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The dictatorship of the articulate

florentcrivello.com

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Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#221

Post by throwaway0a5e »

gernb wrote: post #151
spoonjim wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you set it at zero you will never build anything

And further there are trade offs. I don't know the trade offs of bridge building is but the example i've heard in the past is, it's possible we could make it so no one ever dies in a plane crash. To do that with today's tech might make flights cost 2x, 3x, 4x more. Flights cost more = more people choose to drive (say SF to LA or LA to Vegas or DC to NYC). More people drive = more deaths. That isn't to say you shouldn…

>That isn't to say you shouldn't make things safer but you have to take into account is your change a net positive over all.

This is hard to do in a world where people have fundamentally incompatible belief systems.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#222

Post by zaphar »

kortilla wrote: post #147
rwl wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was also a cost in human life. I saw a photo exhibition [1] about the construction of the Bay Bridge once, containing many beautiful shots from the point of view of the workers. The photos were taken by Peter Stackpole, a 20 year old kid who basically just talked his way onto the boats that took the workers out to the site. He took photos of the towers as they were being riveted together, of the cables being wo…

False dichotomy. Look at the delays and cost balloons of the HSR project. They have nothing to do with safety of workers. You can adopt modern safety standards and still wipeout a ton of roadblocks to actually get started much sooner by just generally using eminent domain more freely and not empowering people to so easily stop projects with lawsuits.

Sure, but the article did not make this argument at all. It made zero effort to examine the current state of things and the various reasons and purposes behind it. It merely advocated for blowing it all up. If you want to make a convincing argument then you need to do more than ask for a return to a previous state totally ignoring the reasons we got to the current state.

It suggested no methods of preserving safety while also removing unnecessary roadblocks. It just suggested we should live with the "discomfort". I don't even think the author necessarily intended that. It reads to me as a combination of tunnel vision and poor communication. But the result is that the article comes off as mis-informed.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#223

Post by TwoFerMaggie »

> There is always a loser to any change — even when it’s an otherwise overwhelming net positive.

What an insidious argument. It makes the "loser" sounds like someone randomly selected by bad luck, but we all know that when there is lack of regulation, especially in these cases (construction, industry, etc.), who gets the short end of the stick.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#224

Post by advael »

Weird how during the one tiny era in human history where we've had explosive exponential growth in {technological progress,wealth,etc} we destroyed both human cultures and biodiversity on a scale unprecedented except for the rare natural disasters our paleontologists call "mass extinction events", and created like arguably 2-4 looming existential risks to our species we have yet to figure out how to solve. Sometimes a bias for slower, more considered decisions might be... warranted? Just spitballin' here

Moving fast and building whatever you want on a small scale is probably more feasible than it ever has been. You can go get a 3D printer, use super advanced tools you can get relatively cheap on amazon to build physical things, and even write really crazy complex computer programs on consumer-grade machines that are considered "cheap and dinky". If you own some land that's not around a whole bunch of other people, you can probably build all sorts of fun structures and get away with it. Once that stuff starts scaling such that it affects other people, said other people are bound to care about and try to impose limitations on what you can build. That's called civilization, and it's done a lot more to help large-scale stuff get done eventually than it's done to impede it overall

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#225

Post by zaphar »

coldtea wrote: post #217
hef19898 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That trade off is deeply flawed. Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are. But argueing to sacrifice / risk lives now for the benefit of saving lives later, all you do is arguing to get of regulations holding you back right now from making personal gains. And that line if thought is just selfish, entitled and short sighted. And quite prevelant in certain, especially rich and…

> That trade off is deeply flawed. Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are. Actually both are "future lives" (we're not saving someone we already know is about to die) and both are as easy or hard to quantify. We can quantify average cost of lives in a big building project given X regulations applied (based on past experience with similar projects), and we can also quantify…

They are in no way equivalent in relative ease to quantify. Safety Regulations exist to protect from "known" harms. It is the result of learning from our past and applying that knowledge to our present and future. But anything in the unknown harms category is fundamentally unquantifiable. We know there are unknown harms out there. But we don't know

