9 ms·
Congress is clueless about tech because it killed its tutor
- steverb 11y agoThe original article is at: http://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-congress-clueless-tech-killed-tutor/ http://www.wired.com/2016/04/office-technology-assessment-co...
- dang 11y agoYes. Url changed from https://boingboing.net/2016/04/21/why-is-congress-so-clueless-ab.html https://boingboing.net/2016/04/21/why-is-congress-so-clueles..., which points to this.
- rayiner 11y agoAn OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc?
- jhall1468 11y agoThey wouldn't hire anyone who thought that "seeing eye-to-eye" was a prerequisite for academic rigor. They released reports that were highly regarded for their rigor (the article even mentions that). So if they were given the responsibility of researching the effect patents has on the tech sector, that's exactly what they'd do. I find it disturbing that you'd actually want an OTA that only hires people that agree with you. That's not their purpose.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoThis isn't my experience from going through the USDS hiring process, although that's a branch of the White House's Executive Office, not congress. Disclaimer: No degree, 15 years in tech, was considered qualified.
- harryh 11y agoThe USDS is a very new and fundamentally different organization from most of what the US has ever done with tech.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoAgree, and a model which Congress would be wise to adopt...if Congress had competent guardians at its helm. But I digress.
- radiolysis 11y agoI know plenty of non-PhD technology people in government who are well-respected. They aren't paid nearly as highly as Silicon Valley ($50-70k would be typical salaries) but they're often just as smart, and the government will fund their education.
- deong 11y agoAs well they should hire qualified people. I don't want "college-dropout Facebook engineers", and the goal of something like the OTA isn't to act as Google's lobbying firm. It's actually not at all difficult to find the names of people who worked at OTA as principal staff members. All the reports are archived at http://ota.fas.org/ http://ota.fas.org/ with names on each one. It's a bit harder to match them up with a current profile, because well, it's been 20 years, but in my 10 minutes of Googling, here's the first former OTA project lead I managed to find today (http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/jsngrp/ http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/jsngrp/). The OTA was (and should still be) a group of people with the expertise to sythesize a large body of research in a topic. You don't learn those skills making Facebook's "like" button load 20% faster. You learn them by spending a good chunk of your 20s reading thousands of pages of research for your PhD.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoAt the same time, I'd prefer people with practical tech experience, not academics who have rarely experienced solving real world problems (as opposed to theory).
- _-__--- 11y agoI doubt that PhDs from Boeing or FFRDCs are going to real strangers to "real-world research problems."
- toomuchtodo 11y agoAt the same time, are they experienced in CRUD apps? Probably not. Solve the right problem with the right people.
- cududa 11y agoWhat in the world difference would it make if they're familiar with CRUD apps? They're not writing code for government infrastructure
- 11y ago
- dragontamer 11y agoThe tech industry has demonstrated supreme amounts of power in the political sphere. I'm not crying for the political ills of Zuckerberg or Apple or Google. Furthermore, the tech industry is far removed from blue-collar middle class America, with an average of twice the wages and relatively insulated from the ills of globalization. Just remember: Technocrats are a political group just like any other. You and I may be part of them, but remember that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (aka: EFF) is a lobbying group funded by technocrats, with ideologies that don't necessarily match the average (non-technocrat) American. Again, I'm a technocrat like most others in this site. I am a programmer by trade and generally agree with the issues brought up by the EFF. Just don't get trapped inside of the "bubble" that is Hacker News or even Reddit. There is a big world out there.
- fweespee_ch 11y ago> An OTA, if it still existed, wouldn't hire college-dropout Facebook engineers. It would be staffed with mid/end-career PhDs who came up through Boeing, IBM, etc. Because that's what the government hiring process considers "qualified." You think they are going to see eye-to-eye with the tech industry on hot-button issues like copyright, patents, etc? Honestly, I'd prefer that to the status quo. No solution is perfect but the current situation is an absurd caricature of a shitshow. The ignorance displayed is terrifying because these people are professionals at gathering public support.
- mathattack 11y agoIt's also what the government can afford. :-)
- original_idea 11y agoNo one should trust a government agency to be an 'expert' on tech. Moving on.
- chaz72 11y agoNonsense. I would think a government would be perfectly capable of hiring experts. I would fully expect them to have different motivations than industry and academic experts, but I would think they could easily - and fairly cheaply - minimize some of Congress's stupidest misunderstandings.
- gnaritas 11y agoThat's patently silly since the government is "the" expert on much tech that only it has. Who do you think has and maintains our nuclear arsenal? You think the CIA is clueless on tech? Who again was spying on Google's internal network... idiots that don't know anything about tech? Who is performing mass surveillance, idiots that don't know anything about tech?
- original_idea 11y ago"agency" is the key word there. Individuals aside. bureaucrats tend to kill anything/everything.
- aggieben 11y ago"The problem was that the OTA was reality-based and reality has a well-known liberal bias." That's cute. No, actually, it's bureaucrats that have a liberal bias. Meanwhile, in the absence of the OTA, we've been busy building laser weapons and missile interceptors.
