We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't • Hacker News Board

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#231

Post by roenxi » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 9:16 AM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #58

For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people. Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly sim…

AI is also likely to make a huge difference to coordination problems. We can imagine a future in a short while ... maybe a decade or few? ... where we as random citizens can ask an AI we trust to go through the last 30 years of parliamentary records, profile an individual politician's voting record and interpret it according to my personal worldview.

That seems like it'd be a significant change to the game. At the moment, figuring out what someone's record is is still too hard even with sites that are trying to help. I can go to http://politicsthatwork.com/ and see a politician scored 12.8% on "Humane Immigration Policy" which tells me nothing [0]. My views are complex enough that no mass-produced title is going to break things down in a way I'm satisfied with.

But AI will allow that sort of summary where I can describe what sort of features a record should have, with examples of particular bills. I can think of other similar uses too; this'll be a wild era. One person can get through a lot of text all of a sudden. Maybe even fast enough to use it while arguing politics in real time.

[0] Does the dude hate migrants? Love migrants but prefers a welfare-heavy society and wants to try and make it sustainable? Loves migrants but the opposition is playing silly games with bill names? Loves high-skilled migrants? Are the bills being voted only tangentially related to migrants, or strategically entangled with migrant issues? Politics is best understood in context.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#232

Post by concordDance » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 9:16 AM UTC

pvdoom wrote: post #229

Aunche wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't even give an example of "ancient human tribes," but modern day nomads whose traditions have also developed over thousands of years. If ancient human tribes were so great at avoiding tragedy of the commons, I would be eating a mammoth steak right now.

The whole tragedy of the commons was literally made up by a very reactionary dude to justify fucking people over and justify enclosure and privatisation. Historically people have actually had rather complicated and at the same time very effective ways of sustainably managing the commons. It also happens that privatisation is the thing that makes the tragedy of the commons happen.

> Historically people have actually had rather complicated and at the same time very effective ways of sustainably managing the commons.

Ones that scale to more than a million people?

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#233

Post by concordDance » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 9:20 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #178

arp242 wrote: post #58

For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people. Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly sim…

> For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people. And yet other societies in the present do the right things in a lot of areas even with comparable groups of people. Not to mention today we have tools like the fast text,…

> Or rather most things are better in other western countries with big economies?

Not sure which other countries you're thinking of, but each of then have their own issues. E.g. the UK has insane house prices and its rail is awful (I live here).

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#234

Post by RandomLensman » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 9:21 AM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #58

For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people. Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly sim…

Ancient tribes failed all the time - not sure they did much better on a lot of measures.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#235

Post by concordDance » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 9:23 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #215

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not gonna argue that it’s precisely a wash, but I’m not aware of any country without political factions who strongly oppose each other and think the country would be much better if everyone else would just get on board. What can sometimes be true is that multiparty systems make the hardness of problems more legible ; if you have 5 different parties with 5 different perspectives on how the education system ought t…

> The author mentions, for example, that we know “providing free college to everyone would be a good idea”. But we don’t know this, and there are many other rich countries that don’t do it; in some, college is entirely unavailable to people who don’t enroll in the appropriate high school track. We can change this however to "we know that massively cheeper or free college to anyone in the appropriate high school track…

How do we know that a university degree isn't primarily a signalling mechanism? That would make universal university incredibly wasteful of people's most energetic years.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#236

Post by RandomLensman » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 9:24 AM UTC

pvdoom wrote: post #229

Aunche wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't even give an example of "ancient human tribes," but modern day nomads whose traditions have also developed over thousands of years. If ancient human tribes were so great at avoiding tragedy of the commons, I would be eating a mammoth steak right now.

The whole tragedy of the commons was literally made up by a very reactionary dude to justify fucking people over and justify enclosure and privatisation. Historically people have actually had rather complicated and at the same time very effective ways of sustainably managing the commons. It also happens that privatisation is the thing that makes the tragedy of the commons happen.

Historically, quite a few people ruined themselves.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#237

Post by badcppdev » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 9:25 AM UTC

solatic wrote: post #42

Who is "we"? When engineers are not subject to licensure, don't be surprised when management, pushed by bean counters, let the bean counters make the decisions. Subject engineers to licensure, including ethics clauses, including clauses for building for repairability and minimum expected product lifetimes. Legally protect engineers from dismissal or retribution for invoking these clauses. Then see how much crap we co…

Step 1. Define software engineering in a world of no-code, low-code, and AI code generation.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#238

Post by jampekka » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 9:27 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #185

arp242 wrote: post #58

For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people. Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly sim…

I've lived in a few places around the world. By far the best-run one was the Isle of Man, which (when I lived there) had a population of around 30K. It has an independent parliament (Tynwald, the oldest continuous parliament in the world), and it makes its own laws. The government has very little graft. Politicians seemed to genuinely work for the benefit of their constituents [0]. I always attributed this to the fac…

Isle of Man does have the benefit that its economy is based on international tax evasion, money laundering, online gambling etc sleazy stuff that essentially siphon off money from places where the actual labor is conducted.

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#239

Post by lloeki » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 9:30 AM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #58

For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people. Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly sim…

> Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly similar problems

There are also plenty of countries with very close to somewhat different systems. Let's take France, where there are > 2 party - more like a dozen, of various sizes and shapes -, and where the president is a direct elect from the crowd.

Sounds far removed from the Lib vs Dem indirect US presidential election? Well, every single time when there's a new contender that does not alight with the typical left vs right mentality they're going to be derided as weasely opinion cherry-pickers with an agenda of selecting voters; "that one can't make up their mind, therefore they're shady: pick a side already!" unanimously shouts the crowd.

Some think it gets further emphasised by the two-round election system: vote for any candidate (who may or may not be tied to a specific party, but hey, guess show you get any reasonable amount of campaign funding), then vote for one of the top two of the previous round (the latter is basically intentional post-WWII design that assumes >50% of the population is sensible enough to kick out an extremist should they get enough of a share on the first round so that the neighbour's history doesn't repeat itself).

I'd argue that it would be essentially the same without it: there's only one winner, and for the winner to carry any weight through their term they need to have some backing in Senate and Parliament, which also gets us into "pass" vs "no pass" law- and decision-making, and so, deep down, a "us vs them"[0][1] situation.

It's not a two party system, yet ultimately it seems like "yes" vs "no" voting always crystallises things into one as an artifact.

[0]: https://www.extrafabulouscomics.com/___97

[1]: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/

Re: We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

#240

Post by hutzlibu » Tue, Jan 02, 2024, 9:30 AM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #216

vasco wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things don't change abruptly so society can protect itself from lunatics. Whatever examples you can come up with for "why don't we solve this faster we have the solution", can be counter argumented with the fact that your solution can turn out to be strictly worse and have unintended side effects. Many times in history we thought we had solutions for things and then we didn't. If society, or "the system" is too easy…

I wonder if that's because of communism or because in any country with one party in power for too many years there is a drift to authoritarianism first and eventually to dictatorship. There are examples even in Europe and around it right now. Of course communism as ideology cannot allow competing not communist parties. That would be heresy and the first years after the revolution in Russia 100 years ago show how it g…

"Of course communism as ideology cannot allow competing not communist parties."

Only when we are talking about marxist communism. Anarcho communism is (in theory) fine with alternatives by design.