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The dictatorship of the articulate

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Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#371

Post by sershe »

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…

Regulation operates like a ratchet - it's easy to add, but hard to remove, both due to the lobbying/entrenched interests that benefit from it, and the optics of one obscure accident blown out of proportion after some safety rule is removed. Not even getting to the PR and corruption aspects when it's first introduced - I mean, look at congress under either party.

I think that should be the default assumption; that a given regulation was added because of corruption and PR. There needs to be rigorous explanation on why it's needed; frankly if I could go back in time and magically change the Constitution in some way I'd try to engineer a practical sunset rule that would require all laws and regulations on all levels to expire in a few years and be re-voted-upon (the part where re-voting on many laws might prevent adding more laws is by design).

I feel like there's some sort of a trade-off bias involved here - like when people mistakenly assume that if someone is smart they are not sociable or if someone is beautiful they must be dumb. Most countries are capable of building stuff cheaper, with less rules and far less workers (the latter even applies in Europe). "Oh well but it's less safe". But is it? Does anyone measure that? The buildings and bridges in China don't appear to fall down any more often than in the USA.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#373

Post by BiteCode_dev »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #355
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment can only originate from someone who has lived in democracy all their life. Having travelled the world for most of my life, and saw dictatorship at work, I think a lot of HN and Twitter evil sensors need serious calibration. It's like looking at somebody with diabetes and saying they have terminal AIDS.

The two most famous Fascist movements in history replaced democratic governments after initially attacking them as failures for decades beforehand and promising to return the nation to greatness and save it from failure. They did (most of) the famously bad stuff they are remembered for after they took over and abolished the democracy and its institutions, so no one could stop them. Many of the people they killed woul…

That's not the point of my comment. The point is that today we use those words without any notion of the scale they imply.

So they lost their meaning. To me it's the other side of virtue signaling, easy words to toss around to get an ego trip without having to think too hard about the nuances of the world. And you can only do that precisely because you live in a free society, because the people you are calling fascist will not kill you for doing it. Because you have the education to do so. Because you have the time and energie to do so. Because you are safe with the medium and your audience to do so. And because you don't have a fascist as a leader that is so obviously so dangerous that calling someone fascist on tweeter in comparison would make you feel stupid since it's so obviously dispropostionate.

The point is, the people doing that are immature, unexperienced, and use a word that meant to target the horrors and evil of this world to attack what are merely bad people.

It's not a political statment that they are making. It's a demonstration of how naive, ignorant and arrogant they are.

And it's an insult to people living with actual fascists every day, that one does from the comfort of their sofa where they can get food delivered and watch youtube video.

You can call someone fascist in a democracy, but then they must have in their political program the same thing as Mussolini or Hitler did. The burden is on the person to quote Main Kampf (which I doubt their read) or show similar live actions and show the parallel.

And it cannot be a single thing, it's a collection of ideas and behaviors. A racist or a pro life or somebody going to a book burning is not diserving the title. Because it's only one thing. Everybody is doing ine thing somebody else find terrible.

It's a very, very high bar to pass.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#374

Post by satisfice »

concordDance wrote: post #139
satisfice wrote: post #100

The dictatorship of the articulate? So the author is clearly saying, "people" should not be in the room, or if in the room, be unable to speak, or if able to speak, be ignorant of their rights-- unless they support whatever he values. And then where will these people be? In which room? And what ability to speak should they have? And what about their rights should they know? "In the old days, it was so cheap and easy…

Essentially the more people have veto power or require consultation the harder it is to get anything done. The more policies and rules there are (particularly once uncertainty about what the rules are creeps in), the harder it is to build. If you've worked in a large corporation and a 10 man startup this should be obvious. In the latter you can spin up a new service in a couple of hours. In the former a couple of mon…

I have worked in a large corporation (Apple, but back when it had only 12,000 employees). Yes, it is harder to build when there are more voices. The answer is not to demean or marginalize those voices. The answer is to create relationships so that you build legitimate trust. Then you can proceed with fewer people in the actual room, without abusing the people outside the room.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#375

Post by prox »

bumby wrote: post #308
prox wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think NASA vs SpaceX is a good example. The Artemis costs about 4 billion dollars each flight The Artemis(/SLS) gets build in so many different states so everyone gets a bit of the pie, it seems mostly build by politicians, not by engineers or a general director. Starship, which is similarly powerful and has more tonnage to carry only costs $240 million, which numbers will drop steeply if we do a lot of launches.

