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The dictatorship of the articulate

florentcrivello.com

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Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#211

Post by [deleted] »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #102
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #91

There's a reason we don't just "let the builders build". We used to do that (certainly to a massively greater extent than we do now), and the result was that although a few of them managed to construct monuments we can all be proud of, most of them built a pile of crap and/or damaged the places they built in and the people they nominally built for. This is true of literal buildings, but it's also true of a great many…

Indeed. As the saying goes, legislation is often written in blood. Like how the Triangle fire led to a rule that "you can't lock all the exits of a building, even if you're worried your workers will take unauthorized breaks".

[deleted]

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#212

Post by brazzy »

ghastmaster wrote: post #166
rwl wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was also a cost in human life. I saw a photo exhibition [1] about the construction of the Bay Bridge once, containing many beautiful shots from the point of view of the workers. The photos were taken by Peter Stackpole, a 20 year old kid who basically just talked his way onto the boats that took the workers out to the site. He took photos of the towers as they were being riveted together, of the cables being wo…

> There was also a cost in human life. The article's first sentence, reads, "A few years ago, Silicon Valley was buzzing with the reverberations of Marc Andreessen’s epic essay, It’s Time To Build." Here's the main point of "It’s Time to Build" regarding the failures in response to the covid pandemic: "Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we did…

> Regulatory oversight is not necessary for safety to improve over time.

You couldn't be more wrong.

> I think history shows that as technology advances and people's standard of living increases, people become more risk averse. General knowledge also increases over time, decreasing the proclivity for humans to put themselves in risky situations.

Except complexity increases faster than knowledge. It's flat out impossible for everyone to have full knowledge of all the risks that might be generated by people trying to make a buck by cutting corners on safety, and what you'd have to do to avoid those risks. And that's not even mentioning how risks can affect other people who never made a choice about them.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#214

Post by throwawayacc2 »

kortilla wrote: post #147
rwl wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was also a cost in human life. I saw a photo exhibition [1] about the construction of the Bay Bridge once, containing many beautiful shots from the point of view of the workers. The photos were taken by Peter Stackpole, a 20 year old kid who basically just talked his way onto the boats that took the workers out to the site. He took photos of the towers as they were being riveted together, of the cables being wo…

False dichotomy. Look at the delays and cost balloons of the HSR project. They have nothing to do with safety of workers. You can adopt modern safety standards and still wipeout a ton of roadblocks to actually get started much sooner by just generally using eminent domain more freely and not empowering people to so easily stop projects with lawsuits.

Precisely! I saw an NDC Cooenhagen talk recently. I think it was called “Biggest mistakes in programming” or something like that. In the talk the guy mentioned at some point fixing a db problem.

The way he described it, he was contracted to describe the problem and provide guidance on how to fix it. Not to actually fix, just analyse and describe the solution. But the problem was so simple he just made the fix and offered to do it there and then. They didn’t accept that, they insisted on getting a report and steps to fix. So he does that. He sends them a document and doesn’t hear from them for a while.

Six months later, he gets an email “Can you please come over to discuss your findings?” The “discuss your findings meeting” he describes as being easily a £100.000 meeting.

All this could have been avoided if they just did the fix there and then. But there is a culture a bureaucracy and ass covering.

I have no doubt, this sort of thing is prevalent in other industries as well. It’s not always reasonable safety regulations. Often times it’s bureaucracy running in circles and driving up costs for no reason .

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#215

Post by dane-pgp »

concordDance wrote: post #139
satisfice wrote: post #100

The dictatorship of the articulate? So the author is clearly saying, "people" should not be in the room, or if in the room, be unable to speak, or if able to speak, be ignorant of their rights-- unless they support whatever he values. And then where will these people be? In which room? And what ability to speak should they have? And what about their rights should they know? "In the old days, it was so cheap and easy…

Essentially the more people have veto power or require consultation the harder it is to get anything done. The more policies and rules there are (particularly once uncertainty about what the rules are creeps in), the harder it is to build. If you've worked in a large corporation and a 10 man startup this should be obvious. In the latter you can spin up a new service in a couple of hours. In the former a couple of mon…

> In the latter you can spin up a new service in a couple of hours. In the former a couple of months is a blistering pace.

