We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

https://erikmcclure.com/blog/we-could-fix-everything-we-just-dont/

by xena • 3 years ago

292 388 3 years ago

BMc2020• 3 years ago

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.

eru13• 3 years ago

That's pretty silly.

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.

croes12• 3 years ago

Yes, but then we get useless microwaves and in the end dangerous microwaves.

waterproof• 3 years ago

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.

hinkley• 3 years ago

Technology Connections just did a thing about this.

I can confirm that some KitchenAid microwaves use a sound sensor instead of humidity.

MeImCounting• 3 years ago

Who did you think the quote was from?

jerbear4328• 3 years ago

That’s the video mentioned in the quote:

“What's the deal with the popcorn button?” https://youtu.be/Limpr1L8Pss

Great video and channel, good stuff.

transfire• 3 years ago

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).

We need something truly new.

Conscat• 3 years ago

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.

seventytwo2• 3 years ago

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.

josephg2• 3 years ago

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.

eru13• 3 years ago

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.

briantakita• 3 years ago

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.

tonymet2• 3 years ago

how did hackernews brew so many well compensated communists.

EMIRELADERO6• 3 years ago

Because, unlike what classical-liberal economic theory stipulates, human beings aren't inherently selfish.

People can succeed under a system and still acknowledge it is a bad one for a big part of the population.

eru13• 3 years ago

That happens when a community goes more and more mainstream.

Compare the early years of reddit with now, too.

bawolff10• 3 years ago

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.

oatmeal12• 3 years ago

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

seventytwo2• 3 years ago

Price absolutely still exists in government run health care… do you have any idea how it actually works in developed countries?

anonuser123456• 3 years ago

PP is referring to the price mechanism of markets. Not an arbitrary set price set by a regulator / central planner.

By definition if government runs a sector, there can be no pricing mechanism. Otherwise the government isn’t running it; it’s just a market.

klooney• 3 years ago

He's probably referring to price controls, which basically everyone else has.

smsm427• 3 years ago

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.

wwweston• 3 years ago

when it doesn't benefit from the #1 best coordinator of resources on the planet - price

Price is arguably #1 in info-symmetric non-urgent elastic demand situations.

Which portions of health care function this way is left as an exercise for the reader.

oatmeal12• 3 years ago

I'm not advocating against health insurance in general, as you are suggesting.

Kim_Bruning2• 3 years ago

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.

josephg2• 3 years ago

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.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...

Health spending per person in the U.S. was nearly two times higher than in the closest country, Germany, and four times higher than in South Korea.

panick21_10• 3 years ago

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.

toldyouso2022• 3 years ago

Damn this got downvoted so hard. HN needs less js frameworks and more basic economics (so I'd recommend basic economics by Thomas Sowell as a start)

thelastgallon• 3 years ago

Can we do this with defense budget instead of healthcare? I don’t mind paying taxes for universal healthcare.

gwbrooks• 3 years ago

Defense spending is roughly half of what the federal government already spends on healthcare.

charcircuit2• 3 years ago

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.

1970-01-01• 3 years ago

In the oldest days, we had formal verification of software. That didn't seem to stick around after Microsoft took over the PC world.

charcircuit2• 3 years ago

I don't think there was ever a time this was true industry wide.

avalys2• 3 years ago

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…

grecy3• 3 years ago

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.

tgv• 3 years ago

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.

jnsaff24• 3 years ago

But that’s what the post was kinda trying to argue, no?

avalys2• 3 years ago

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.

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

You can’t even elect people who fix everything. There are industries relying on things not getting fixed, who can lobby.

curtisblaine• 3 years ago

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

kevmo314• 3 years ago

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?

croes12• 3 years ago

COVID was a great example of this.

Was it?

How many fought against social distancing, masks and vaccines?

Same with climate change, how many fight against necessary measures.

xboxnolifes4• 3 years ago

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.

peyton• 3 years ago

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.

grecy3• 3 years ago

the question is at what cost?

The world will be a wonderful place when schools have all the funding they need and the Air Force must hold a bake sale to pay for new fighter jets.

The US spent $8,000,000,000,000 on the "war on terror" [1], while 21% of adults are illiterate [2]

[1] https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar

[2] https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statisti...

WalterBright16• 3 years ago

It's much more expensive to lose a war.

smsm427• 3 years ago

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.

Fbnkigffb66tfbj• 3 years ago

$8,000,000,000,000

It's a lot more readable to just write $8 trillion. Writing out all the zeros doesn't make your point any more convincing.

smsm427• 3 years ago

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.

jnsaff24• 3 years ago

That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much.

Is it though?

