lot of the people fighting against these things are not feeling the pain. Many people in my family are some degree of anti-vaccine / masking mandates. I can guarantee you that if a single close family member ended up hospitalized due to covid, their tune would do a fast 180.
All of their beliefs are based on whether someone they care about had something happen to them.
That's funny, the people who are dumb and emotional in my entourage are those who are still completely afraid of COVID even after like, 5 boosters, even if they are in their thirties, no immune condition, etc. They don't go out, don't see anyone, only order stuff online, and actually think that they are smarter than everyone else who just... lives their lives. (r/zerocovidcommunity is a good example of that, just to give you more than a personal anecdote)
To me that's a much more emotional take on life than anti Vax lunatics because they at least "live their life" as it has always been. Which might be a bad thing in this case, but to me it is much less insane than becoming a hermit over something that is objectively not an actual danger to them anymore, unless they believe their 5 boosters don't help. So I'm not sure that reducing it to caring or not is actually helpful. You can care about something but disagree about the method.
I guess my point is that I don't think antivaxxers don't believe in vaccines because they just want people to die, they don't believe in vaccines because they think it doesn't help people from dying. They actually believe vaccines don't work, it's not just pretend play. It's very very dumb, but I don't think that framing as is just not caring until stuff happens to them is helpful.
If you didn't believe that for example, homeopathy works, you won't suddenly think that it should be used if someone close to you dies. Maybe in desperation, but that's different from believing it. Obviously the difference is that homeopathy doesn't work, and vaccines absolutely do. But remember, that's literally what antivaxxers disagree with!
> That's funny, the people who are dumb and emotional in my entourage are those who are still completely afraid of COVID even after like, 5 boosters, even if they are in their thirties
I have a few friends like this, though to a lesser degree as their worries have disappeared by now.
> I guess my point is that I don't think antivaxxers don't believe in vaccines because they just want people to die, they don't believe in vaccines because they think it doesn't help people from dying. They actually believe vaccines don't work, it's not just pretend play. It's very very dumb, but I don't think that framing as is just not caring until stuff happens to them is helpful.
I wasn't trying to frame it as "all covid deniers just don't care unless it impacts their family" or something similar. It more subtle than that. And what I said was not supposed to be a generalization at all. It was specifically about my family members.
I do think some portion of all people fall into this group though. Yes, they might truly believe the covid vaccines do more harm than good. But also yes, they would immediately line-up for a covid vaccine if a close family member became hospitalized and visually looked bad. Nothing about the dangers of the vaccine changes in this scenario, and covid didn't suddenly become more dangerous to them. It just became more emotionally visceral. That's not desperation. It's straightforward emotional persuasion, and is the "feeling the pain" as originally commented about.
I do think there is many more social dynamics at play, but I don't feel confident in articulating my scattered thoughts on them well. How people adjust how they act based on social groups, or with very little information people form very strong opinions, how information bubbles impact what topics you see or how they're presented, etc.
I didn’t see it that way - I think they have a valid point. I know people personally affected by deaths in their family due to the virus and I know people who caught and fought it like it was nothing, so I know exactly what the poster is getting at.
When it hits your loved ones, you start to take it more seriously. Wearing a mask and socially distancing doesn’t matter if it means not losing another family member. Conversely, if you experience just a minor cold, you start questioning all the media you’ve seen about the death rates and this and that which can definitely lead you to thinking everyone’s exaggerating the whole thing for a reason unknown to you.
I’m not anti vax at all (studied biomedical science) but I do see how people can be pushed towards having those views, even subconsciously, through highly manipulated algorithms that can use emotions to extract content in the form of comments, reaction videos, memes etc from real people. Come to think of it, AI has been milking humans for content for years.
Francis Collins has already admitted the policies were myopic and didn’t account for QALY — they were malpractice that focused on a particular disease while ignoring the holistic situation. Literally failed at basic medicine.
Again, you’re portraying people as “dumb and emotional” without addressing the substance of their concerns or reasons. You’re also refusing to ponder if that’s how you reached your conclusions.
But the director of the NIH during COVID now admits those people were right the whole time — COVID policy failed to weigh its costs, and as such, didn’t strike the right balance for public health.
>now admits those people were right the whole time
Those people for sure aren't the anti-vaxers and anti maskers.
It's about the consequences of the lockdown, school closings and operation postponings and it's pretty easy to point at that consequences if you can't compare them to the consequences without these measures.
In Sweden they had similar admissions that their initial measures were wrong and they didn't have lockdowns.
If you fight vaccines and masks you are anti-vax and anti mask that's not a stereotype but just a description of their behavior.
An despite claiming otherwise, masks work as long as you and the people around wear them. The Cochrane study only showed that you can't escape the virus if it's everywhere because as soon you ket your guards down you get infected
And guess what helped to spread it everywhere.
Masks aren't dangerous and the benefit of the vaccines outweighs the risks compared to a corona infection.
There's no stereotype there. I'm explicitly talking about people I know. If what I said happened, their tunes would change. It's happened before, and it'll happen again.
And yes, the loudest ones about it in the family are dumb and emotional. That tends to be the case for most people who do less thinking and more repeating their point louder and louder.
Francis Collins has already admitted the policies were myopic and didn’t account for QALY — they were malpractice that focused on a particular disease while ignoring the holistic situation.
Look what happened in Sweden, they say the same about their intial measures and lost more people in the first year of the pandemic than any other scandinavian country.
Running from death out of fear is the very definition of cowardice. There are higher goods that call one to put away their own fear and serve, no matter the cost.
That's interesting because I remember lots of people fear masks and vaccines and refuse to use any of them even despite the mention of the higher goods.
The ones vaccinated and masked didn't run, they stayed especially in the health sector.
Different set of "higher goods". I'm not a humanist. I'm a Christian. So going to church to worship God is more important than staying home to stay alive.
You can also praise God at home and I am pretty sure that He prefers it if you do not deliberately jeopardise His creation so that you may no longer be able to support your family and do His work.
Also what happened to "Love your neighbor as yourself.’ No other commandment is greater than these.”?
I can't participate in the Eucharist at home. Also, you are still assuming that sickness and suffering are inherently bad. There are worse things for your soul than sickness and death. Sickness and suffering in general heal your soul, and death means you have repented as much as you can and you are returning to your Lord. There is nothing to fear. Suffering and sickness shouldn't be avoided out of fear.
And I should have clarified sooner: "it's living by common sense" is true if you are a humanist, which I am not. I am a Christian, so going to church to worship God is more important than staying home to stay alive.
The problem here is we need solutions that work, not magical thinking. Otherwise credibility goes in the toilet. It’s self-evident in the face of an aerosol-generating respiratory pandemic that social distancing, surgical face masks, and immunizations that don’t produce a muscosal response do not constitute a complete solution. At best, they’re good things to do that may help a bit. Likewise, ending our own reliance on fossil fuels by decree won’t work—energy transitions are driven by economic viability.
Profit isn't the only reason things cost to much. There is also just the fact that some things take too many resources to do.
Take the healthcare example, of cancer that we have a cure for but costs $2 million so no one gets it. The instinctive response is to say that is horrible, and that we should spend whatever it takes to cure someone... but should we?
Even if we said profit wasn't an issue, scarce resources still have to be allocated. Time and resources spent doing one thing means less to do something else.
Imagine a cure for cancer that required 10000 people to work 1000 hours each to produce... surely that would be too much to be worth it, right? Those are hours we can't do something else.
Even if we decided no amount of hours or resources were too many, we are still limited by the people we have and the resources available. We simply don't have enough to do everything.
So yes, maybe we can fix ANYTHING, but we certainly can't fix EVERYTHING
For governments and infrastructure they don’t need to make a profit they can subsidise. That is somewhat the point of a government. Costs too much is still an objection but “no immediate profit” isn’t.
Whether that is true for fibre, I don’t know it is a complex topic.
Yes, but they get that back later on with all the productivity increases.
Or to put it another way - think of how much the government could save in taxes if it built no infrastructure at all. You want electricity? Get a generator. You want roads? Pay a new toll every 1km as you go through various private lands.
