Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
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Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
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Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#2Lex Fridman did a good show with the authors last week. It just sounds like supply side economics?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTPSeeKokdo
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#3There's this old amusing book The UNIX-HATERS Handbook[1] in which Dennis Ritchie has written a funny "Anti-Foreword."
"...Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Windows or a Mac. No Gulag or lice, just a future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the Hedgehog. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining..."
This seems quite relevant to Klien & Thompson's new work, which is basically advocating for and co-opting many of the core economic ideas of the current administration; ideas that would be difficult to imagine anyone would else in the government class would be qualified to out-execute them on when the rubber actually meets the road, despite their reservations and the differences they have at the margin. End of the day, somehow they wish they owned the agenda, which is understandable: they are peddling an ideology and it is difficult to see the competitive one win on merits.
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#4Most common training of American politicians: Law
Most common training of CCP membership: Engineering
Face it, we are a litigious nation that values due process (with one exception of course) over making things. An influential idea or book isn't changing this, it's in our DNA somehow
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#5Lex Fridman did a good show with the authors last week. It just sounds like supply side economics? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTPSeeKokdo
I was thinking of Milton Friedman the whole time I was listening to that episode :)
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#6Most common training of American politicians: Law Most common training of CCP membership: Engineering Face it, we are a litigious nation that values due process (with one exception of course) over making things. An influential idea or book isn't changing this, it's in our DNA somehow
But you compared two different things. CCP membership is like Republican Party affiliation: it is not reserved to politicians. The most common training of CCP politicians is... politics. The most common training of American members of the Republican Party is... whatever is trending and useful today in the US.
Your premises are so wrong that it is hard to argue with your conclusion. Ofc politicians, or policemen, or lawyers, train in law more than engineering. The US is more litigious than many countries because... it works better to litigate there, maybe ?
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#7There's this old amusing book The UNIX-HATERS Handbook[1] in which Dennis Ritchie has written a funny "Anti-Foreword." "...Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Wind…
> which is basically advocating for and co-opting the core ideas of the current administration
How on earth do you come to this conclusion?
Trump is famously NIMBY, both in real estate and in infrastructure. He objects to solar and wind purely on the basis that "they ruin the view". He's anti-dense and pro-suburb, he hates zoning except when it actually comes to residential zoning, where he has pretty consistently tried to leverage it to destroy dense housing projects (other than his own presumably).
Aside from that "this administration" has no real consistent policy objectives other than kicking out immigrants. Not even cutting taxes, because tariffs are taxes.
DOGE barely even pretends to be a legitimate effort to make government more efficient as opposed to simply cutting things they don't like or understand without concern for the actual ROI. You don't slash the IRS if you care about government efficiency.
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#8Most common training of American politicians: Law Most common training of CCP membership: Engineering Face it, we are a litigious nation that values due process (with one exception of course) over making things. An influential idea or book isn't changing this, it's in our DNA somehow
I think comparing US politicians and Chinese politicians in this way is very disingenuous. Our political systems are incredibly different on a foundational level.
And to further make the point, the US has been the center of innovation for decades. There’s a reason Silicon Valley is in the US. Other countries are catching up, but wasn’t that always to be expected?
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#9“ Okay. So the abundance agenda calls for an expert-laden, big-government apparatus to build high-speed rail, and a lean skeleton crew that outsources all the key logistics and execution layers to the private sector for a mass vaccination campaign. It’s difficult to detect a usable framework here.”
Having read about 4 different critiques of the book, this maybe closest to a well thought out one. However, it still gives in to the hyper-partisan times looking for a straightforward template to apply in every situation when actually “it depends” is the right answer.
How to build quickly and efficiently while managing everyone’s expectation is tricky business and not every situation will fall neatly under left-right (big government or small government?!) dichotomies!
The core thesis is to optimize to build quick not for some consistent politics du jour.
Re: Move fast, break things: A review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
#10There's this old amusing book The UNIX-HATERS Handbook[1] in which Dennis Ritchie has written a funny "Anti-Foreword." "...Your sense of the possible is in no sense pure: sometimes you want the same thing you have, but wish you had done it yourselves; other times you want something different, but can't seem to get people to use it; sometimes one wonders why you just don't shut up and tell people to buy a PC with Wind…
My beard isn't long enough to understand any of this.
Is Sonic a reference to crass commercialism, the diminished attention span of young people, or the iteration speed of the platform?