- hga 11y agoIndeed, it was nicknamed the Office of Technology Assassination back before it was properly terminated with extreme prejudice. It's really fun watching scientists and engineers, real experts, build all these things the OTA and its allies assured us was either impossible or beyond the foreseeable future state of the art.
- matthewmcg 11y agoYou (and Boing Boing) are mischaracterizing what OTA said about the Star Wars program. They never claimed it would be impossible to shoot down a missile or that any of the technologies involved could not be made to work. Instead, OTA found it was unlikely a program that would be effective against a large scale Soviet first stike could be deployed within the desired timeline. History has proven them correct. You can read the actual reports here: http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/ http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/ There's a reflexive tendency on HN to dismiss government-directed technology efforts. But a quick look at the advisory panel on the September 1985 OTA ABM report should convince anyone the report authors really did consult with experts in the field: Guyford Steve, Chairman President, Universities Research Associates Solomon Buchsbaum Executive Vice President AT&T Bell Labs Ashton Carter Kennedy School of Government Harvard University Robert Clem Director of Systems Sciences Sandia National Laboratories Sidney D. Drell Deputy Director Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Daniel J. Fink President D. J. Fink Associates, Inc. Richard Garwin IBM Fellow Thomas J. Watson Research Center Noel Gayler, Admiral, USN (Ret.) American Committee on East-West Accord Colin Gray President National Institute for Public Policy George Jeffs President North American Space Operations, Rockwell International General David Jones, USAF (Ret.) Former Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Robert S. McNamara Former President of the World Bank Michael M. May Associate Director-at-Large Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory H. Alan Pike Program Manager, Space Stations Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. Frederick Seitz President Emeritus The Rockefeller University Robert Selden Associate Director for Theoretical and Computational Physics Los Alamos National Laboratory Marshall D. Shulman Director Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union Columbia University Ambassador Gerard C. Smith President Consultants International Group, Inc. Sayre Stevens Vice President System Planning Corp. Maj. General John Toomay, USAF (Ret.) Consultant Seymour Zeiberg Vice President Research and Engineering Operations Martin Marietta Aerospace
- a3n 11y agoIt's much easier to ignore the facts when you remove them from the environment.
- quanticle 11y agoThese are also (largely) the same Congresspeople who voted to reduce funding to NOAA, because, as it turns out, weather satellites are a good source of evidence in favor of man-made climate change.
- d33 11y agoHopefully at some point they'd get too dumb to be able to enter the congress and something a bit cooler will ensue from the imminent anarchy... In the meantime, say "hi" to Trump.
- pklausler 11y ago> too dumb to be able to enter the congress You might have just lowered the bar right down beneath the grass there.
- authorkate 11y agoReally interesting read, thanks for sharing!
- amelius 11y ago> The problem was that the OTA was reality-based and reality has a well-known liberal bias. Speaking about bias ...
- awinter-py 11y agoI don't know, it only takes jason chaffetz 3 tries to say COBOL http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4541987/cobol http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4541987/cobol
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- OliverJones 11y agoUnfortunately, the US Congress is a failed institution: proudly ignorant, uncooperative, and inwardly focused. It pains me to say it, but that failure is one eventuality the second amendment to the US Constitution contemplated.
- pc86 11y agoThe second amendment was crafted with the express purpose of allowing American citizens to defend themselves against a tyrannical, oppressive government, using that force as a last resort to maintain their freedom. I don't think "LOL the internet is a series of tubes" quite qualifies.
- jonathankoren 11y agoNo. That's a rather modern invention of the 1970s. It was to create a state militia, that's why it talks specifically talks about a "Militia" (capitalization original). It's prima facie absurd to think that the very document that defines treason as "levying war against [the United States]" and talks about using "Militia to [...] suppress Insurrections" would also codify insurrection as a good thing.
- hga 11y agoYou're conflating the Constitution created by the Federalists, which defined the latter two items, and the different document known as the Bill of Rights which was the price of the Anti-Federalists to accept to that Constitution. And the very same Congress that drafted the Bill of Rights also defined the militia in law, and basically that same definition holds to this day in 10 U.S. Code § 311 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/311, modulo modern interpretation that holds "men" equals men and women, folding in the National Guard, etc. Note also that the Founders were hardly of a single mind on the subject, with, say, Jefferson being the most noted, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." (see e.g. http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/The_tree_of_liberty...(Quotation) http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/The_tree_of_l... ), but he had plenty of company. We've always had seriously ornery factions in the nation....
- pascalxus 11y agoYes, but don't ignore the root cause. Politicians make decisions based on what will get them re-elected, or whatever will get them the best post-career lobbying position. Their self interest doesn't always overlap with what's best for the country. Most of the advice they got from their 'advisors' probably fell on deaf ears anyway.
- nikdaheratik 11y agoExcept that most of the issues they're looking for advice on, are things that most voters don't care about. Basically, it used to be a battle of information with lobbyists putting their (often biased) viewpoint, and then the advisors, who are at least paid by the public and theoretically looking out for the rest of us, putting in their view. Now you just have different lobbyists weighing in on these issues and no one out there thinking about it who isn't already bought by someone trying to make a buck off the public. It should worry at least some of us.