You have to (attempt to) quantify those productivity increases. There are an unlimited number of nice things government could spend on, but limited budget. It happens that fiber passed muster. Other things don’t.
(The productivity value of fiber can be estimated with a revenue model based on subscriber fees)
Some small towns have started building fiber to every home that want it, as a public utility. It has confirmed cost is the only question that voters care about.
In one example it cost something like $200M for a population of 150,000. That’s $1.3k per person. Good luck getting the taxpayer to sign up for that without a clear revenue model.
It’s being done, but not as some kind of blind “hey you know what would be great” leap.
98% of Americans have access to fixed-line broadband, but only 62% actually have it. A significant proportion are fine with just having mobile and a small but fairly stable minority simply have no interest in using the internet at all.
There are certainly some remaining connection gaps in remote rural communities, but universal fiber coverage is the least cost-effective solution to that problem.
I had a conversation as an agent with a customer wanting to cut internet access in favor of just having people use their phones. She was confused by the fact that she thought the experience she had by using her fixed wired internet to provide wifi access to her phones was automagically a function of the devices themselves.
While slightly slow walking the process and explaining the disadvantages of this I manually shut down the connection to the modem without actually disconnecting the internet service. Her kids had successfully vetoed the operation before we could complete the disconnection.
Pew says of those who rely only on a smartphone rather than a broadband connection only 45% feel a phone does everything they need was true and only 23% said that was the most import reason. Other popular reasons included unacceptable speed, cost, and perhaps most relevant the 22% that said other options simply weren't available.
I don't think its a stretch to imagine that uptake of fast fiber might be slightly higher than the 73% (not 62) with Home Broadband internet given that many have options that are both piss poor and expensive.
Exactly, they worked out the numbers just like you did here, and showed it would cover principal in a reasonable timeframe. Instead of blindly building it without thinking about revenue and return on investment. It wouldn’t have been built otherwise.
> When the problem is painful enough we as a society can do a lot.
For example, we lie about how the problem came to be, institute a censorship framework to prevent scientists from discussing it, spend months preventing solutions from reaching the consumers because we can't figure out how to issue permits, institute policies guaranteed to make the problem much worse, rally against solutions that could make it less bad because it allows us to take cheap shots about political opponents, lie about various aspects of the problem because it looks to us more convenient if people behaved as if they believed the lies, institute draconian policies that make absolutely no sense but allow the politicians to declare they are "serious about it", allow the same politicians to blatantly and constantly violate the same policies, dial the censorship to 11 to suppress public discussion of these policies, spend enormous amounts of money on things that do not work, distribute even more enormous amount of money to fraudsters, because we don't have time to bother checking who needs help and who doesn't, and so on, and so forth...
Yeah, you are right, as a society we did a lot. We shouldn't have done most of it, but there's no denying it, it is a lot.
> What they don’t tell you is that we already have solutions for a lot of problems, we just don’t use them. Sometimes this is because the solution is too expensive, but usually it’s because competing interests create a tragedy of the commons.
If you have a solution that can't be used because it costs too much money or other societal concerns, then you don't have a solution.
Part of making a solution is finding something that works in the real world and not an idealized world.
There’s a difference between “too expensive given the budget constraints we have imposed on ourselves” and “too expensive for any society to afford”. The author is asking us to step outside of the current political constraints and simply question whether these problems are truly as insurmountable as our political system makes them.
As for “other societal concerns” there are always societal concerns with anything. There were societal concerns with Social Security and free education for kids. Turns out those are good ideas despite the fact that they’re not free. In fact if you suggested them today a lot of people would shoot them down as infeasible. I don’t have any kids but I pay for other kids to learn to read. I’m not retired but I pay into social security.
It's not that it costs too much money, in many cases. The money's there. The problem is that the solution is not profitable compared to other actions, which is a different thing entirely.
For example, it is much more profitable to sell recurring treatments than it is to sell cures. You can only sell a cure once per instance of disease, after all, whereas selling a recurring treatment means you have an indefinite stream of revenue. (Similar logic applies to selling software as a subscription instead of as a one-off license.)
When something is "not profitable", that does not mean it costs too much. It means that the thing is not as profitable as other options, which is sometimes a result of excessively costly processes, but is at other times a result of having "do nothing" as an option (which by definition costs nothing, and depending on the field can make quite a lot of money).
Another example of something being "not profitable", but not because it costs more, is public goods. Public transportation, for instance. It is undeniable that good public transportation is a boon to society, but public transport is often framed as a business rather than a public good, and in the context of a business, public transport is simply not as profitable as something like a toll road. Running a toll road is close to "do nothing" compared to running a bus line or train line, since everyone brings their own car instead of using the publicly-provided transportation. The catch is, this is actually MORE costly overall--because many more vehicles have to be fueled and maintained, and cars are relatively inefficient compared to trains. But, because the cost is distributed to the users of the road, the toll road is "cheaper" for the people operating it, and thus more profitable--so if you run government like a business, the toll road is the thing you go with.
“costs too much money or other societal concerns“
Uhh you coupled these together which is a little odd, since societal concerns might be more addressable than the basic fact of resource scarcity is.
"costs too much money" isn't resource scarcity. It's at best a synthetic proxy for the general concept of resources (and at worst, the scarcity is entirely artificial)
Sure “costs too much money” is an umbrella term that includes scarcity as a cause but can include other things. When its a consequence of something other than scarcity, the purpose of the article is to point that fact out. Unlike issues of scarcity, societal problems are often solvable but for lack of widespread will, and awareness that solving that underlying societal issue could solve a more obvious and important problem we’re interested in solving is useful because it helps rouse that will.
I don’t think it’s fair to mark some parts of the argument “not the real world” when the argument is a whole block. The societal changes being discussed in the article are the main proposed path to a solution, not the particular cancer cure. Yes it involves some changes in the amount of profit some people will make. Yes potentially even destabilizing capitalism somewhat. These kinds of changes might not be comfortable or free of risks, but we have done similar changes in the past. Sometimes without even killing people in the process. The are definitely part of “the real world”.
Changes can be made, but that has to be discussed as part of the solutions not as something extra.
Problems are not purely technical, they always have a social component.
If you have a solution but its too expensive, that's not a full solution, that is half a solution. Maybe the other half is government grants or whatever, but you can't just talk about it as if the problem is solved. The social factors are just as much a part of the problem to be solved as the scientific part. Someone needs to figure them out. It is hard work that needs to be done and is how problems actually get solved.
That argument could be applied to prohibition too for example. If we just changed society enough... we could be alcohol free! Same for drug usage. But the thing is, if you have to literally change society to do something maybe it's not such a practical or useful idea.
When engineers are not subject to licensure, don't be surprised when management, pushed by bean counters, let the bean counters make the decisions.
Subject engineers to licensure, including ethics clauses, including clauses for building for repairability and minimum expected product lifetimes. Legally protect engineers from dismissal or retribution for invoking these clauses. Then see how much crap we continue to build.
And then, sadly, you’ll most likely get beaten by some foreign country’s slap-shit-together-and-ship-it junk. Because people don’t think in terms of TCO and product lifespans, they see that “-30%” and “$X.99” and buy things that possibly even unable to do what they really need them to do, because ad made a different impression.
Solving junk requires much more than licensing and certifications (unless somehow it’s done globally, worldwide). It also bridging the consumer awareness/competence gap somehow.
I would have agreed with you before COVID and the Russo-Ukrainian war. Today, the world is slowly changing direction on globalization. There is increasing understanding, at the national policy level, of the value of more localized supply chains, where local manufacturing is encouraged through tariffs. This is besides newfound focus on privacy and data sovereignty, and the race by cloud providers to build globally-accessible datacenters all over the globe. The next step will be a focus on localizing not just the data but the software itself: the operators, the code, and finally developers.
> unless somehow it’s done globally, worldwide
The vehicle for this is the WTO, or at least, it used to be, before the US decided to take its teeth away. Giving it teeth requires moral leadership. It doesn't happen overnight, but it starts with licensure, then working through the WTO to establish new rules and tariffs for violators.
> Today, the world is slowly changing direction on globalization.