Or is it that there is not enough profit for someone to make from running fiber to every home?

To be clear I’m not trying to lead with the question but actually ask something and that the difference might be useful.

Gigachad• 3 years ago

That’s the same as it costs too much.

Scarblac• 3 years ago

There are homes to where it can be done profitably, homes to where it can't.

It can probably be done profitably to every home, but it's even more profitable to do it to only the easier homes.

Collective action could make a law that only allows companies to lay fiber if they do it to every home.

ip264• 3 years ago

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.

cortesoft• 3 years ago

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

cbozeman• 3 years ago

This post is mind-boggling to me...

> 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.

vlovich123• 3 years ago

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.

pompino• 3 years ago

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.

hnthrowaway0328• 3 years ago

Human problem IS the most difficult problem.

mikewarot3• 3 years ago

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security

bawolff10• 3 years ago

Capabilities aren't magic, and i don't really think they make sense during the low level boot process.

maxbond17• 3 years ago

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.)

maxbond17• 3 years ago

Re your edit, what disqualifies eg smartphone app permissions from being capabilities? As far as I can see - they literally are.

ryanjshaw• 3 years ago

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.

solatic2• 3 years ago

Who is "we"?

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.

someguy5281• 3 years ago

Subject engineers to licensure

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.

robocat2• 3 years ago

Because licensing is working so well in other disciplines?

Magic fairy dust!

Look at some civil engineering disasters: licensing doesn't prevent disasters.

jpc0• 3 years ago

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
    }

In almost any codebase and it will be there.

eru13• 3 years ago

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.

drdaeman2• 3 years ago

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.

glitchc• 3 years ago

If medicine can achieve a gatekeeping function, so can engineering.

solatic2• 3 years ago

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.

badcppdev• 3 years ago

Step 1. Define software engineering in a world of no-code, low-code, and AI code generation.

concordDance8• 3 years ago

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!".

hehhehaha• 3 years ago

All we need to do is alienate the incentives of the idiots, what could go wrong :)))

bbor• 3 years ago

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

nmilo• 3 years ago

David Graeber in Utopia of Rules:

"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.

bawolff10• 3 years ago

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.

otikik3• 3 years ago

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”.

bawolff10• 3 years ago

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.

mardifoufs2• 3 years ago

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.

BriggyDwiggs424• 3 years ago

“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.

swiftcoder2• 3 years ago

"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)

janalsncm• 3 years ago

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.

dawnbreez4• 3 years ago

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.

arp242• 3 years ago

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.

hackerlight• 3 years ago

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.

vasco• 3 years ago

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.

bawolff10• 3 years ago

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)

from-nibly• 3 years ago

Because homeowners CAN vote out politicians who reduce their house value.

abroadwin• 3 years ago

100-200, you say? Sounds familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

throwup238• 3 years ago

Well yeah, Dunbar was an anthropologist studying social structures of tribes and primates…

ChatGTP• 3 years ago

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.

Aunche3• 3 years ago

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.

oh_sigh2• 3 years ago

Maybe losing mammoths wasn't actually a tragedy.

coldtea6• 3 years ago

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).

pvdoom6• 3 years ago

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.

xwolfi• 3 years ago

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 ?

imtringued4• 3 years ago

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.

coldtea6• 3 years ago

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".

SpicyLemonZest2• 3 years ago

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.

concordDance8• 3 years ago

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).

marcus_holmes3• 3 years ago

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.

prox• 3 years ago

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.

timeon• 3 years ago

that they lived in the communities they served

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.

consp• 3 years ago

the UK politicians spent the contributions on other things

I'm pretty sure this is by design and the end result is as well.

jampekka3• 3 years ago

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.

MrPatan• 3 years ago

Is the secret in the running of it? The policies?

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?

jmnicolas• 3 years ago

The ancient tribes did better because when they didn't, people died of starvation. Pretty big incentive here.

Nobody died from the UEFI custom image vulnerability.

pvdoom6• 3 years ago

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.

roenxi• 3 years ago

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.

RandomLensman2• 3 years ago

Ancient tribes failed all the time - not sure they did much better on a lot of measures.

lloeki• 3 years ago

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.

[0] https://www.extrafabulouscomics.com/___97

[1] https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/

nvm0n26• 3 years ago

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.

fifticon• 3 years ago

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.

nvm0n26• 3 years ago

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.

me_me_me3• 3 years ago

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.

Ragnarork• 3 years ago

I get the frustration of the author, but to me this article reeks of the "Cocktail Party Ideas"[0] syndrom.

[0] https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/

imtringued4• 3 years ago

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.