In the latter you can harm society in ways that take a couple of hours to fix. In the former, you can cause harms that take months or years to fix (and, with enough lobbying, you can make taxpayers foot the bill).

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#216

Post by coldtea »

yodelshady wrote: post #163
kortilla wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False dichotomy. Look at the delays and cost balloons of the HSR project. They have nothing to do with safety of workers. You can adopt modern safety standards and still wipeout a ton of roadblocks to actually get started much sooner by just generally using eminent domain more freely and not empowering people to so easily stop projects with lawsuits.

Indeed. Airlines do well, and they're heavily regulated. But they don't have armies of engineers doing nothing whilst court cases are worked out. The flip side of that is monopoly. The only recent aviation accidents that have happened, have done so because, put bluntly, the FAA knows they didn't stand a chance if they blocked the only (US) big-jet maker from upgrading its planes. Were there (US) competitors, which on…

>Airlines do well

Isn't airlines one of the worst performing industries, with companies which often require subsidies, and are always on the verge of collapsing?

And that has been this way, way before Covid...

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#217

Post by coldtea »

hef19898 wrote: post #169
ghastmaster wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was also a cost in human life. The article's first sentence, reads, "A few years ago, Silicon Valley was buzzing with the reverberations of Marc Andreessen’s epic essay, It’s Time To Build." Here's the main point of "It’s Time to Build" regarding the failures in response to the covid pandemic: "Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we did…

That trade off is deeply flawed. Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are. But argueing to sacrifice / risk lives now for the benefit of saving lives later, all you do is arguing to get of regulations holding you back right now from making personal gains. And that line if thought is just selfish, entitled and short sighted. And quite prevelant in certain, especially rich and…

>That trade off is deeply flawed. Future lives saved are impossible to quantify, while lives saved now very much are.

Actually both are "future lives" (we're not saving someone we already know is about to die) and both are as easy or hard to quantify.

We can quantify average cost of lives in a big building project given X regulations applied (based on past experience with similar projects), and we can also quantify the impact of a project in first (and sometimes second) order effects (e.g. "building this highway bypass means X less traffic and congestion in that populated area, and thus X man-years spared, plus X less pollution").

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#218

Post by coldtea »

gentoo wrote: post #137
spoonjim wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 11 people died during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge which is fewer than the number of people who jump off of it every year.

what is the acceptable number of people to die during bridge construction

Obviously more than zero, else we wouldn't attempt to build any bridge (or do anything else, like drive cars or fly planes) lest someone dies in the process...

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#219

Post by Tade0 »

thrown_22 wrote: post #195
notahacker wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a certain irony in looking favourably at the building speed and cost of an era when Depression labour oversupply could get a bridge built quickly and cheaply (with only 11 construction deaths!) but the longstanding invention of running water didn't find its way into grandma's house until well into the second decade of her life. And even people with running water saw it collected straight from the same ri…

Spoken like someone who's never had to carry all their daily water from a well. Even if you can't drink tap water the fact that you don't need to carry the water for washing, bathing, cleaning, watering, etc. etc. etc. is an amazing improvement in quality of life.

I've carried water occasionally in the past - aside from hiking trips my grandfather built a summer house without running water.

I would prefer to have clean rather than just running water, since the latter is useless when contaminated.

There's a stream close to where my grandfather built the house. We never used water from there because it was too rich in iron, even though it's more accessible since you don't have to pull the bucket out like in a well.

Re: The dictatorship of the articulate

#220

Post by notacoward »

This feels closely related to an observation I made a long time ago.

>>

Replace "marketing" with more general arts of persuasion, and you get OP's thesis. Rhetorical skill (which is completely orthogonal to other qualities like honesty or sound judgment) is often the surest route to success, across all fields. It's the "ace in the hole" that beats all other cards. People with the gift of gab usually win the race to get their project approved before others, often contrary to objective merit. They get more promotions, likewise. They gain political power. Our lives are influenced more by persuaders than by makers (and BTW social media only make it worse). I detest this fact, but don't feel I can deny it.

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