I'm not so sure about this. The world is slowly realizing heavy dependence on exports of autocratic countries was not exactly the brightest idea - and this superficially polite wording is very intentional here, because that's how it goes. Even the war hadn't stopped trading - worse, on the contrary, Russian trading boomed after the invasion. And it's not something unique that money beats anything - oil deals are advertised at climate conferences, and somehow this doesn't surprise me at all. And I think WTO also wouldn't do a thing that won't benefit its stakeholders - not the consumers. There's barely any global consensus about anything important, and international institutions like UN look dysfunctional at best.
And in terms of money, cheap junk beats consistently anything else out of the market. The homeostasis of price-regulation-quality is very hard to maintain, and consumer products either fall down towards cheap junk extremum, or towards regulatory capture extremum (but still junk under the hood - just see how banking and medical apps are doing).
Sorry to be this pessimistic - I really wish I'd be wrong here. But unless somehow there's bigger money in making changes than in maintaining the status quo, I doubt anything would happen.
That'd be great. It can also finally define a standard for things like clean code, development cycles and and design patterns. Companies keep claiming to promote these things but it seems to be just a lot of equivocations.
> clean code, development cycles and and design patterns
We can't even agree that these things are in fact good ideas.
Singleton is a design pattern, generally considered a bad one but it has important uses when used correctly.
Clean code is good but only when done the correct amount, when done in a zealous manner just slows down development and adds extra overhead which will again cause mistakes.
If anything I feel design by contract will become more of a standard, look at the JPL recommendations, they don't explicitly call it design by contract but it's build into the spec.
Not enough "software engineers" even know what invariants need to hold, what preconditions need to be true and what postconditions need to be in place.
Don't believe me, look for the equivalent of:
try {
// some code
} catch(...) {
// Handle all these errors we didnt know about and handle explicitly
}
> Look at some civil engineering disasters: licensing doesn't prevent disasters.
I'd suggest that you are judging the effectiveness on the wrong criteria here. It's impossible to foresee all distasters - the goal is to enact mechanisms to mitigate the human cost of distasters, and even more importantly, prevent the second and third occurrences of the same distaster... (which we seem decently good at)
Licensing doesn't prevent similar disasters from happening. Licensing is simply too low-level to prevent problems. Licensing is a mechanism to scapegoat individual engineers. It doesn't fix issues with systems. And the penalty of losing a license is simply too cheap compared against the cost of major accidents.
Engineering projects are usually performed by businesses, often across jurisdictional boundaries. Licensing is usually a monopoly within a jurisdiction.
Avoiding accidents requires solutions at the level of a business activity: and it needs to cover all the aspects of the activity (not just the coalface of engineering, but the management and sales and every other aspect that can affect safety).
If software engineering requires licenses then open source cannot be used. Good luck starting from scratch and introducing other risks of proprietary solutions!
An example: a Lambourghini tractor has a fault in the steering software that causes the tractor to overturn and kills a farmer in Nabraska. How do you expect software engineering licensing to prevent that?
Note that this will make society's ability to build things even worse.
The UK has gotten worse and worse at large scale construction over time as laws and rules and culture have gotten more conservative. Near me a small bridge is being widened. This takes a year and a half and £160 million, partly due to well intentioned rules. For example, one that says you need to have two attendants guiding traffic at every location people could get to the site, which means 12 very bored men standing around all day doing nothing at the two intersections at the edge of the build site.
Rules made from our ivory towers can't take into account all the factors that will actually occur in our fractally complex reality, particularly as times and situations change.
The impossible task gets even harder when second and third order effects come into play. For example, if a license is required to work, that license can be lost if something ever goes wrong and firing for not approving something is impossible then a second order effect could be that engineers will have every incentive to never approve things, requiring every safety feature rather than taking the time and effort to determine which are needed in the situation. The third order effect is a gradual shift of engineering culture towards being more conservative, as being more than average levels of risk taking means you can't just point at what everyone else does and say "Best practice!".
You have a lot of faith in the bureaucrats who are supposed to dream up and enforce those rules.
There are honest and competent civil servants, of course. But they are a precious and limited resource for any society, and should only be expended on the most critical tasks.
I'd rather have those people work on important stuff (say, criminal justice), than arbitrate microwave popcorn buttons.
No, we can’t “fix everything” because not everyone agrees that these are problems which need solving, or that your proposed solutions are actually an improvement.
I feel like most people go through this thought process around junior year in college. “If only they would put me in charge, I could fix everything.” Yes, the world is not that simple, what a surprise…
The post presents a simplistic point of view - that there are universally-agreed-upon solutions to these problems that, through a failure of organizational or coordination capacity, we're unable to enact.
The actual reality - that these "solutions" are not as simple or effective as he thinks and that's why we're not doing them - is a lot less gloomy than the thesis he proposes.
His call to "build social systems that cooperate" basically just amounts to "All you people need to start doing what I say". Join the club, dude.
Doesn't he cite several solutions that already exist and have been demonstrated? For instance, he cites voting systems that have already been implemented in two US states, as well as a video describing the mathematical proof of how that voting system affects the outcomes of elections compared to a simple first-past-the-post vote. That's not "not simple or effective", that's "mathematically proven to be effective".
I got a feeling that in the political space we are given a binary choice between two dudes. The winner is then being courted by big-something to make a decision that benefits said dude.
All the nuance and actual say about pressing questions has been removed.
The feeling is understandable, but it’s a symptom of living in a complex world and not something some particular other political system could fully solve. The Netherlands, to pick a topical example, has a healthy multiparty democracy with over a dozen parties who win some representation - but as a consequence, the actual process of deciding who’s in charge happens after the election, with party leaders spending months courting each other to benefit each other in exchange for contributing their votes to a legislative majority. (They’re in a bit of a pickle right now, because a historically unpopular party which used to be frozen out by all the “big-somethings” has won the most legislative seats.)
> your proposed solution is actually an improvement.
Whenever we try to improve anything in this world (software, hardware, humans, society, laws, constitutions), we measure a bunch of things beforehand, then we measure again after implementing the change. If it's faster or cheaper or lighter or taller or some measurable amount different, we can quite easily determine if the changes have in fact improved upon the way things were.
In the case of many things at a societal level, it's not difficult to compare to other countries that have already implemented a bunch of these things to see the likely outcomes.
The critique is not that it's impossible for all changes to measure improvement, just that it isn't possible in many cases, because the ideas about what constitutes improvement differ.
And even if there was agreement on a set of aspects, measuring them is not the holy grail. You can rarely measure the effect directly. You have to measure some proxy (operationalize it). And the definition of that proxy is going to cause problems.
That, plus --of course-- vested interests, makes that you can't fix everything. The best you can hope for is gradual improvement, and a change of direction when the plan doesn't work out as hoped. Those are political choices, not technical.
Exactly this. We could build a network of commuter trains, but not everyone thinks that commuting as a life style is the future they want, so they comprehensibly don't want to pay that with their taxes. We could build enough houses to give housing to everyone, but many people don't want their neighbourhood turned into a concrete jungle or a "bad" neighborhood at their expense, so they would vote against a candidate with radical plans about housing. We could elect representatives choosing from a multiparty system with multi-preference, but many countries that do have large coalitions that regularly transition into government crises every time one of the parties thinks they'd have a better chance on a new election.
I find this kind of reasoning more and more frequent on the Internet: someone starts their rant with "we all agree that A is bad", while in reality 1) we don't even all agree that A is a problem 2) we don't all agree that, A being a problem, it is worse than the alternatives 3) sometimes, saying "A is a problem" is the only socially allowed take even if you don't care / don't think it is
I'd like to point out that computer security was solved in the 1970s after lessons were learned by the Military during the Viet Nam conflict. We've blamed everything except our operating systems, which are fundamentally flawed because they don't incorporate Capability Based Security[1].
Things that are not capability based security, but people seem to think they are, include:
App Permission flags on your smartphone
Windows 8 UAE
SELinux
AppArmor
Group Policies
Every major operating system has a capability model (eg SELinux or Group Policies). Mobile operating systems have had capabilities from the jump, but still get hacked.
(That being said, capabilities are great, we should use them and they do help. If you're not familiar with this pattern, look it up, it's worth knowing.)
