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We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

erikmcclure.com

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

#261

Post by nvm0n2 »

fifticon wrote: post #255
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 don't think he was blaming it on the two-party system. He was just explaining how the two-party system is one of those obviously broken mechanisms that effectively blocks against replacing it with one of the better alternatives. The general category of issues he highlights, should be well known to people who have lived in and observed our real world and society for a while. It is possible to produce USB-C cables th…

The US two party system isn't that obviously broken. Americans like to say it's broken, but they often aren't that familiar with the alternatives.

You could have FPTP but with more than two parties, like the UK does. The downside of this is that the reason there are more than two major parties in the UK is that the parties are much more closed off to outside influence, and due to the presence of a major independence movement (something banned by the Constitution). In the USA it's considered entirely normal and possible for complete outsiders to run in party primaries, take over that party and then become President. This cannot happen in the UK because none of the parties have open primaries. Small movements towards more internal party democracy by Labour have been rolled back in recent years, because they allowed in non-centrist types like Corbyn who were popular with the base but not with the electorate. Still, it could be implemented in the USA. "All" you need to do is end the system of party primaries and voting for President, to allow party insiders to select their own leadership. And if you want a big independence party then change the Constitution to allow cessation.

You could have PR, like most of Europe does. Then you'd have lots of parties. The downside of this is that it guarantees that politicians can never actually do any of the things they campaigned on doing, with the result that politicians tend not to take policy development seriously. Parties end up standing for extremely vague positions even during election campaign periods, knowing that there's no point in having specific ideas as they'll all be mashed up in coalition negotiations anyway. Because the system is in some sense inherently unstable you have a lot of government collapses, and the promised benefits of representing everyone's views better doesn't happen in reality. Instead what happens is that every party just ends up being at a different point on the 1D ideological spectrum, and all the left and "center" parties form coalitions against the right wing party to deny them any representation at all, even if it means the government becomes deadlocked and can't do anything.

Overall the US system isn't perfect, but it's also not the great weakness Americans like to claim it is. The two parties are sufficiently loose and broad tents that they shift with the political winds easily, and it means Americans are able to go in an "fix" the parties if they drift too far from what is actually wanted. A big part of the meltdown over Trump is that the party insiders were reminded of this against their will. A big part of the meltdown over Sanders vs Clinton was that Americans actually like this aspect of the system and the left felt it was being denied to them.

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

#262

Post by Ragnarork »

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 get the frustration of the author, but to me this article reeks of the "Cocktail Party Ideas"[0] syndrom.

[0] https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/

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

#263

Post by me_me_me »

fifticon wrote: post #255
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 don't think he was blaming it on the two-party system. He was just explaining how the two-party system is one of those obviously broken mechanisms that effectively blocks against replacing it with one of the better alternatives. The general category of issues he highlights, should be well known to people who have lived in and observed our real world and society for a while. It is possible to produce USB-C cables th…

> He was just explaining how the two-party system is one of those obviously broken mechanisms that effectively blocks against replacing it with one of the better alternatives

I think this is self evident. How the hell US is heading to next Biden vs Trump. Again? How can anyone claim its that those are the best possible choices - or good choices? Trump is a fraud clearly claiming he is one and biden is barely capable to string two sentences together.

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

#264

Post by dawnbreez »

avalys wrote: post #105
jnsaff2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that’s what the post was kinda trying to argue, no?

The post presents a simplistic point of view - that there are universally-agreed-upon solutions to these problems that, through a failure of organizational or coordination capacity, we're unable to enact. The actual reality - that these "solutions" are not as simple or effective as he thinks and that's why we're not doing them - is a lot less gloomy than the thesis he proposes. His call to "build social systems that…

Doesn't he cite several solutions that already exist and have been demonstrated? For instance, he cites voting systems that have already been implemented in two US states, as well as a video describing the mathematical proof of how that voting system affects the outcomes of elections compared to a simple first-past-the-post vote. That's not "not simple or effective", that's "mathematically proven to be effective".

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

#265

Post by insickness »

littlestymaar wrote: post #250
Telemakhos wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two unexamined assumptions in the article: first that the “we” in “we can solve everything” is synonymous with “government,” and next that “we” know the correct answers. The former is a very twentieth century notion. The identification of government with society (“we”) went hand in hand with the idea that government should have power in every domain of human life and co-opt or liquidate every competing auth…

> Governments have never solved many problems at all—-homelessness comes to mind North Korean dissidents in South Korea disagree strongly with your claim: several of them publicly expressed their shame to see such a rich country failing to fulfill this very basic human need when their super poor communist country of origin had no such problem. Homelessness is a society-wide self-inflected wound: it could be stopped i…

Citing a totalitarian government as the solution to homelessness supports the original commenter's claim rather than detracts from it.