Kim_Bruning2• 3 years ago

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

rileymat23• 3 years ago

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.

No punting people with ping of death anymore.

Towaway696• 3 years ago

Have ransomware attacks increased in that time?

Isn't the increase in attack surfaces for ransomware actors an indication of decline in software quality?

Software has become incredibly complex and interdepended.

rileymat23• 3 years ago

I was trying to come up with a metric and threw that out because there is also more effort in creating ransomware and software ubiquity now.

Thought about CVE counts, but that has methodological problems too.

nolongerthere5• 3 years ago

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.

narrator• 3 years ago

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.

eru13• 3 years ago

Compare https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-t...

(And also https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/)

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??!

smsm427• 3 years ago

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.

RangerScience2• 3 years ago

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.

Towaway696• 3 years ago

If your neighbour is using a type less language and is making more profit than you, then your boss will question the choice of language.

Development pace is set by the competition.

Edit: and if there is no competition, the longer it takes, the longer it will take to be profitable.

Etheryte• 3 years ago

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.

RangerScience2• 3 years ago

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?

hatenberg• 3 years ago

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.

But humans … oh well

smsm427• 3 years ago

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?

tempestn2• 3 years ago

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.)

smsm427• 3 years ago

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.

travisjungroth2• 3 years ago

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.

bruce5112• 3 years ago

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.

bawolff10• 3 years ago

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.

moring8• 3 years ago

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.

Telemakhos• 3 years ago

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.

yetihehe2• 3 years ago

Claiming that we could lay fiber cable to every house, but not how to actually do it.

This one is pretty simple if you can accept 98% as "every house". Reality is that not every house needs fiber.

I fully agree with the rest of your comment.

QVVRP4nYz• 3 years ago

Yeah, whole article could be summed up with Mencken quote from 1920:

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

adolph• 3 years ago

Reïnvented by South Park as the Underpants Gnomes:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/underpants_gnome

underdeserver• 3 years ago

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.

reuben364• 3 years ago

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.

TaylorAlexander• 3 years ago

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.

That is, the job of philosophers is not to solve problems, but to articulate a way of looking at problems which may lead to solutions.

moring8• 3 years ago

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.

travisjungroth2• 3 years ago

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.

extr• 3 years ago

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.

evancox100• 3 years ago

Yes, author doesn't seem to know what tragedy of the commons is either.

Fripplebubby• 3 years ago

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.

TheAceOfHearts• 3 years ago

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.

bawolff10• 3 years ago

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.

acyou• 3 years ago

Does the person who wrote this article think that a custom disk image == a custom logo?

A mistake only possible from someone with extremely poor subject matter expertise, or by text predictive AI?

Or, am I totally out of whack and have no idea what the author is writing about?

tempestn2• 3 years ago

See recent discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38515571

rileymat23• 3 years ago

https://www.securityweek.com/many-consumer-enterprise-device...

nurettin• 3 years ago

People talk like there is one cure for a hundred types of cancer.

Daz1• 3 years ago

Possibly one of the worst opinion pieces I've ever read.

MostlyStable• 3 years ago

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.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

manx3• 3 years ago

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.

Latest creations: https://social-protocols.org/global-brain/ https://social-protocols.org/social-network/

Contributions welcome

mistermann3• 3 years ago

Do you have a document that gets into the meat of things yet, I wasn't able to find anything other than short introductions....

manx3• 3 years ago

The first link (https://social-protocols.org/global-brain/) is the best we have so far. Other than that, there's the almost finished prototype implementation on github (https://github.com/social-protocols/social-network). Where would you like to dive deeper?

I can also offer to jump in a call to discuss.

paulddraper• 3 years ago

We know that providing free college to everyone would be a good idea

What??

College is a colossal waste of resources for most jobs, terrible ROI.

Given the utter confidence in being wrong, I'm not sure how seriously I can take the rest of the argument.

derelicta• 3 years ago

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.

mouzogu• 3 years ago

"we"..

stop thinking. just consume product and get excite for next product.

anonyme-honteux• 3 years ago

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)

lapcat• 3 years ago

strategic voting is rational behavior

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.

concordDance8• 3 years ago

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.

erremerre• 3 years ago

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.

refurb• 3 years ago

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.

SillyUsername• 3 years ago

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.

hamilyon2• 3 years ago

I am on a fence regarding this.

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

inglor_cz2• 3 years ago

"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.

czierleyn• 3 years ago

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.

manx3• 3 years ago

Do you have a good link to read about that?

ZeroGravitas• 3 years ago

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.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/21/nuclea...

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.

tmaly2• 3 years ago

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.

We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

Related Stories