21–30 of 115 posts
China seems to do a decent job of it. Why can't we?
China seems to do a decent job of it. Why can't we?
Does it? There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. There are plenty of failed projects. The west in general used to be a lot more efficient. IMO the main cause is exactly the problem the Soviet Union used to have, and China still does: centralisation.
The US does this hilariously wrong. Like giving each state money for public metro system and then each state implements a unique incompatible solution that really only differs slightly from the alternative. In a competitive private market that fine, industry standards can emerge. But in terms of metro system that a country only builds very rarely having the system be the same between metros makes a lot of sense.
Its not like these are experimental concepts that nobody in the world knew about already.
I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments? We're missing guardrails to allow safe experimentation and we're missing institutions to provide affordances. I think the difficult bit is figuring out how to seperate the goodness of centralized decision shaping and the badness of centralized power accumulation.
Many things don't really need 'experiments'. You can just do them. Like run good buses. The US already does run experiments thanks to the states, and we run many simply by having many countries. The problem is not lack of experiments the problem is lack of political will to implemented known good solutions.
Indeed. We have extensive and widely repeated evidence that walkable streets, cheap mass transit, free healthcare, decriminalisation of drugs, and a 4-day workweek are all strict improvements over our current societies.
And yet somehow all of those are viewed as radical reforms.
China seems to do a decent job of it. Why can't we?
Like the One-child policy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_child_policy
Or the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
Or the persecution of Uyghurs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin...
Or the 2021 Hong Kong electoral changes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Hong_Kong_electoral_chang...
China seems to do a decent job of it. Why can't we?
Does it? There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. There are plenty of failed projects. The west in general used to be a lot more efficient. IMO the main cause is exactly the problem the Soviet Union used to have, and China still does: centralisation.
Failures are everywhere, even the OP acknowledged that. I think the more important question is what a system does with those failures and how well it can learn from them and improve. (And if course, what does "improve" even mean? What are the targets that the system optimizes for?)
So my question would be, could China learn from those failed projects and improve its policies? How many disastrous decisions were there in the last 5 years in contrast to 70 years ago?
> The [solution] is to organize the work into the smallest possible learnable chunks and continuously alternate between doing and learning.
It would be more convincing if the article gave examples of where that solution had been tried and succeeded. I mean this must have been tried somewhere, surely.
China seems to do a decent job of it. Why can't we?
This would seem to me to rely on an extremely selective interpretation of "improving".
Even to 40 years ago.
This is just objectively true for the waste, waste majority of the population.
"Society" (i.e. northern European and Anglophone) doesn't want to be improved.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This would seem to me to rely on an extremely selective interpretation of "improving".
Not really. I mean compared to 70 years ago. Its not really a question. The difference in living standard now compared to 70 years ago it gigantic. Even to 40 years ago. This is just objectively true for the waste, waste majority of the population.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because 15min cities are Soros funded projects to imprison us and the sheeple don't understandit. Renewable energy is a "gina" scam to destroy our economy. Healthcare is communism, socialism, fascism. Everything sucks but I don't want anything to change... /s If a society makes every problem a culture war, there can't be any progress until it gets so bad it can't be ignored anymore. But I feel even that is bit too op…
What is more important for you - economy or ecology?
Smart policies like land value tax are good for both.
Tons and tons of things are good for both.
In general economy is more important because people, but people also live in the environment. But not building a mine because of tailings is a bit silly as it just mean a mine somewhere else is built that handles tailings even worse. These things can be done reasonably.
And if you actually price in the environment destruction in the supply chain cost, we could do a lot of things.