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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

#101

Post by Bratmon »

chrneu wrote: post #92
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.

The most obvious (to me) example is the San Francisco anti-homelessness program. The city government of San Francisco understood that

1. Homelessness is a massive problem, far larger here than most cities 2. For political reasons, the obvious solution of "Double the number of homes in the city to take people off the streets at the margin" is off the table.

As a result, they started giving massive contracts to a wide variety of NGOs that promised a wide variety of novel solutions to the homelessness tragedy.

As it turned out, the effect of basically all of those experiments was either nothing or counterproductive. But the NGOs ended up being so numerous that they have political power of their own, and are now at the same level as "teachers" as a major expense and powerful constituency for the city.

If you're one of those people who needs an opposite-political-valence example, a good one is the TSA. Totally worthless at stopping terrorists, but totally skilled at keeping itself funded.

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

#102

Post by FinnLobsien »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #98
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 explod…

I think there's a big difference between putting people's houses next to the local paint factory and saying that you could have mixed-use neighborhoods where you have local businesses and recreational activities close to where you live vs. needing to go to the designated area for it.

I'm not arguing for zero zoning laws, but I'm saying that much of modernist urban planning primarily benefits the planner.

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

#104

Post by JuniperMesos »

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.

There's a substantial number of people who see drug decriminalization as a failed experiment. The most salient example is the state of Oregon re-imposing criminal penalties for drug possession in 2024 after having decriminalized them in 2020.

You can also look at discourse from people who are unhappy with de facto marijuana legalization for a variety of reasons, including that it causes more public places to smell obnoxiously like weed; or that legalization allows legitimate profit-seeking firms to market marijuana more effectively to more people, creating additional marginal lazy stoners and thereby making society generally worse off.

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

#105

Post by panick21_ »

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…

Just because an 'automatic consistency' for something exists doesn't mean they automatically get their way on everything. And for most X that group is not big enough to direct federal policy.

Yes Amtrak exist and people inside Amtrak want it to continue to exist, and yet tons of reports the government does shows issues with Amtrak. Not to mention many groups outside of Amtrak, civil society, journalists and so on.

Many government institutions have existed for 100s of years have no managed to capture government to such an extend as to make them be able to monopolize any analysis of them. And there are plenty of government programs that don't exist anymore as well.

You are only looking at 1 side of this issue. You have given 0 consideration if X was actually solved or not.

Do you remember the movie "Good Will Hunting". The Therapist says "You can never do anything because you see every possible bad thing down the road" but that also misses also the opportunity for all possible good things.

In Switzerland we have SBB, a almost universally popular government owned institution that has existed for well over 100 years and has solved a problem about as good as anybody in the world. So X was solved, and we still have very objective discussion on improving X and we get reports about issues with X and so on.

In your view it would be good if Switzerland canceled the SBB? No matter if reports indicate that its beneficial or not?

I don't see how your attitude is not just defeatism and depression.

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

#106

Post by panick21_ »

dofm wrote: post #56
panick21_ wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and 70 years ago they were living in socialist utopia where honey flowed from trees. Do you have any notion what China used to be like? You need to get a grip and get some perspective on what China is like for most people. You can be critical of current day China without losing your brain.

You could be considerably less rude. > Do you have any notion what China used to be like? Try not to be so patronising. My observation, simply, is that in fixing the old centrally-imposed cruelties, they've created new ones. The current improved situation is predicated on the new cruelties. It is on any philosophical level incorrect to suggest things are better for everyone when they have become deliberately and syst…

But this is not the debate, the topic is 'can society be improved' not 'can society be made utopian'. Nobody said 'China is not the perfect society'. The question is 'has it improved' and by literally every possible metric, literally any metric or measure or estimate of 'cruelties' has improved. That does not mean non exist now. But you are drawing a binary between 'cruelties' existing or not and judging by that if it has improved. That is just a totally unreasonable. By your metric no society has ever actually improved, because almost every improvement in any society ever made some people worse of as well.

It just sound out of touch with observed reality even if you can make sense of it with some philosophical mental gymnastics.

But I much rather be a delivery driver in contemporary China compared to collectivist farm laborer 60 years ago. Now there is an underclass that is some part of the population before the was a literal slave class that was the overwhelming majority of the population. The different in cruelty and exploitation is not even in the same universe. The amount of starvation, slave conditions, massive famines, the cultural revolution, these are some of the most horrible things that happened in human history. I fear your approach is downplaying some of the largest scale human suffering ever inflicted on a population.

I'm all for being critical of China and some of their policies. But if the question is 'has society been improved' the only reasonably answer is 'yes, by a lot'.