I don't believe that Linux capabilities are correctly named. They describe an ambient privilege, whereas capabilities represent explicit authorisation i.e. one invokes a capability to use it, and this is why entire classes of security vulnerabilities aren't possible in true capability-based systems.
Unfortunately capabilities have long been misunderstood as equivalent to access control lists, and therefore ignored or misnamed due to the difficulty of building working capability-based systems Vs ACL-based systems. (ACL-based systems should be built on top of a capability-based core, and only apply to a smallest possible domain of objects - a single global namespace with an ACL-based access control mechanism is where the common security vulnerabilities of modern operating systems begin.)
Smartphone permissions are also ambient privileges, but that's not the reason they get hacked: they get hacked because the operating systems are not designed around capabilities from boot and up, and have shared critical global namespaces with an ambient authority access control mechanism. Capabilities provide defense in depth, they don't make a system automatically unhackable but they do make it so that a critical attack path is highly unlikely to exist.
Hmm, I'm not sure we share an understanding of "ambient." Smartphone permissions are scoped to the app. It's been a while since I've messed with SELinux, but iirc, the rules can be scoped to an executable.
Whereas in my mind, an ambient permission is scoped to a broad category, like a user or group.
Ambient here is defined as the programmer assumes that they don't have to ask permission, nor does the runtime, you can just open any file at will that the user is allowed to access, without restrictions.
So if an image viewer is given permissions to access your photos, it includes a broad swath of permissions, including the ability to just corrupt them all.
With a capabilities based system, the image viewer would get access to a single photo, or a folder of them, and perhaps read-only access, decided by the user at run time, instead of the system administrator at some earlier time, or the manufacturer as a category choice.
A capability is essentially a handle to a file or folder, chosen by the user at runtime using a "powerbox" (much like a file-open dialog). The OS doesn't give access to anything other that the files chosen by the user, so no matter how confused or evil the program, it's not going to have unauthorized side effects.
That’s how several iOS permissions work. For instance, you can trigger an image picker and receive a handle for an image asset without gaining permission to read the photo library.
Capabilities are strictly less secure than hard-coded permissions, because capabilities can be given away by confused deputies whereas fixed permissions cannot.
Capabilities also don't magically stop your app containing buffer overflows, SSO login problems, they don't make your users phishing-proof and in general they don't do a lot of anything. They're a useful API pattern that every OS already provides and has done for decades, but they're very far from a silver bullet.
Contrary to the tweet, I would classify "build nuclear" as equivalent to the programmers pulling out the plugs to smother suggestions for obvious progress.
This can be seen most clearly in Australia, where very much despite, not because of the previous government, renewables are toppling records weekly and offering the opportunity of a lifetime to the Australian people.
Meanwhile, News Corp and the ousted government, almost exactly at the time they lost all control pivoted to suddenly advocating nuclear as a tactic to slow the rollout of renewables.
I have some problems with the way modern software is changing, but I don’t think it is QA related, more a race to the bottom with perpetual beginner focused UX.
But as far as the author is referencing QA is there a good measure of quality over time?
My recollection of consumer software started 30 years ago, and it was incredibly unstable. BSOD frequently, my uptime is far far better now. Save frequently, because you will probably lose your document at any moment; I still reflectively ctrl-s even though I can’t remember my last document crash.
It references the image exploit in the article, that’s bad, but I got MS Blaster simply connecting to the network.
90-99% of ransomeware attacks are really just social engineering. There is no question that software is more bulletproof today than it was in 2000 when nearly every website was susceptible to simple sql-injection, OSes didn’t have any sort of built-in security or access controls.
The number of update reminders is a measure that I use. Updating software has become expected, as a reminder to open the app again.
It would be nice if apps were developed as software for satellites: updating satellite software in flight is expensive, so constant updating isn't an option.
Coordination problem is not a simple or easy one. Totalitarian/dictatorship answer to it of course exists, (not sure if author implicitly suggests it), with a lot of obvious downsides.
For example dictatorship really sucks if you have to open a new market, to the detriment of incumbents, of course.
Hand-picking winners and manual resource allocation works remarkably bad in most contexts. Fall of USSR and what followed it is too recent, too bright examples to ignore.
So, while the question asked is really, really, interesting and i am sure we can do better, "just do" isn't really an answer and oversimplification. Resources are finite. Talent can't be applied everywhere at once, there is not enough talent. Why this solution (higher education for everyone) and not that (education reform with changed focus)? And so on.
I think author knows this better than me, single article has to focus on something, and in general "something needs to be done" is a sentient i can agree with
"We actually have a cure for blood cancer now, by the way. Like, we’ve done it."
Proceeds to link to a highly experimental and complicated treatment that was only tested in vitro and in mice. Yes, it is plausible that it could work in humans, but further clinical trials are absolutely needed.
I don't trust the author's judgment if he can look at something like that and label what he sees "we have a cure for blood cancer now".
If the author is so incapable of seeing and understanding finer details, I am not suprised by the angry and frustrated tone of his article.
Yeah, there is a lot of inefficiencies in current systems, often result of lobbying of special interest groups. No doubt about that. But a hypothetical author's autocracy would likely look much worse. For a smart person, he is way too gung-ho about what needs to be done.
The solution to the collaboration problem is achieving collective intelligence, e.g. making a crowd smarter than the sum of their parts.
I'm part of a small group who are working on algorithms for achieving that. We're applying system's thinking, game theory, bayesian statistics, computer science to find an algorithm that creates collective intelligence.
I have not bough anything in Amazon since 3 years ago, and honestly, it was because I was given an Amazon card as a present, otherwise it would be 6 years ago.
I go the extra mile to do that. I do because I hate the commingle inventory, and because I think is getting to big.
I see no impact at all on my behaviour. My friends, avid amazon consumer see me like a strange person for not buying there. I don't evangelise neither I go the extra mile to explain the situation more than "Jeff Bezos doesn't any more of my money".
I could repeat this situation with any single measure that we as individual can take. They are basically worthless.
Increasingly, I suspect the real value of type systems is that they force slower, "more correct" development, allowing you to "win the argument" with Management over taking the time to Do Things Right. They put a floor on code quality (albeit, IMHO, a pretty low one - you can also royally fuck up a type system) - preventing the worst excesses of rushed development.
This. This is the argument I'm exhausted having. Rushing development works for... maybe a week. After that, every time, it takes longer overall than if it'd been done "right" the first time.
Like a desk, you get one layer of crap and clutter. More than that and everything begins to teeter and fall.
That said - you definitely have to ask yourself (as a developer) or your engineers (as management) "is there a simpler way?". But "simpler" is not the same as "rushed", even if both are "faster" - it's just a question of "on what timeline". Faster today? This week? This month? This quarter? This year?
What's the old saying - nine pregnant people won't produce a child in one month. I think that comes from the Mythical Man Month but not sure.
I think "faster" has been replaced by "profit". Is there a more profitable way of doing it. Etc. Hence things such as AI/CoPilot and the rest.
We as developers have lost the craftsmanship that coding once was. Crafting a good bit of code that might just be a single line but which has elegance and conciseness to get the job done just right.
This is a common misnomer, writing more code faster doesn't mean you get more product or value faster. It can look like it at first, but you'll quickly come to find you're actually producing more bugs and vulnerable surface faster instead. More code is not good, it's the opposite of what you want.
It seems like the point of this article is we could cure cancer if we wanted to. It’s just a matter of incentives.
That’s not true. It’s not a money or effort hurdle, it’s a knowledge and technology hurdle.
Now one might argue that with enough money the knowledge and technology hurdle could be overcome, but I would disagree.
There are too many elements that are missing - biological tools, chemical probes, analytical techniques, laboratory procedures.
Sure money could advance those, but we don’t know which ones we need. One key (of many) to curing cancer could be the discovery of some mammalian cellular pathway. But we don’t know it exists so how would you find it? And even if it was discovered, you might not know it’s important.
Science often advances by the intersection of seemingly unconnected discoveries. You don’t know they matter until you do. It’s not a matter of just finding a specific area.
Our economic system controls the schedule and actions of essentially every human on the planet. When they get up in the morning. What kpis they have to meet to stay employed or bring food to the table.
