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

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

#91

Post by enaaem »

nilirl wrote: post #78
danbruc wrote: post #65

1. An airplane crashes, everyone dies. Clearly a bad thing. Not so quick. For the funeral industry this means additional business, a good thing. And this is true for a LOT [1] of things, they are not good or bad, right or wrong, their judgment depends on perspective and personal preferences. 2. Which means that there is generally no policy that makes everyone happy. So you need a party with a program that aims at fin…

I enjoyed your comment. Over the long term, democracies have mostly avoided self-implosion, so this political see-saw does seem to work. The question is: is there anything we can do to make it feel better to live in?

Democracies solve the succession problem. Autocracies often don't have peaceful transition of power and swing far more extreme. Sometimes even civil war.

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

#92

Post by chrneu »

Bratmon wrote: post #54

It's weird that this article doesn't even attempt to grapple with the reason why governments can't run big policies as experiments and cancel them if they fail: Every time the government hires a group of people to do X, that automatically creates a class of people who: 1. Depend on the government continuing to do X for their livelihoods 2. Are experts in X and know far more about it than any government official This…

this is based more on assumption than anything else i think. this is something i hear folks yell very loudly about all the time but actual examples seem to be harder to come by.

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

#93

Post by nilirl »

enaaem wrote: post #91
nilirl wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed your comment. Over the long term, democracies have mostly avoided self-implosion, so this political see-saw does seem to work. The question is: is there anything we can do to make it feel better to live in?

Democracies solve the succession problem. Autocracies often don't have peaceful transition of power and swing far more extreme. Sometimes even civil war.

I wasn't trying to argue against democracy. I was asking about how we make it feel better.

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

#94

Post by rawgabbit »

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.

In the U.S. federal system, states often act as policy test sites. A state may try a new law. Other states may copy it. Sometimes Congress later turns a state model into federal law. Eg, unemployment insurance started as Wisconsin program.

The answer to your question I believe is that politics are no longer local. Instead politicians are punished if they don’t mimic the daily talking points from the national committee. That is politics is no longer about solving real problems but is about who swears unswerving loyalty to the party ideology.

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

#95

Post by red-iron-pine »

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.

> Like run good buses.

you act like people are born with an idea of what "run good busses" means.

how many busses? what models? what schedule? what routes to where? how do you staff them? how do you handle disruptions, strikes, bad weather, fist fights, budget cuts, etc?

there may be some known good solutions there, but how do you know they apply here? Australian public transit approaches aren't necessarily gonna work in frozen Canada, and great solutions for dense cities won't translate to rural.

at some point you're gonna have to figure out what works for your locality, and that may involve trying new things

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

#96

Post by red-iron-pine »

kjshsh123 wrote: post #87
mlsu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man you guys are so close. "Somehow." Indeed, it is a mystery. 0.01% of the population has direct control over something like 50% of society's resources. Society moves to enrich them, at everyone else’s expense. Curious that.

Most countries don't allow billionaires to influence elections like the USA. Maybe they still do in other ways. Anyway, I think blaming the 0.01% for how 50%+1 vote is too easy. Take electoral reform. Is that the 0.01%, or is the case that it's just the only one that could improve elections with electoral reform never has any incentive? Still, if voters really made it their priority and punished parties that run on i…

that's cuz the billionaires already own the system and don't need to influence the elections. Putin waves his hand and it is so -- no election needed.

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

#97

Post by red-iron-pine »

stouset wrote: post #47
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.

> 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.

Gramscian Hegemony, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony

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

#98

Post by red-iron-pine »

FinnLobsien wrote: post #70

I agree with the problem, and I think it stems from a few core issues: 1. Societies are heterogenous, and some groups are always benefitting from the status quo, which will then rebel against any potential changes. For instance, in Germany (and multiple other European countries), forming a GmbH (LLC) requires in-person sessions with expensive notaries, who will read the entire paperwork out loud. This made sense when…

> It checks the boxes of daily life, but the people living through it feel alienated from their community with these single-purpose urban areas.

these rules exist for good reason -- regs are written in blood -- and ware why your air and water are cleaner than ever: you're not right next to the places where they're leaching into the ground.

one of the original zoning rules was after a giant tank of hot molasses exploded and killed 12 people, burying a chunk of Boston in sticky-sweet tar. people were sitting at home minding their own business before being scalded and drowning in poorly stored food product. and that ain't got nothin on industrial toxins...

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

#99

Post by Bratmon »

nilirl wrote: post #77
Bratmon wrote: post #54

It's weird that this article doesn't even attempt to grapple with the reason why governments can't run big policies as experiments and cancel them if they fail: Every time the government hires a group of people to do X, that automatically creates a class of people who: 1. Depend on the government continuing to do X for their livelihoods 2. Are experts in X and know far more about it than any government official This…

Your argument hinges on deciding what "works" means. You're saying it "works" for some people but maybe not in a way or scale that was originally intended for it to "work". But isn't that how all learning in a complex system takes place? Doesn't mean you need to rush to cancel something? What's wrong in saying it doesn't do what we thought it would but it does do something useful? Maybe adjust further investment base…

Ironically, that's exactly the argument the X experts make to keep themselves around
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