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

#266

Post by me_me_me »

Aunche wrote: post #219
coldtea wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author explained very well what they meant (optimizing for lower risk vs profit) and this has little to do with preserving mammoths. That would be a very peripheral concern (if it was one at all).

Mammoths were an easy protein source for ancient people that were hunted into extinction. This is optimizing for short term profit.

It was any kind of fauna that was hunted into extinction when humans moved in.

And its still happening to this day.

I was staying in a tribe village in Thailand, a full day trek into jungle. They had a dirt road connecting them to the rest of thailand but were surrounded by jungle. I was sharing few drinks with people i traveled and locals, and there was small commotion. When asking about it, locals explained that someone saw monkey out in the jungle and people were discussing who should shoot it.

They explained that there is no animals in over 5km around the village as its hunted for the meat the moment its spotted. Basically a deadzone for anything that has enough meat to be worth a shotgun shell.

Its clear as day that everyone in the village would benefit from cooperation but they dont. Humans on average are not rational. And we are barely more advanced than the ancient people. We have better tech, and a bit more empathy. But the wiring is still the same.

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

#267

Post by quickthrower2 »

ip26 wrote: post #97
quickthrower2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For governments and infrastructure they don’t need to make a profit they can subsidise. That is somewhat the point of a government. Costs too much is still an objection but “no immediate profit” isn’t. Whether that is true for fibre, I don’t know it is a complex topic.

Subsidize - with taxpayer dollars.

Yes, but they get that back later on with all the productivity increases.

Or to put it another way - think of how much the government could save in taxes if it built no infrastructure at all. You want electricity? Get a generator. You want roads? Pay a new toll every 1km as you go through various private lands.

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

#268

Post by coldtea »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #220
coldtea wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Not necessarily. It's still possible there are confounding factors that led to it's success, unknown to all implementers and observers. Maybe there are other pre-requisites to the success of the implemented education system.

We still know not having millions of people in debt out of university, and not giving millions of others the possibility to even go into university without big spending, is not good - confounding factors or not.

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

#269

Post by coldtea »

concordDance wrote: post #235
coldtea wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Because people don't just learn to be doctors, physistics, biologists, structural and civic engineers, chemists, and countless of other professions on their own (not in any significant nunber after the 18th century at least), they learn it in university, with a structured curriculum, theoritical tuition, supervision, labs, and so on.

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

#270

Post by nvm0n2 »

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.

That seems to be ahistorical revisionism. The common land in mediaeval England was literally called "waste" as in a "wasteland". It seems that some ideological academics are now trying to rewrite this history. Wikipedia has been edited into a state of internal inconsistency where it says [2]:

> Millions of acres were "common land", but this did not mean public land open to everybody, a popular fallacy ... Certainly their rights were strong, because the lord was not entitled to build on his own land, or fence off any part of it

So this land wasn't fenced off in any way and the putative "owner" couldn't build anything on it, yet this article argues it also wasn't "open to everybody", despite literally being called "common land" that is the root of the word "commoners".

It also says:

> the commoners' right to graze the lord's land with their animals was restricted by law - precisely in order to prevent overgrazing

... but the citation for this is very curious. It's a book [1] with an abstract that says:

The report of the Royal Commission on Common Lands (of which both authors were members) revealed not only the chaotic state of the laws relating to the commons but also the lack of information regarding their nature, distribution and extent. Some commons being shamefully misused, while some very large tracts are lying idle and serving no useful purpose either economically or for public enjoyment.

... which sounds exactly like the well known tragedy of the commons that supposedly doesn't exist.

Checking the history of the Wikipedia talk page (which is nearly empty) reveals what you might expect: someone engaged in a massive edit war to totally rewrite this page along ideological lines, claiming the classic understanding taught to British schoolchildren was "neomalthusian rubbish", whatever that means. They appear to have simply ground down their opposition, then the whole discussion was deleted by a bot. Nice. Wikipedia has become such a dumpster fire in recent years, it's so sad.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Common-England-Collins-Naturalist-L...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

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