It transcends nations through trade treaties and competition, trillion dollar companies have “no choice” but to lay off workers to placate “shareholders” expecting infinite growth.
And we know it is stripping the planet of its resources at a completely unsustainable rate, poisoning our very environment, some times burning the equivalent of entire forests for as simple reasons as “decentralized crypto NFT defi product scam”
Game designers know better than to make a game with a single high score, and even better than to allow players who amass the score to use it to pay for new rules.
Players know better than to continue playing a game that’s entirely and utterly broken for them.
Great article, but it feels a bit absurd to not mention the clear, obvious cause of all this: wealth inequality and corporate governmental capture because of capitalism. Like, that’s it. Almost any other form of government would be better setup for things in this essay like universal healthcare, and hopefully it’s obvious why the current stock-market-obsessed version of capitalism isn’t good for long term engineering tasks like testing and QA.
Here they just say that we need better voting algorithms, which is a necessary but not sufficient fix — we’re not stuck with this bad electoral system because we couldn’t figure out a better one, we’re stuck here because it benefits those in power.
Also this essay could do with a bit more “and AI is going to exacerbate this injustice” but that’s my bias lol
It seems companies use to be about more than profits.
At one point they appeared to contribute to the social good.
There was some shift and now everything is about eking out every last penny of profit.
My dad use to tell me about going to Woodstock in 1969. It seemed somewhat spontaneous.
I had a friend that went to the Woodstock concert in 1999. He described it as a complete hell hole. Everything seems to be turning to crap for the sake of profit.
>It happened because the people writing the image parsers made an incredibly stupid mistake and then didn’t bother testing it, because the software industry doesn’t bother with QA anymore.
I too remember the good old days when software used to be written without security vulnerabilities, especially in media format parsers.
Oh wait, that never existed. In fact in the old days people cared even less about security.
The underlying point that the vast majority of problems are Moloch/incentive alignment problems is correct, but a lot of those examples are controversial. To take one:
> We know that automation is chipping away at low-skill jobs, which means our workforce needs to be better educated, and that providing free college to everyone would be a good idea, we just don’t.
University education is primarily a signalling mechanism. Getting a degree in English literature doesn't actually make you a better oil market analyst to an appreciable degree, it just signals the ability to do work with minimal supervision.
And if higher education is indeed a positional good then funding everyone to do it is just setting money/time on fire.
By the way, the idea of the ‘Tragedy of the commons’ has been thoroughly debunked and should, in my opinion, not be used anymore in an argument as if it has any value.
On this topic (and, in my opinion, a much better article), one might be interested in Meditations on Moloch[0] by Scott Alexander. The moral is: fixing things is actually really hard even when you know how to do it.
Many people here comment on the title rather on the substance.
The title is indeed clickbait, but it is not scambait. Clickbait is when you want the reader interested in reading things, which is normal, scambait is when you do that but you have no points behind made after that.
Here are the points made by the article and what I think of them :
- Much more things can be improved than we think possible (100% true - obviously we can't to them all at once, but we don't need to.)
- We don't need a new plan, we already have plans (True, for example you can take the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations as a starting point).
- Coordination matters (And is possible, the UN had lead the historic achievment to eradicate fucking polio)
- We have enough resources to act in the real world, but the way we make decisions is broken (True, Elon Musk spent an insane amount of money to make a dumb website worse, while US Foreign Aid #1 top priority is to help the government of Israel commits more crimes with no accountability)
- Things will not change until a determined group of people take action (100% true, this is how every progress ever has worked out)
Started reading this and felt my head start to spin a bit, is it just me or does this author seem to have misunderstood the term "coordination failure"? This example about UEFI is like the perfect OPPOSITE of a coordination failure, seems like the issue at hand was just a classic engineering challenge. And likewise with the popcorn button/tragedy of commons example, don't really understand the connection and it feels like the author didn't either.
My take on the medical part is that this is mostly panic from disjointed priorities.
Supply and demand (priority driven) affect the medical treatments available, and the a single cure is a stepping stone to greater efficiency.
For example, take COVID immunisation, due to priority we had multiple companies work on these, and the best won, these delivery mechanisms are now updated with new viral variants, but they don't charge as though it's a totally new disease or drugs. In fact the cost is absorbed by the sale of the original and not in the sale of the updated vaccine which is at the same price point or less.
Which leads me back to the point, if you run socialised medicine, and you have to choose which medicines offer the greatest return, why would you choose a 1st gen treatment curing one person when a older treatment, which you have infra for, and costs thousands not millions cures in 50% of cases?
If you want to fix anything with 1st gen, we need to subsidise the research cost using the same priority as the needs of patients - that gives the demand.
Misalignment is just going to cause articles such as this being written, where you don't actually hear about the other things that are a priority being cured. Did you know we have 3 successful treatments for COVID now for example, or in the UK we've started using proton beam therapy after it was famously denied treatment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashya_King_case a few years ago, and now I believe also available within the UK?
These are both consequences of a change of priority and normal process, the worry in the article is that a cure isn't being used, which is both 1st gen and probably due to disjoint with the needs of the NHS/socialised medicine, but this would be expected to happen if a company (a single university) wants to carve a well paid niche in an area that has lower priority/demand.
Is it? How many large-scale elections are decided by one vote?
I'm well aware that that the 2000 US Presidential election was officially decided by 537 votes (in Florida, though recounts were not allowed). Nonetheless, 537 votes is not 1 vote. If one person had changed their vote, it wouldn't have made a difference. If two people had changed their votes, it wouldn't have made a difference. If three people had changed their votes, it wouldn't have made a difference. You could try to coordinate all of your friends and family (in Florida), and it still wouldn't have made a difference.
Realistically, the chances of your vote changing the outcome of a large-scale election with millions of voters is practically nil. You have better odds of winning the lottery; as proof, people do actually win the lottery! But buying lottery tickets is not generally considered to be rational behavior.
Admittedly, there are a number of smaller, local elections that have been decided by one vote. In general, though, I would consider strategic voting to be irrational, indeed delusional.
If you want to significantly influence the outcome a large-scale election, then become ultra-wealthy and throw your money at politics. (Or you could just ignore the elections and buy off whoever wins.) The irony is that in a democracy, every vote is equal, which means none of us individually has any power as voters.
You don't need "ranked choice voting" or any other convoluted system in order to "vote your conscience", as it were. You could just do it, but we just don't.
I'm not suggesting that you ought to vote your conscience, by the way. It really doesn't matter one way or the other. But that's precisely why you could if you wanted to. From a kind of Kantian moral framework, you might vote as you would want everyone else to vote, and in that case, if you truly hate the two major political parties, then why would you vote for them, and want everyone else to vote for them? I don't believe that makes sense either strategically or morally.
> "When historians write the epitaph for neoliberalism, they will have to conclude that it was the form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. That is: given a choice between a course of action that will make capitalism seem like the only possible economic system, and one that will make capitalism actually be a more viable long-term economic system, neoliberalism has meant always choosing the former."
> [...]
> "If the ultimate aim of neoliberal capitalism is to create a world where no one believes any other economic system could really work, then it needs to suppress not just any idea of an inevitable redemptive future, but really any radically different technological future at all. There’s a kind of contradiction here. It cannot mean convincing us that technological change has come to an end—since that would mean capitalism is not really progressive. It means convincing us that technological progress is indeed continuing, that we do live in a world of wonders, but to ensure those wonders largely take the form of modest improvements (the latest iPhone!), rumors of inventions about to happen (“I hear they actually are going to have flying cars pretty soon”), even more complex ways of juggling information and imagery, and even more complex platforms for the filling out of forms."
The system we are in is inert and we need more than ranked voting to fix it.
First of all, I don't actually think the argument is even very coherent. So lets break it down as far as I can understand.
As background I would argue leftist in the 1970s created 'neoliberalism', its not and never was a coherent framework of policy proposed or defended by anybody. What it was is simply a framework for leftists to throw literally anybody that doesn't agree with them (outside of leftist anarchists) into that bucket.
The function was to simply group all opposing view points under one umbrella to have a unified attack vector.
Somehow extreme free market people, social democrats and social conservatives are under one umbrella and somehow together have organized a global conspiracy to defend this supposed philosophy.