1) What they are

2) When they can happen

3) How many they could affect

You can't make decisions that help you avoid harms in that category. But you can make decisions in the other category. There is an argument that failing to build is for example in a category of known harms now. But so are a whole host of harms that we encountered to get where we are now. The trick is to make it easier to build while not also engaging in the rest of the known harms out there.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#226

Post by wizofaus »

rwl wrote: post #120
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #91

There's a reason we don't just "let the builders build". We used to do that (certainly to a massively greater extent than we do now), and the result was that although a few of them managed to construct monuments we can all be proud of, most of them built a pile of crap and/or damaged the places they built in and the people they nominally built for. This is true of literal buildings, but it's also true of a great many…

There was also a cost in human life. I saw a photo exhibition [1] about the construction of the Bay Bridge once, containing many beautiful shots from the point of view of the workers. The photos were taken by Peter Stackpole, a 20 year old kid who basically just talked his way onto the boats that took the workers out to the site. He took photos of the towers as they were being riveted together, of the cables being wo…

I find it pretty hard to believe "just letting workers die" was at all economically cheaper than having regulations in place to minimize that likelihood. The costs might be subsidised more heavily, but to just waste the years of training and effort that's put into ensuring we have skilled qualified workers (of any sort) is surely enormously expensive.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#227

Post by mihaic »

I find this sort of article both oversimplifying and overcomplicating why innovation stopped. Talking about big abstract things sometimes clarifies things, but often leads to situations without a clear path forward. How do we simplify regulation and reduce the influence of short-term corporate thinking for instance?

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#228

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

secretsatan wrote: post #123
rwl wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was also a cost in human life. I saw a photo exhibition [1] about the construction of the Bay Bridge once, containing many beautiful shots from the point of view of the workers. The photos were taken by Peter Stackpole, a 20 year old kid who basically just talked his way onto the boats that took the workers out to the site. He took photos of the towers as they were being riveted together, of the cables being wo…

Was going to say this, human life was cheaper. It's quite worrying to see now a trend trying to praise this attitude as fearless workers, where as the ones we have now are all wimps, views usually espoused by people who have never, and will never work a job that could be dangerous

Yeah classic corporate doublespeak. Workers that accept unsafe conditions are "brave", workers that don't unionize are "loyal", etc.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#229

Post by Tsiklon »

thrown_22 wrote: post #193
rwl wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was also a cost in human life. I saw a photo exhibition [1] about the construction of the Bay Bridge once, containing many beautiful shots from the point of view of the workers. The photos were taken by Peter Stackpole, a 20 year old kid who basically just talked his way onto the boats that took the workers out to the site. He took photos of the towers as they were being riveted together, of the cables being wo…

I'm fine with people dying during construction _if_ we foresee the deaths. What I'm not fine with is killing people with lead/arsenic/asbestos/plastics because we didn't put new tech through it's paces before we deployed it en-mass. We live in a world that is both too conservative and not anywhere near conservative enough.

That’s a very callous and detached way to consider human life.

It’s exactly the sort of thinking that led to the execution of the Ford Pinto. Wherein the bookkeepers determined that the number of deaths and cost of wrongful death settlements would be less than the cost of recalls to fix the fatal design error in the car.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#230

Post by ianai »

kaashif wrote: post #207
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #156

This is what I consider the modern face of Fascism. I know you're not supposed to use that word, because it really upsets Fascists. But really, long passionately argued essays about how democratic governance is stopping us from returning to the good old days and we should let the powerful do whatever they want. Using dubious emotional arguments like laundromats can't be historic buildings? Calling things dictatorship…

Democratic control over things that affect everyone and benefit everyone is necessary to avoid e.g. free rider problems, pollution. Democratically restricting other people's rights, to the extent that people are not allowed to e.g. subdivide a house into a duplex, all because it would reduce the voters' property values, is immoral and counter productive. Certain rights should not be subject to democracy to the same e…

The counter to the democratic outcome not being “your personal choice” is to admit defeat, rest up, reflect, and look for better, more popular positions next time. Ie continue engagement in the relevant systems. Attend local council meetings or other hearings - and be polite, respectful and thus some base level respectable. In the US, democratic republic norms are aggregate personal acts and not a state. Like jury duty.
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