The dictatorship of the articulate • Hacker News Board

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#361

Post by 1dry » Thu, Sep 01, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

api wrote: post #247

1dry wrote: post #63

Unspoken and underlying the author's entire worldview seems to be, "the more new things, the better," a not uncommon tunnel view in the engineering world. The purpose of regulation, ideally, is to ensure that whatever activity/process is being regulated is worth the cost(s) for the majority of people. Defining those terms and making that decision is precisely the job of regulators, who are ideally accountable to a de…

> is to ensure that whatever activity/process is being regulated is worth the cost(s) for the majority of people Ideally yes but in reality it ends up being a way for trolls to hang out under bridges and take their cut or to block new things to protect existing interests. Is more housing in the best interest of the majority of people? Public transit? High speed rail? Better energy systems?

Totally agree. I think the issue here though is not with regulation itself, but with corrupting influence that we as constituents allow to infiltrate our regulatory bodies. I'd hope campaign finance would help solve this issue too – harder to pull a " Greg and Co. gave me $x so I'll appoint Greg jr. to this sweet regulatory position where he will inevitably act in his self-interest" kind of thing if the public has full view of Greg and Co.'s campaign contributions in the first place...

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#362

Post by bumby » Thu, Sep 01, 2022, 10:31 PM UTC

kansface wrote: post #319

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…

> But it's hard for me to see that as a bad thing I'd buy this argument so long as you actually sit down to do the math at hand. Did you add up the man years we now spend waiting on safety? How does that compare to the lives we saved waiting, or the money we spent doing so? I'm personally guessing a very large amount of the required waiting exists chiefly for bureaucratic needs, not human. How much of that extra 6T$…

What's missing in this utilitarian perspective is the idea that a safe workplace isn't an economic good but a right within the US codified by law.

We can go through the list of the Bill of Rights and probably point out how they don't make economic sense. But they make an abundance of moral sense.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#363

Post by bumby » Thu, Sep 01, 2022, 10:38 PM UTC

ghastmaster wrote: post #166

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…

> There was also a cost in human life. The article's first sentence, reads, "A few years ago, Silicon Valley was buzzing with the reverberations of Marc Andreessen’s epic essay, It’s Time To Build." Here's the main point of "It’s Time to Build" regarding the failures in response to the covid pandemic: "Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we did…

>Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time.

Doesn't this neglect the deaths in the short term? If we remove all speed limits and safety regulations on cars, there will likely be a spike in deaths. Maybe there will be enough public sentiment to change that, but there will be a lag that creates an awful lot of death in the near term.

(I'd also argue that regulation is one of the main mechanisms the public exerts such demands, because there is a natural asymmetry in market power between a manufacturer and a collection of individuals)

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#364

Post by larsrc » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 12:04 AM UTC

An ultra-libertarian rant. Let's let the rich and powerful do whatever the fuck they want and to hell with any direct or indirect damage to ordinary people. Not what we need.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#365

Post by mcqueenjordan » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 1:51 AM UTC

novok wrote: post #54

lukasb wrote: post #9

The premise is wrong, technological change has slowed only in relative terms, not in absolute terms: https://twitter.com/ThomasPHI2/status/1516079819913674759

That assertion doesn't stand up when relatively simple equivalent things like bridges and bus lanes are built slower and more expensively in certain regions compared to the 1930s, which is a main premise of the article.

This is because the author and many others make the trivial error of not measuring how many people it cost to build those bridges. And when I say cost, I don't mean headcount.

11 people died building the Golden Gate Bridge. Safety does cost more time. But it saves people.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#366

Post by closeparen » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 2:03 AM UTC

blueflow wrote: post #170

1dry wrote: post #63

Unspoken and underlying the author's entire worldview seems to be, "the more new things, the better," a not uncommon tunnel view in the engineering world. The purpose of regulation, ideally, is to ensure that whatever activity/process is being regulated is worth the cost(s) for the majority of people. Defining those terms and making that decision is precisely the job of regulators, who are ideally accountable to a de…

New was good because humans needed many things (that were new at this point). Now that we got almost everything we need, "New" is no longer good on its own.

Humans did not “need” things they lacked, and live to tell about it. Every age could see itself as complete. We’re fortunate that it took until the mid 20th century to freeze everything in amber. Unfortunately, the mid 20th century left us some really problematic stuff that wouldn't pass regulatory scrutiny today - like car dependence - and now we can't get rid of it.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#367

Post by closeparen » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 2:14 AM UTC

pif wrote: post #287

_fat_santa wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chesterton's Fence at all: before you criticize let alone dismantle regulation, you should be able to demonstrate a sound understanding of why it came to exist in the first place It's not the individual regulations themselves, it's the mass of regulations that's slowing things down. I'm sure SF has a ton of regulations around building housing. You can point to each rule and give a very good reason for why that rule…

> I'm sure SF has a ton of regulations around building housing. Which only affect those builders who keep wanting to build in San Francisco. Just go and build somewhere else, that's the entire point of San Francisco regulation! > massive disservice to the community by driving away affordable housing and business. I don't agree with you. SF regulations are working exactly fine for SF community: they are preventing the…

Right. The point of the regulation is to empower evil people to do an evil thing. That’s bad. Such powers shouldn’t exist in the first place, but especially ought to be revoked once they are found to be abused in this way. And fortunately, the State of California is working on it.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#368

Post by 1auralynn » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 2:32 AM UTC

I stupidly thought this was going to be an article about how it's much more likely that schmoozer types are able to fund their projects, leaving others in the dust, but instead it mostly just rails against regulation.

At the time, my stance on the Marc Andreessen article was "because we have systematically defunded basic scientific research since the early 2000's", and I stand by that. To me, government funding of research is the only current mechanism by which non-schmoozers are able to get their projects funded (though admittedly, it's super flawed and also involves a bit of political positioning/having the right partnerships/etc).

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#369

Post by 1auralynn » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 2:35 AM UTC

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…

Even moreso with the Hoover Dam

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#370

Post by wyre » Fri, Sep 02, 2022, 4:54 AM UTC

shswkna wrote: post #356

wyre wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Others have commented on the other fallacies in your post but you say >If evolution had been “conservative” When has evolution not been conservative? Tiny changes over the span of generations is certainly not liberal or radical. It took what, hundreds of thousands of years if not more for us to evolve into Homo sapiens and develop intelligence.

You are thinking human timescales. The sheer diversity of mindboggling lifeforms that exist and have existed have been everything but conservative. And also very wasteful/destructive.

Goalposts. You specifically mentioned intelligent life, which is dealing on human timescales.

You mention wastefulness and destruction which only makes me think of humanities actions in causing extinctions, caused by our lack of regulation or something synonymous.