Swedish policy makers who wanted to reduce government share of GDP from 60% to 50% are just evil Friedman loving market fundamentalists. Neoliberals want to somehow reduce governments but also want military to globally enforce neoliberal hegemony. Of course, that makes total sense. Or it maybe just could be that we are talking about lots and lots of different groups with fundamentally different points of view.
> If the ultimate aim of neoliberal capitalism is to create a world where no one believes any other economic system could really work
This just fundamentally makes no sense, 'neoliberal capitalism' does not have any opinions. There isn't even a clear organization that represent 'neoliberalism'.
So somehow what he is saying here is that all the people who 'believe' in neolibearlism somehow have convinced themselves that their live goal should be 'creating a world where no one believes in alternatives'.
The idea that all those supposed neoliberals somehow have a coherent program of eliminating alternatives is ridiculous.
Politicians don't want to successfully solve problems and get reelected in a land-slide victory, they much rather lose but preserve neoliberal world order. Anybody that believes this is actually delusional.
The reality is solving problems is actually hard. The solution David would like (as far as I can tell) to see aren't a magical pill that will win election no matter how much he thinks they would be. And most of the problems aren't hard because of some neoliberal conspiracy against progress but because they politically hard and even if you can get politics to somewhat line up, actual execution is also very hard. See California High Speed Rail for example.
> but really any radically different technological future at all
Ok, so neoliberalism is somehow preventing technological improvements, if I understand that correctly. I guess one can make that argument, but I would like some actual facts and examples. Because I don't see it.
Countries that are very neoliberal in global comparison have gone in very different direction. The Netherlands, inventor of modern capitalism, is revolutionizing transport thanks to the humble bike.
Switzerland, has fundamentally changed its rail transportation system and massively increased rail modal share. They built the largest tunnel in the world to protect the Alps from to much trucking.
Japan has people travel even more by rail and they are even building a crazy high speed maglev.
If you look at the US, Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan, you see radically different conception of the future of transport. But these countries are all some form of neoliberal.
What amazing transport technology is 'neoliberalism' preventing from taking over? What path of technology is prevented by being 'neoliberal'.
> It cannot mean convincing us that technological change has come to an end—since that would mean capitalism is not really progressive.
And 'it' (again not a thing) wouldn't want to ...
> It means convincing us that technological progress is indeed continuing, that we do live in a world of wonders, but to ensure those wonders largely take the form of modest improvements (the latest iPhone!), rumors of inventions about to happen (“I hear they actually are going to have flying cars pretty soon”), even more complex ways of juggling information and imagery, and even more complex platforms for the filling out of forms.
Again, there is no substance to this. Its in the nature of semiconductors that it can evolve faster then say massive rail infrastructure. To simply dismiss all progress in computing as somehow irrelevant is absurd. Improvements in software, sensors and data is what makes so many other things possible, modern manufacturing, modern research and development wouldn't be the same without it. His casual divisiveness about computation as trivial is simply idiotic.
But its hard to argue with him since he provides no counter argument at any kind, just some vague assertion that (a) neoliberalism is a dominate ideology (b) technological progress is slow.
If we look at most machines, efficiency is rising continuously. New EMU trains and electric lokos are more efficient, new passenger planes are significantly more efficient, rocket technology has improved by a huge margin, electric cars have unprecedented growth, electric bikes are revolutionary. I could go on.
At the same time, as I have demonstrated above, countries are doing revolutionary things even with existing technology. The bike hasn't gotten better, but the Dutch have revolutionized transport anyway.
He needs to demonstrate that technology is failing us to actually make this argument.
> (“I hear they actually are going to have flying cars pretty soon”)
The obsession with flying cars is a US obsession that is not talked about much here in Switzerland where I live. Instead we are in process of talking about Rail 2050 project and how it should look. Rail 2035 project is ongoing.
The US has built itself into a car depended hellhole and the flying car is the only solution a car dependent nation can figure out. I guess for David this is also neoliberals fault, despite many other nations who are also 'neoliberal' according to him not having the same issues.
And of course the obsession with the car is something that actual classical liberals never would have wanted. National highway program is a gigantic ongoing infrastructure project. A massive book of regulation about road building that encodes all the worst design principles in law and makes it impossible to build modern advanced infrastructure. Governments that use state power to take over private property and put highways threw that land. I guess that neoliberalism as well?
I have not read this new book (and wont) but from what is written here it seems to me that he believes:
- Neoliberalism is a coherent philosophy --> It isn't.
- Assuming it 'was' an actual philosophy, its core tenant is the suppression of alternatives --> It wouldn't be. And even if it was, it couldn't successfully do so.
- Neoliberalism defenders accept personal failure to preserve the NWO (Neoliberal World Order) --> They don't.
- Neoliberalism prevents 'real' technological improvement --> It isn't.
- Neoliberalism prevents solving 'real' problems -> It isn't since it isn't a dominant philosophy to begin with.
To some it up, David Graeber is the 'perfect' leftist intellectual. Never clearly define your own own position and clearly state what and how things should be done instead but still strongly imply that it would be utterly amazing. Spread a bunch of vague smart sounding criticism about societies big evils (<insert thing here> capitalism). Throw some hand selected historical examples with health dose of historical revisionist takes. Throw in a strong dose of 'other intellectuals that don't agree with me are capitalist shills'. And there you have a great leftist table top book.
Reading people like him rather then people who actually have real knowlage about the current situation and propose actual real solutions or at least processes that could be put into place to help real solution from existing are what is actually needed to make progress.
As long capitalism is allowed to exist, its prime directive aka "ACCUMULATE WEALTH AT ALL COST" will ALWAYS win over whatever mankind needs, for it is the capitalist class that effectively rules over the "free" world. This is no conspiracy theory. This is a cold, hard fact.
> Our story begins (says Gurri) in the early 20th century, when governments, drunk on the power of industrialization, sought to remake Society in their own image. This was the age of High Modernism, with all of its planned cities and collective farms and so on. Philosopher-bureaucrat-scientist-dictator-manager-kings would lead the way to a new era of gleaming steel towers, where society was managed with the same ease as a gardener pruning a hedgerow.
> Realistically this was all a sham. Alan Greenspan had no idea how to prevent recessions, scientific progress was slowing down, poverty remained as troubling as ever, and 50% of public school students stubbornly stayed below average. But the media trusted the government, the people trusted the media, and failures got swept under the rug by genteel agreement among friendly elites, while the occasional successes were trumpeted from the rooftops.
> In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public. Starting in the early 2000s, that axis broke down. People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn't how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!
EDIT to be more topical to the submission:
> So for example, Gurri examines some of the sloganeering where people complain about how eg obesity is the government's fault - surely the government could come up with some plan that cured obesity, and since they haven't done so, that proves they're illegitimate and don't care that obesity is killing millions of Americans. Or homelessness - that's the fault of capitalism, right? Because "we" could just give every homeless person a home, but capitalism prevents "us" from doing that. Or if you're a conservative, how come the government hasn't forced the liberal rot out of schools and made everybody pious and patriotic and family-values-having? Doesn't that mean our lack of strong values is the government's fault? The general formula is (1.) take vast social problem that has troubled humanity for millennia (2.) claim that theoretically The System could solve the problem, but in fact hasn't (3.) interpret that as "The System has caused the problem and it is entirely the system's fault" (4.) be outraged that The System is causing obesity and homelessness and postmodernism and homosexuality and yet some people still support it. How could they do that??!
The OP is like if High Modernism were a teenager. All adults are stupid, they don't understand anything and can't see what is clear to any normal person (i.e. me). I know everything that is there to know, but nobody wants to listen to me because they are all stupid.
as this fantastic video about the popcorn button explains. Our economic race to the bottom has been sabotaging almost every aspect of engineering in our society. To save a few cents per microwave, the cheap microwaves don’t include a humidity sensor and then lie about having a popcorn button when it can’t actually work properly, which leads to everyone saying “don’t use the popcorn button” and now nobody uses the popcorn buttons even on microwaves that actually have a humidity sensor and a working popcorn button.
The 'economic race to the bottom' is exactly how we can all afford microwave ovens in the first place.
