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The dictatorship of the articulate

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Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#381

Post by concordDance »

dane-pgp wrote: post #215
concordDance wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In the latter you can spin up a new service in a couple of hours. In the former a couple of months is a blistering pace. In the latter you can harm society in ways that take a couple of hours to fix. In the former, you can cause harms that take months or years to fix (and, with enough lobbying, you can make taxpayers foot the bill).

It doesn't matter whether or not your new big corp service is in the "takes a couple of hours to fix" category. It will still take months and will be even more unreliable than the startup service.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#382

Post by yazaddaruvala »

superchroma wrote: post #66
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would suggest this speaks to the weight of your experiences coloring your view. > Anyway, I would encourage you to make a new submission about it This is extremely condescending and unnecessary. There is no reason for the other poster to “create a new submission” for their points. If you disagree with them that is ok, feel free to respond to the points. If you’re having difficulty responding to their points, don’…

There's no point going into the weeds in a discussion ten posts deep when we deviate from the broader topic. It discourages community engagement from the discussion we're having and the main thread and derails the thread as people have to scroll past it to see other comments. This is not why people are here, even if we feel passionate about the topic.

> There's no point going into the weeds in a discussion ten posts deep when we deviate from the broader topic.

That is up to the other person and what the downvote button is for.

> It discourages community engagement from the discussion

Then the community can vote via the down button. Meanwhile, you do not need to be condescending or singly try to shepherd a group conversation.

> This is not why people are here, even if we feel passionate about the topic.

I’ve been using HN for 10 years, other than trying to shut down the other commenter, the back and forth and deviation/tangentiality in this thread isn’t different than I normally have seen on HN.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#383

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

ysavir wrote: post #334
drewbeck wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your mind how many man years of savings do you think is worth one human life? Let's say we can save half the time on a big project but periodically one random person is killed. Worth it? I'm being glib here and/but/also we need to be talking about this directly. There's a spectrum of possible responses to the question and we need a language to discuss risk intelligently.

I think their point is that we can accomplish all the safety needs while only increasing costs and time so much, and that some portion (maybe big, maybe small) of that time is needless bureaucracy. They aren't advocating for more risk.

how?

which specific federal safety regulations should we eliminate that seem to blocking any significant progress?

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#384

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

wizofaus wrote: post #359
mburee wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the more experienced (and more valuable I guess) knew most dangers and pitfalls and were better able to navigate amongst them. Some people also seem to be inherently more clumsy/likely to misstep/hurt themselves and they'd get sorted out sooner. Not that that was any good, but I don't think enough builders died to make a difference in productivity.

I'd argue you're not really considering the total $ cost of an adult human being. I'm guessing many of those who have died during poorly regulated construction projects were relatively young too, so having invested heavily in nurturing workers to that point, the potential to capitalise on decades of productivity is lost.

I'd argue that they are, but that Rockefeller era capitalists were fine replacing workers that died, to whom they likely gave little training back then

perhaps you value workers more than they did? not that there's anything wrong with that

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#385

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

ghastmaster wrote: post #182
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…

> Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are. The point of regulation(in this context) is to preserve future lives. If future lives saved is impossible to quantify and that somehow invalidates the idea of less regulation, would it not therefore invalidate the idea of regualtion as well? > But argueing to sacrifice / risk lives now for the benefit of saving lives later, all you…

>If future lives saved is impossible to quantify and that somehow invalidates the idea of less regulation, would it not therefore invalidate the idea of regualtion as well?

no, since the causality of regulation saving lives is more direct, obvious, and convincing than the causality of less regulation saving lives

the people holding the latter view would need to come up with a convincing argument explaining how less regulation saves more lives than more regulation, ideally specifying the regulation they wish to eliminate

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#386

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

bumby wrote: post #363
ghastmaster wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mechan…

yes, it's a very cynical argument along the lines of "abolish the FDA and people will learn how to deal with food and drugs that negligently cause death

we did find a way to deal with it, it's regulation. if the regulation is too slow, fund more people doing the work.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#387

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

ghastmaster wrote: post #236
brazzy wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time. You couldn't be more wrong. > I think history shows that as technology advances and people's standard of living increases, people become more risk averse. General knowledge also increases over time, decreasing the proclivity for humans to put themselves in risky situations. Except complexity increases faster than knowledge. It's flat out impossi…

Complexity increasing faster than general knowledge may be true, however, it is much easier for me to do assess safety with a search online for "death rate of copper vs coal miners" than it was in less complex times. General knowledge has made people aware of complexities that warrant some investigation or questioning, before participating.

it is easier for you to assess safety with a search online than it was decades ago, it may be true, but complexity increases faster than general knowledge (much less specific knowledge), thus outweighing that

imagine having to become an absolute expert in cars and mechanics before buying a car, so you know of every possible corner that can be cut manufacturing a car and can check on it

or the same for construction when dealing with contractors you hired: now you need to know everything about construction to not get screwed

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#388

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

concordDance wrote: post #378
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 are…

So you are splitting hairs by, after the fact, by distinguishing between "houses" and "housing"; making up numbers of what regulations cost (not the same as the total cost of housing, right?) and insisting that fireproof cladding just isn't worth it in purely monetary terms.

You're right though, it does sound callous.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#389

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

concordDance wrote: post #132
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…

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…

> if you detregulated and put that money in healthcare

The weird thing though is that the people who argue along these lines "if you block X you could fund Y" never ever actually fund Y. Example: https://ifunny.co/picture/stop-immigration-so-we-can-take-ca...

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#390

Post by ZeroGravitas »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #373
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fascis…

Yeah a super high bar apparently:

> World Fascism: a Historical Encyclopedia notes that "Although he was authoritarian and ruled dictatorially, Pinochet's support of neoliberal economic policies and his unwillingness to support national businesses distinguished him from classical fascists.

See, if you sell the nationalized companies to your family, and they profit from selling your countries resources abroad, then you're no true Fascist.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet

Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's an ethos.

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