People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard • Hacker News Board

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#291

Post by outworlder » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:17 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #283

raywalters wrote: post #117

Having worked front line technical support, I have to disagree. People are indeed dumb, many choose to stay that way.

Having used things that require technical support, I have to disagree. I'm not an idiot, I just don't have time to learn the idiosyncrasies of the problem that I have.

Are you able to determine if some piece of equipment you use every day is turned on or not, and able to accurately relay this information?

If so, you are not part of the demographic the parent is talking about.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#292

Post by matt4077 » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:21 PM UTC

rvern wrote: post #135

ppeetteerr wrote: post #34

This is probably the greatest argument for big government. If we were to eliminate the supervision of the establishment over the safety and security of everyday life, it would be very time consuming to handle every single aspect of it. There is always the issue of an overreaching government, and that's where the left/right party split comes in. Each party either creates more regulation and protection or take some awa…

No, this is one of the greatest arguments for small government or no government. People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. Voting for good policies is a public good. When a voter is one among three hundred millions of citizens, only 1/300,000,000 (on average) of the benefits of the vote befall the individual voter. This gigantic externality means that the democratic market will sev…

I don't think it's valid to discount the individual's power by the number of voters. If the low impact of any single vote had the sort of effect you're suggesting, people would be much more likely not to vote at all.

When a voter is just one of millions, their share of power is necessarily low. Yet the total power obviously rises linearly. (or even super-linearly, considering the outsize influence the US has in the world). Your comment also suggests that you believe people are fundamentally open to altruistic decisions. It should therefore not matter if the power they have is over themselves, or their compatriots.

I also doubt widespread agreement with the policies you mention. Answers to such survey questions depend on the phrasing more than anything. And to use one recent datapoint: we all know a recent candidate who embodied those policies more than anyone before him. Yet they actually got fewer votes than their free trade / pro-immigration opponent.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#293

Post by notahacker » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:22 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #255

notahacker wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The elected component of the government sector in a properly functioning democracy is far more mortal than large corporations and newly elected Cabinets generally more zealous about reforming (for better or worse) the way agencies and services are run than newly appointed corporate board members. Sure, some services are prioritised more than others; no government is going to get voted out of office solely for running…

> the elected component of the government sector in a properly functioning democracy is far more mortal than large corporations The elected component of any modern government oversees a vast administrative bureaucracy. This is the part people refer to when comparing "big" and "small" governments. > the main reason for the institutional inertia is the same scale, complexity and principal/agent problems large corporati…

I'm not convinced the legislature explicitly killing or dramatically reconstituting agencies is a significantly rarer event than large companies going bankrupt. More to the point, the executive is seldom shy about embarking upon restructuring or adjusting funding and objectives of its administrative bureaucracies, not least because it faces its own acute existential threat from not being seen to give its taxpayers value for money and the operations and future direction of its bureaucracies is the subject of open public debate; obviously more for pensions and prisons than vehicle registrations or waste transfer licensing

Ruthless efficiency for maximising long run profit is only useful in cases that particular metric happens to align closely with the goal of society. For film distribution this might be a reasonable assumption. For promoting health or learning outcomes or facilitating retirement, it almost certainly usually isn't.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#294

Post by matt4077 » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:27 PM UTC

dstroot wrote: post #221

rvern wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is one of the greatest arguments for small government or no government. People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger. Voting for good policies is a public good. When a voter is one among three hundred millions of citizens, only 1/300,000,000 (on average) of the benefits of the vote befall the individual voter. This gigantic externality means that the democratic market will sev…

Is there more I could read to get educated about this? How can we construct polical systems that are better?

Note that you are still living in the best times humanity has ever seen. That's true in the US, but also world-wide, with few exceptions such as Syria.

There's less war, life expectancies are generally rising (the opioid epidemic being a temporary, and local, blip), the possibility of achieving one's true potential is less dependent on class/gender/race than it has ever been.

It's not perfect, but it's far away from life as it was even 100 years ago: nasty, brutish, and short.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#295

Post by poulsbohemian » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:32 PM UTC

skadamat wrote: post #223

copperx wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people have strong opinions about Alan Kay's CS / programming work I'm curious. I wasn't aware of this. What are these strong opinions about?

Common ones I hear: - He hasn't shipped anything popular (he's a researcher, expanding the tree of knowledge, not an engineer optimizing for shipping) - Smalltalk isn't as great as Alan makes it out to be (again he's a researcher) - That the computer revolution has happened but he's stuck in the 70's - Many, many more things

FWIW: I used Smalltalk a bit in college and then for about a year professionally, about four years into a now twenty year career. I've shipped software in about five languages over my career and have never again come anywhere close to as productive as I was during that time using Smalltalk. Ironically, the work environment at that time was perhaps the worst of my career but Smalltalk just makes it so darn easy to crank out functionality and test it at the same time. So, sure it is old but there's a lot we could still learn from it.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#296

Post by ballenf » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:37 PM UTC

smhost wrote: post #286

skadamat wrote: post #80

I would really really encourage everyone here to watch Alan Kay's recent talks on how poorly we understand systems and why it's critical we get better at managing them. Some good ones: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1R2jH4PQEo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9c7_8Gp7gI Some people have strong opinions about Alan Kay's CS / programming work and I'd really encourage them to put them aside and deeply understand h…

What did he mean at 1:09:22 ( https://youtu.be/R1R2jH4PQEo?t=1h09m22s ) when he says "nobody complains about multiplying one fraction by another because it looks reasonable, but it turns out it isn't reasonable at all"?