Of course, you can make a special case for microwave ovens, and we could afford them to be slightly more expensive. But we need the general cost cutting and optimization in the economy to drive progress.
Most gadgets I ever bought were far above legally required minimum requirements. Ie those minimum requirements were not a binding constraint. Why would that suddenly change?
Yes, the problem here is that capitalism is good at some things (making microwaves cheap) and not others (dealing with externalities). We’ve let it be the dominant force shaping “progress” for quite some time, so we’ve made progress on a lot is things capitalism is good at solving. In the meantime we’re also backsliding or stagnant on various issues that capitalism can’t address alone.
The pro- and anti-capitalist sides both have a point.
No need to intervene further to prevent some 'evil' race to the bottom. Just narrowly address exactly the externality in question, and stop there. Compare https://openborders.info/keyhole-solutions/
I have a saying, “Capitalism is the means by which we screw each other over.” But it’s better than the alternative “Communism, the lack of means by which we screw each other over.”
I don’t think Socialism is the answer, which is simple Capitalism with bits of Communism sprinkled in to soothe over the more egregious failures (or to pretend to do, which is even worse).
I’m fond of the idea that capitalism is like fire. You can use it as a tool and for cooking and warmth, but it must be regulated lest it get out of control and consume everything it touches.
Yeah; I like to think of capitalism as an eldrich god that we've summoned from beyond the veil and attempted to yoke for our own betterment. Its incredibly powerful, yes. But it fundamentally doesn't care about human flourishing.
To use a line from the Economist, we have to tame capitalism's excesses in order to get the most benefit to society.
It's more like the state that's this creature that engulfs everything.
Nation states have been extremely successful. Nearly every square metre of landmass on earth is claimed by one nation state or another.
Capitalism stays out of stuff just fine. Few people organise their family or friendships or their bowling club along capitalist lines.
Even companies themselves are usually structured as quasi-socialist command economies, and the market mostly only is for interaction between companies.
> Nation states have been extremely successful. Nearly every square metre of landmass on earth is claimed by one nation state or another.
Isn't that just because its an abstraction we view the world through? As an abstraction it often doesn't fully work. E.g. is taiwan a nation state? Are the parts of lebanon that have effectively been taken over by hezbolla really part of the state of lebanon if the state isn't fully in control anymore? Is belarus really an independent state or does russia have so much control that it isn't really anymore? The state abstraction makes for neat boxes but the reality on the ground in many places isn't really that clear cut.
You are right about grey areas. However, eg Taiwan and Belarus are still organised and run like nation states, even if their diplomatic status might be a bit wonky. Eg they have an army, they enforce laws, people pay taxes and obey regulations etc.
Compare that with the state of eg Europe a thousand years ago, when things were organised differently. Or have a look at most of the rest of the world back then.
Historically, one big change was the spread of gun powder. Fielding armies powered by gun powder required a lot more state capacity and organisation but provided huge military advantages. A tribal or feudal society couldn't cut it on the battlefield anymore, so they were outcompeted. (The whole process is a lot messier and complicated, of course.)
I assume what you really mean by socialism is "democratic socialism" or "market socialism", because they kind of fit your description, but not other "socialism"s like anarcho-syndicalism.
They just assume that you have preferences and want to satisfy them. Those preferences can include 'earn as much money as possible', but they can also include 'feed starving children in the orphanage across the street'. The theory doesn't really care about the exact shape of your preferences.
It's a useful shorthand to assume that economic actors want to maximize profit, because that allows them to spend money on almost any other goal they have (like feeding the orphans). But economics can still help us understand why more people want to be teachers, even if the pay is low, than programmers or prostitutes or truck drivers in oil boom counties.
There have been many societies based on the idea that people can be convinced to be unselfish. They've all failed. Bregman has an impossible uphill battle against a vast historical record.
Reading the synopsis https://www.amazon.com/Humankind-Hopeful-History-Rutger-Breg... it appears Bregman has made a mistake. He posits that cooperation is unselfish. This is incorrect. He's right that cooperation works, but people cooperate for selfish reasons. If I grow bananas and you hunt fish, we cooperate and trade the results, and we are both better off. We cooperated for selfish reasons.
Now, if you grow fish and I just take it from you because I felt I deserved it more than you, you are going to be mad at me and might fight me. This is how it is in our selfish interests to cooperate.
> But if we believe in the reality of humanity's kindness and altruism, it will form the foundation for achieving true change in society,
Many societies have been founded on this model, with a 100% failure rate.
It isn't Bregman's premise that people can be convinced to be unselfish, but rather that they are kind an unselfish by nature, and that it is modern society that made us egoistic.
The book does a far better job of making the argument than I, or its synopsis, ever could.
All people are selfish. People who give to others derive pleasure from it, and they like that pleasure. Not enough to base an economy on it, though. People soon get tired of working hard only to give the results to loafers.
I can't help but notice that you didn't answer my question, but instead repeated your original assertion.
Let's say I declare that your observation is not true of me personally. Note that this doesn't necessitate any evidence external to me; I could introspect and discover this about myself, however you don't have the ability to "introspect" into my own mind.
How could you prove to me I'm mistaken? And please note, I am not looking for a restatement here, I understand what your view is.
By having a conversation with you. I'd point out your pride and self-satisfaction at being unselfish. If I knew of you more than that, I'd point out your selfish behavior. It's not hard, look at the clothes you wear, the car you drive, the cookie you ate, your grooming, and so on.
You wouldn't think much of my clothing. I've never owned a car. My grooming is minimal, my appearance just doesn't cross my mind. But I do like a nice cookie.
I behave selfishly sometimes, no question. Does that really define the entirety of who I am? Why would it define me more than, say, when I feel bored, or when I behave generously, or when I do things on impulse? Afterall, I try to avoid behaving selfishly, so I spend a lot more time in these other frames of mind. Why shouldn't the totality be what defines me or anyone else?
Flattening a human being into mere selfishness might be a convenient assumption to build models around, but the map is not the terrain.
Lets break it down, how much of your income do you spend on yourself, your family, friends and community you live in, how much to benefit society as whole where you see almost no benefit what so ever?
There is a reason economist use the term, self-interest, not selfishness. And it doesn't 'define you as a human' but it non the less true in the behavior patterns for 99.999999999% of humanity.
You simply biologically have to look out for your own survival, and in the few cases you don't, its because you put family or sometimes community above your own interest. But that still is self-interested.
No, not really. Following my values usually feels neutral. Sometimes it feels absolutely terrible.
What I'm trying to tell you is that this is an intrinsic goal, not an instrumental goal. If you were to ask me, "why do you have values?" or "why do you follow your values?" I wouldn't even know how to answer, it would be like asking a fish why it swims.
Alternatively; why do you do things you enjoy? Why do you do things that benefit you? Why does it matter to derive benefit?
---
As far as I see it, the point of contention here is that you believe there exists only one intrinsic goal. I not only disagree but contend that I experience other intrinsic goals.
At this point, I don't really see how one of us could convince the other. You don't believe my self-reported experience for one reason or another. I know I have other intrinsic goals, so your hypothesis is exploded from my perspective. I was trying to demonstrate that you don't have access to other people's experiences and can't really know what motivates them, but you seem unmoved.
But if you have a different idea or line of argument I'm happy to entertain it.
A fish swims because a fish swims. (It's an idiom.)
> Only one? No.
If you actually believed this I don't think you'd have much reason to doubt me when I said I had an intrinsic goal other than selfishness. Why would you unless you believed it was impossible?
> Frankly, I don't believe you do things from which you derive neither benefit nor satisfaction.
This would seem to imply you do believe there exists only one intrinsic goal. So I'm not really sure what you're trying to say.
Is it possible to have an intrinsic goal other than selfishness, or isn't it?
> Because, unlike what classical-liberal economic theory stipulates, human beings aren't inherently selfish.
If you actually knew anything about the history of classical liberalism you wouldn't perpetuate this nonsensical stereotype. Classical Liberalism is not the same as Objectivism.
A core classic liberal belief, arguably the core belief, is that nothing should stand in the way of individuals being able to secure their own economic self-interest.
To be sure this does not stipulate that all actors be selfish, merely that no penalty should inhibit selfishness.
