We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society • Hacker News Board

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#41

Post by lukan » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 9:25 AM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #23

panick21_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I like all of that, but is there really a scientific consensus about those things? I don't think so. Most seems to be disputed.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#42

Post by cultofmetatron » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 9:26 AM UTC

graemep wrote: post #3

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #2

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.

> There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies.

one thing I've come to respect about the Chinese is that while they make huge decisions that sometimes have disastrous consequences, they don't make the same mistakes twice.

At this point they have fed information from their environmental impacts into reforesting entire mountains and improving air quality.

They went in on Evs. not just subsidies but recognizing that you need an entire supply chain. so while americans bitch constantly about the failing power grid and how we can't switch to evs cuz it would be disastrous, the chinese built renewable energy projects and a massive DC transmission line accross the entire country. This is also a big part of why they can provide AI services for way less than america can.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#43

Post by 14113 » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 9:26 AM UTC

The fundamental issue with this is that many problems have a time/energy/financial threshold for success. Trying to tackle such a problem with incremental iterative solutions will consistently fail, as each individual iteration will fail.

This is most obvious when network effects are present (e.g. local immunisation efforts vs country-wide immunisation), but it's surprisingly common in other government-related areas like welfare, childcare, social security etc.

Edit: Another comment has reminded me that affordable public transport is the perfect example of this: Incrementally building out a public transport system will almost always fail, as the initial lines (be they buses, light rail, etc) will typically not be successful enough to justify the cost of building the line. If, instead, a system is built out universally and simultaneously, the utility (and thus income) of each line increases due to the interconnected nature of the network.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#44

Post by nilirl » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 9:27 AM UTC

panick21_ wrote: post #17

nilirl wrote: post #8

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.

Yes, but they're not safe experiments. And they're not experiments in the sense that we don't focus on shaping the reusable knowledge they produce.

It's not enough to try things, we also need a social system in place to allow trying to be safe and useful, even on failure.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#45

Post by injidup » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 9:29 AM UTC

It doesn't work because politicians are not allowed to admit failure. A politician who admits that they tried something, no matter how small, and it didn't work, is fish food. This means there is no difference in downside, for the politician, between going all in on a big decision with huge risk versus taking baby steps. The politician is dead no matter what. They either keep claiming the bad decision was a good one in the hope that something turns up, or eventually resign or get voted out. But if they ever dare to publicly change their point of view in the presence of new evidence, they are accused of the worst crime a politician can commit. They are a "flip-flopper."

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#46

Post by retired » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 9:29 AM UTC

This is why I left The Netherlands. They have been working on laws for both self employment and unrealized capital gains for the past ten years and in the meanwhile have implemented some unworkable “temporary laws”.

Just implement good laws, do it right once. Yes it will hurt to not have a smooth transition but it’s better than having meetings about it for ten years.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#47

Post by stouset » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 9:29 AM UTC

PaulKeeble wrote: post #36

Governments do run experiments sometimes, quite a lot of experiments on UBI have been run for example and we have good knowledge on whether its introduction would improve society. But I don't feel like leadership particularly cares about evidence and the right thing, they are far more idealogical than that and tend to gravitate towards policy based evidence from thinktanks and other powerful sources that produce bad…

Honestly this is because an enormous segment of the population has offloaded their critical thinking skills and moral evaluation to large media conglomerates, who mostly serve the interests of those at the top who would not benefit from these things.

If a politician does want to shape policy based on research evidence for what would improve society, this captured segment of the electorate is weaponized against them.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#48

Post by inglor_cz » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 9:30 AM UTC

cultofmetatron wrote: post #42

graemep wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There are plenty of disastrous decisions in the last 70 years at the level of major policies. one thing I've come to respect about the Chinese is that while they make huge decisions that sometimes have disastrous consequences, they don't make the same mistakes twice. At this point they have fed information from their environmental impacts into reforesting entire mountains and improving air quality. They went in on…

"they don't make the same mistakes twice."

But they do. Even if we limit ourselves to post-1949 China.

Once Mao died, the Party decided to never allow a single leader to arise again, and switched to an oligarchic model. But Xi was able to break that system and once again you have a sort of cult of personality with One Dear Leader at the top, although we have to admit that Xi is a lot saner than Mao ever was.

But the negatives are once again rearing their head, worship of a single person, personal loyalty triumphing over competence, and the Chinese economic machine, subject to whims of a single person, seems to be slowing down.

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#49

Post by coldtea » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 9:31 AM UTC

energy123 wrote: post #21

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #2

China seems to do a decent job of it. Why can't we?

I see no reason to believe they are. China is poorer than Taiwan per-capita despite being the same culture. They recovered a little after Deng reduced the amount of centralization, but they are still lagging behind.

>China is poorer than Taiwan per-capita despite being the same culture

What does being "the same culture" have to do with anything?

Aside the fact that Taiwan is much smaller (and different situation), Taiwan was cold-war period favored partner to the west, and started modernized industrialization way earlier (in the 80s and 90s it was a dominant industrial partner, like Japan had become earlier).

China had to do this much more recently, and brought 100s of millions out of poverty in the process. Taiwan is city-size compared to China, whereas the China comparison includes like 70x the population, a large percentage in rural areas.

> "They recovered a little after Deng"

The understatement of the millenium.

https://x.com/CNLiberalism/status/1397764323553034242

Re: We Don't Have to Be This Bad at Improving Society

#50

Post by JuniperMesos » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 9:32 AM UTC

nilirl wrote: post #8

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.

> I've been thinking about this too: why aren't we able to run safe political experiments?

Often, the reason is that some constituency, possibly a small one, that strongly benefits from the existing status quo, actively works against the political experiment using the judicial system; and the rest of the electorate doesn't care enough to fight them effectively to make the experiment possible.

This is actually a problem of decentralization, not of centralization. A stronger central planner would be able to just crush a small group of concerned citizens who are independently organizing to fight a political experiment that impacts them, and do that experiment anyway. This is a good thing if you expect that the political experiment is just fucking over some innocent people for no reason; and it's a bad thing if you think that the small, dedicated group of activists are actually rent-seekers in some sense who are benefiting themselves and making everyone else in society slightly and diffusely worse off.