Both these numbers are somewhat speculative at this point, since neither has seen a successful orbital flight. But I think your point is both correct and missing something. It's true that NASA is largely run by politicians (it's no accident that there are NASA Centers in major political states like Florida, Texas, Ohio, California, and Virginia). But conversely, there would be no SpaceX in it's modern form without NA…

Well it’s interesting to see the comparison between risk averse / risk embracing which is kind of the topic here. Are there other areas where companies can be disruptive because of the foundation other “end game/risk averse/bound by laws” companies have laid?

It’s an interesting cycle and perhaps research to see how these things effect eachother?

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#376

Post by jhugo »

treis wrote: post #259
yodelshady wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Airlines do well, and they're heavily regulated. But they don't have armies of engineers doing nothing whilst court cases are worked out. The flip side of that is monopoly. The only recent aviation accidents that have happened, have done so because, put bluntly, the FAA knows they didn't stand a chance if they blocked the only (US) big-jet maker from upgrading its planes. Were there (US) competitors, which on…

That's not really true. The MAX issues were in large part a result of trying to keep the same type rating. An almost entirely artificial requirement generated by the FAA. In an ideal world Boeing would have said this is the Max, it's slightly different and you need to do a little training to get used to the difference. But that means a new type rating which causes all sorts of operational headaches.

This requirement was actually pushed on Boeing by Southwest. They insisted that the MAX not require training for their pilots, and with Southwest being a large 737 customer with other good options (A320), Boeing found a way.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#377

Post by shswkna »

wyre wrote: post #370
shswkna wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We are arguing past one another or have a different background. I don’t think you have countered my reply.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#378

Post by concordDance »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #177
concordDance wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except in practice regulation increases cost and reduces access, particularly of anything new. Regulation has made building so difficult in the UK that oligopolies have formed and 90% of the young will never be able to buy a house unless they inherit.

> Regulation has made building so difficult in the UK Lack of appropriate regulation allowed Grenfell tower to burn down. 72 people died. (1) The case for "deregulation" of UK housing is a grotesque joke. 1) How lax building rules contributed to Grenfell disaster https://www.ft.com/content/bf6bcbd0-5b35-11e7-9bc8-8055f264a...

It sounds callous, but even if those 72 deaths could be attributed to regulation on houses (they can't, that's apartment blocks), it would still be an acceptable price to pay. It costs less than a million to save a marginal life, housing regulations have cost north of a trillion (comparing total cost of housing stock then to now adjusted for inflation), so unless those regulations have saved a million lives? They aren't worth it.

Humans are really bad at thinking at scale, but this is essential for good pubkic policy.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#379

Post by blueflow »

closeparen wrote: post #366
blueflow wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Every age could see itself as complete.

I remember the thing with women voting rights differently.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#380

Post by concordDance »

V_9 wrote: post #142
concordDance wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The costs of doing things the slow way as we do now hugely outweigh the benefits. Yes, buildings fall down less but they're so much more expensive that if you detregulated and put that money in healthcare you'd save an order of magnitude more lives than you lose. A big factor is the costs of regulation and the fragility of innovation are both hugely underestimated. Every little form or permission slip is massively mo…

"Yes, buildings fall down less but they're so much more expensive that if you detregulated and put that money in healthcare you'd save an order of magnitude more lives than you lose." And "Every little form or permission slip is massively more costly than it would intuitively seem" Genuinely interested, do you have any sources for this economic analysis?

The former can be mostly done by comparing building costs and fall down rates 100 years ago to now and then plugging in the NICE HALY figures (they will pay for treatment that gives >=1 year per £30k IIRC) to see how many lives you could save. An order of magnitude was probably hugely understating things.

The latter is something I've seen a mountain of evidence on (from personal life, corporate life (all they needed to do was click on a link and fill out three fields... but no....) and various stats such as reduced application rates per page of forms and big changes in completion rates with extra fields) but don't have a good reference. :(

Beware Trivial Inconveniences is kinda related I guess.

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