> A core classic liberal belief, arguably the core belief, is that nothing should stand in the way of individuals being able to secure their own economic self-interest.
That is completely false, you are simply attacking the straw men that 100 years of oversimplified critics of classical liberalism have set up.
The classical liberal tradition always had a strong association and interest in English Common Law and never asserted individual action is above the law, exactly the opposite is the case. The Law very foundation that classical liberal build on.
That's why there is a whole field of economics called 'Economics & Law' that goes back a long time.
> To be sure this does not stipulate that all actors be selfish, merely that no penalty should inhibit selfishness.
The factor that inhibits selfishness is the law. But you are correct, no classical liberal thinker thought people should be punished for being selfish in of itself.
Drawing on ideas of Adam Smith, classical liberals believed that it is in the common interest that all individuals be able to secure their own economic self-interest.
attributed to: Dickerson, M. O.; Flanagan, Thomas; O'Neill, Brenda (2009). An Introduction to Government and Politics: A Conceptual Approach. Cengage Learning. ISBN 978-0176500429.
> A core classic liberal belief, arguably the core belief, is that nothing should stand in the way of individuals being able to secure their own economic self-interest.
You literally said 'nothing'.
It is of course true that they believed that self-interested individuals seeking voluntary trade to improve their self interest within a legal framework would be beneficial for society.
Note how Adam Smith never says 'its amazing to steal as much money as possible because following your self interest is good for society'.
I suggest you read Adam Smiths actual work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
That is still wrong. It more correct for Chicago but its not remotely true for Austrian school.
The whole point that made the Austrian school different from the Neoclassical approach used by for example Walras or Jevons was that they DID NOT think about micro economics as pure utility optimization.
The point of their approach is not to claim that all individuals are self interested, rather that a dynamic market situation can lead to a good outcome whatever desire the person has. It doesn't fundamentally matter if a person buys porn for himself or if he feeds the homeless. That's of course morally different, but a difference in the underlying economics. That why there is a strong emphasis on subjective theory of value in Austrian economics.
But of course simply empirically speaking most people first look out for themselves and their family and friends. Not sure why that would be controversial. And that is what Austrian economics also assumed, but its called self-interest and not selfishness.
but why always communism? Let's agree today's system is bad. What system are we in? Certainly not capitalist. ~ 50% of GDP goes to the government. That's closer to socialist.
Why love communism so much? We're practically communist already. Why not blame that?
I mean a lot of us work on open source software in one form or another. I don't think FOSS is communism by any means, but it does seem somewhat adjacent in terms of values.
Hopefully it's not "The Great Reset" which uses a derivation of an even older form of governance...Neo-Feudalism...along with "Public-Private Partnerships"...aka Fascism.
A culture of bottom up independent & responsible creators would be a freedom-oriented alternative. Perhaps things are not fixed because the majority of the population is nudged & habituated to give up their responsibility to governments, corporations, & "experts". This includes the responsibility to hear all information in a pure uncensored & unnarrated form...And the responsibility to make decisions based on all available information. Also, the responsibility to take action based on the information & decisions. Convenience & irresponsibility comes with a great price.
If you let let them take your responsibility away from you, they will have sole determination of your conditions...Feudalism & Fascism has historically not ended well for the subjects, including the subjects that profit from these governance models.
This article focuses on policy recommendations, but that's not the issue in my opinion. It's people who are comfortable with the current system for whatever reason who don't want to find radical new approaches to solving problems that's the issue.
I think Bukele in El Salvador has been a great example of changing this. Decades of murder and mayhem and having the highest murder rate in the world, and the guy makes it the safest country in Latin America in just a few years by calling B.S on the government's entire approach to criminal justice. It's one of the greatest examples of turning a country around in recent memory. We shall see if Melei can do it in Argentina with his approach to radically changing an economy that has been a basket case for decades.
In the Elon Musk biography, the power he has to so effectively build a manufacturing company is he knows enough about all the aspects of the business that he can call B.S on people in any part of the company who aren't performing. It's the ability to go into power structures that are stagnant and tear out the parts that need tearing out.
It is adorable when a person who knows a lot about some things decides that he knows everything about all things, all problems are simple to solve, just do this and that, and the reason all problems in the world aren't solved yet is because all other people just stupid and for some stupid reason refuse to do obvious things that are so clear to this person. I guess this is where the different between a lot of knowledge and wisdom shows up.
Also, something I am wondering from the article. If socialized healthcare is the best system ever, and the only problem in curing cancer is the lack of proper incentives which the socialized healthcare provides, why the cancer is not cured yet? We have billions of people living under various fully or partially socialized healthcare systems. Any of them should have all proper incentives to cure cancer. Why China didn't do it yet? Why anybody in Europe didn't do it yet? Why Canada didn't do it yet? I mean I get it, capitalism is bad, profit is bad, profit motives are bad (even though I don't get how curing cancer wouldn't be fabulously profitable beyond anybody's wildest dreams, but let's assume that's the case). But there are a lot of countries which have socialized healthcare systems. What are those people waiting for? Or maybe curing cancer is not about finding proper incentives after all?
I think you have some valid criticisms of the article, but they'd probably be better received without the condescending tone. (For example, calling someone "adorable" sarcastically is guaranteed to elicit defensiveness IMO.)
Well, I think the approach taken by the author - all dolutions are known and easy and people are just stupid for not just doing the obvious - deserves it, for failing to ask - and even better, answer - the obvious question of why nobody else saw it before and fixed if if it were so easy.
It's ironic for him to suggest government-run healthcare when it doesn't benefit from the #1 best coordinator of resources on the planet - price. He accidentally highlights the reason we have so many coordination failures - smart people with little wisdom think they can solve every problem, using other people's money, with no consequences for their failure.
Not everyone should get free college, and not every house should have fiber optic cable. We have the opportunity to fix all easily fixable issues if we let go of our ego, and admit how our conceited actions have caused the coordination failures we see today. We absolutely will not achieve a better future by continuing the exact same self-aggrandizing approach to problem solving that brought us here, where we think every problem is simple, that our morality is above reproach, and that by the stroke of a pen we can alleviate any ill.
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." - Hayek
As I understand it, the US government pays more per capita for healthcare than any other rich country. And Americans don't even get free healthcare in return.
I'm not sure what the solution is either, but the status quo ain't it.
Any idea that the US is a even any kind of approximation of a free market is ridiculous. Any study of the history of US health care makes this quite clear.
That not to see that such a system would be better then some other systems, we don't really have good evidence as no major country has developed this way. There were some early interesting developments for patterns of care in the US before the current system became the dominate re-enforced system.
Its also not really clear if the US switched system to something like those countries, that it could achieve the same costs. Such a reorganization would be monumental in scale requiring an US bureaucracy of a scale only matched by the US Armed Forces.
Its not a problem I would want to be in charge of solving.
Price exists. Information that is embedded in the price, or, more precisely, in the myriad of market interactions that, among other things, also create the prices, however, is often lost. Or replaced with other information - e.g. who has a the better lobbyist or can negotiate with the government officials more efficiently. Also, it seems that you are implying there's a single "way it works in developed countries" - if you do, you are seriously mistaken, there are a wide variety of ways and each one has its own set of issues.
If all you've got is a hammer then every problem begins to resemble a nail. But some problems actually require a screwdriver.
The problem with price signals in health care is that they compete with survival signals, and the survival signals sometimes win out.
This makes health care an example of a situation where (traditional) markets become distorted and fail to operate efficiently. A little external help is needed.
Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly similar problems. Details differ and some things are better (and others worse!) but overall: it's not that different.
I don't know about all the individual topics that are mentioned. I'm not an expert of blood cancer and I'm guessing the author isn't either, but ... maybe it's not that simple? The "Preclinical proof-of-concept study" from August 2023 doesn't really sound like "we've solved it, end of story" to me.
"We could fix everything, we just don't" seems far too simplistic. "Everything" encompasses quite a lot, and "I looked at this for a few hours/days and I figured it all out" is classic mistake that people make. Almost everything is conceptually simple. Actually doing it tends to be harder because all those details you didn't account in the high-level overview often do matter.