You can maybe justify this by some philosophical reasoning, fine, but what I interpret this is as is virtue signaling, hence I somewhat rude.

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

#107

Post by panick21_ »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #95
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.

> 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 wor…

Ok sure, but this isn't some fucking massive task. And you don't have to invest 100 billion $ and then its fixed forever. You are not trying to set a competitive fab to compete with TSMC. We are talking about running a few buses.

This is a problem universal enough that there is very likely a place very similar in climate and more.

Sure there is some experimentation in the details, but the basics are known and can be implemented if there is a will to implement them. The problem is not some fact finding problem, the problem is the will to do it.

Sure if you want to go from good to great, or outstanding, you need some more experimentation. But even that isn't that hard.

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

#108

Post by panick21_ »

mlsu wrote: post #52
swiftcoder wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

You are aware that just because you read Marx you are not some superior being that levitates over the rest of us, right?

Yes, there are entrenched interests, far more then just billionaires, that are always prefer the status quo. But its also wrong to say that the status quo only exist to serve those interests. Rather that the those players have best adopted to the status quo best.

Wallmarkt is perfectly adopt to US idiotic zoning and land use strategy, but its not Wallmarkt lobbying that created that strategy. Its the other way around.

And all known good changes have to overcome entrenched interested. And just standing around saying 'nothing can every change because billionaires' is silly.

Other countries that have walkable streets have billionaires, there are very highly profitable shops and properties on those streets that billionaires can and want to invest in too.

I would say that implementation of land value tax would generally help billionaires as well, because it just overall more efficient. That is the problem with the far left, if you see everything always as only a class war and specifically in the modern sense where its the 99.9% against the 0.1%, you miss that there are many other entrenched interest that matter a whole lot for deciding where society goes. Those can even be reasonably poor people.

You are not wrong that 0.01% of the population matter but interpret society only as their tool is missing a much bigger much more complex picture.

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

#109

Post by mlsu »

panick21_ wrote: post #108
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.

You are aware that just because you read Marx you are not some superior being that levitates over the rest of us, right? Yes, there are entrenched interests, far more then just billionaires, that are always prefer the status quo. But its also wrong to say that the status quo only exist to serve those interests. Rather that the those players have best adopted to the status quo best. Wallmarkt is perfectly adopt to US…

I'm not a Marxist, far from it. I think the best possible thing is the free market. The problem here, is that the wealth is concentrated so much that the markets are no longer free.

I have 20 veterinarians in my town. That means, if my pet gets sick, I have options. One vet has Elvis posters on the wall; I can't stand Elvis, but I have options. Some veterinarians suit me, some suit my neighbor. Life has a richness to it.

Now, Walton comes in and buys out 50 percent of the vets and makes them all into Walmart. It's all above-board; he has the means, they're all legal transactions. The veterinarians can hardly object, they made out good. But now, half the vets I go into are Wal-mart. The richness of that sliver of my life is gone. And on top of this, Walmart can now throw its weight around in the city council. Extra licensing to open a new vet. Mandatory Elvis posters by law.

See how this is a problem? It's not a Marxian "it's unethical to have accumulation" view. The surplus is not the issue; it's the accumulation.

I hate all of these tech people. I hate the way they think, I hate who they are, I hate their values and their taste. I hate how they raise their children and the media they like and the way of life they promote. Fleets of AI agents in every workspace! phones in every classroom! creepy cameras tracking you! Scan the QR code to see the menu!

But they own so much of society, they are so powerful, that there is _no alternative_. The richest man in the world is turning all of society into X. I wouldn't care if he owned 3 nail salons and turned them all into the "epic cyber meme palace of nails" but he owns like 1.5% of my retirement fund and dropped a quarter million dollars to elect the president of my country and that's just one of these fucking guys!

I am with you on NIMBY zoning (that's the one thing that I think will meaningfully change in my lifetime) but that is pretty far down the list of things that suck.

From TFA.

> The technique is to organize the work into the smallest possible learnable chunks

"The Work" == human activity == money.

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

#110

Post by FrankWilhoit »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #28
FrankWilhoit wrote: post #18

"Society" (i.e. northern European and Anglophone) doesn't want to be improved.

A more nuanced version of this argument is, different people in democratic electorates disagree wildly on what constitutes an improvement to society. A practice or institution that is an improvement to one constituency is a detriment to another constituency, and that other constituency will seek to destroy the practice the moment they have the electoral power to do so.

All while successive technological discoveries raise the minimum standard of thought: vertiginously, incomprehensibly, unattainably. Something's got to give.
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