He explains that it was a "triumph of Greek mathematics" to prove that multiplying the top and bottom of a fraction is how you multiply two fractions. That is, we accept as true that you can multiply fractions this way, but we kind of just got lucky that it does work that way. Proving that it always works is non-trivial, but that is totally glossed over in math classes, doing a disservice to students.

This is in context of dividing two fractions where kids are taught an arbitrary rule too early in their studies and it turns them off to math overall because it's become a class of memorizing arbitrary procedures instead of learning concepts.

(That's all my summary of that segment with a little reading between the lines, not my personal view of it. Or it might be later, but have to consider it more.)

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#297

Post by poulsbohemian » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:41 PM UTC

romwell wrote: post #278

skadamat wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Common ones I hear: - He hasn't shipped anything popular (he's a researcher, expanding the tree of knowledge, not an engineer optimizing for shipping) - Smalltalk isn't as great as Alan makes it out to be (again he's a researcher) - That the computer revolution has happened but he's stuck in the 70's - Many, many more things

Being stuck in the 70's isn't that bad, many avantgarde things from that era still have to make it to mainstream adoption.

I watched a presentation on YouTube that Christopher Alexander did in 1996, talking about work he did in the 70s and it continued to amaze me at its relevance today. +1 to you for realizing there are still a lot of good, under appreciated ideas out there and that technology actually moves super slow.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#298

Post by ballenf » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:41 PM UTC

skadamat wrote: post #223

copperx wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people have strong opinions about Alan Kay's CS / programming work I'm curious. I wasn't aware of this. What are these strong opinions about?

Common ones I hear: - He hasn't shipped anything popular (he's a researcher, expanding the tree of knowledge, not an engineer optimizing for shipping) - Smalltalk isn't as great as Alan makes it out to be (again he's a researcher) - That the computer revolution has happened but he's stuck in the 70's - Many, many more things

Are those criticisms in response to claims of his otherwise? Does he blame current problems programmers have on not listening to him more? Or make some other critical claims to trigger what kind of sound like ad hominem* responses?

I will google these questions also, but am always interested the HN crowd's take. Like the original question I didn't know he'd ruffled any feathers.

Edit: top hit was Alan Kay himself addressing criticism on a Quora question: https://www.quora.com/Has-anyone-criticized-Alan-Kay, but on further read it obliquely addresses criticisms other than his role in developing OOP.

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#299

Post by azernik » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:43 PM UTC

tynpeddler wrote: post #271

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #134

An interesting bit from the article was that he talks about 'sunk cost' with the defining example of ordering a dessert when you're nearly full and feeling compelled to finish it. > There was an economist once early in my career who said to me, “You know, if you’re right, what am I supposed to do? What I know how to do is solve optimization problems.” A career economist not wanting to change their ways because they h…

Sometimes it's a mistake to think about how these companies could pivot to adapt to new technology. A major feature of capitalism is that companies are (relatively) unimportant and it's the market and society that really matter. Without companies collapsing, it can be really difficult to recycle the manpower and capital invested in obsolete business models. Blockbuster's organizational, legal and physical infrastruct…

This is, by the way, a problem I see with a lot of public policy - in a market system, what's good for companies is not necessarily what's good for the system.

Steve Eisman puts this well in [1] when talking about why he's investing in bank stocks even though he thinks prospective rollbacks in Dodd-Frank reforms are a bad idea: "There's two issues. There's what I think about the financial system and what I think about financial stocks, and the two don't necessarily correlate."

[1] https://youtu.be/NJodqhzqPKQ?t=4m10s

Re: People Aren’t Dumb, the World Is Hard

#300

Post by User23 » Thu, Jul 12, 2018, 11:45 PM UTC

User23 wrote: post #68

sandworm101 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also means laws/regulations to just plain ban harmful behaviors. Collectivization to alter market forces cannot fix everything. Some things need to just stop. Selling CFCs needs to stop. That won't happen by naming and shaming involved companies. It won't happen by people gathering on facebook to organize a boycott. It happens by people in uniforms enforcing the law, with violence when necessary. Sometimes that is…

Thank you for this lucid description of the authoritarian position.

Why was this flagged? Men using violence to enforce a preferred policy is exactly authoritarian. A simple factual description is in no way pejorative.