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I've heard about the utilities argument a lot, I don't know enough to have formed a strong opinion on it, but the following devils advocate point has always see

I've heard about the utilities argument a lot, I don't know enough to have formed a strong opinion on it, but the following devils advocate point has always seemed a legitimate argument: Govt isn't frankly great at roads+infrastructure. Given the oft-cited statistic of how many of our bridges are dangerously unsafe, I worry that if govt. were running internet we'd all be on 90s era DSL (at best). There are other arguments rattling around in my head namely concerns re: budget allocation/prioritized areas that leave others in the dark with no free market recompence to serve that market (not to say free market is doing a good job now) but as you can see from even this slight tidbit there's a lot of back and forth in my head, and I don't know the full picture for a lot of these considerations; however the "our existing infrastructure investment isn't fantastic" is something I can observe relatively empirically. Do you have any thoughts to that?

notduncansmith 10y ago
TL;DR Those concerns are reasonable given our current implementation, but if we want to solve this problem we must liberate ourselves from the constraints of that implementation. It's like talking about whether a feature should be part of the Linux kernel or left to userland. You can say that ideally some functionality ought to be in the kernel without asserting that the current implementation of the kernel is compatible with such ideals. I think that most people shy away from this thought exercise ("assuming an ideal implementation were available, what would government look like if it were re-imagined from the ground up to address the challenges our society faces today?") because it ignores enough details about the current situation to feel like a complete departure from reality. If there are objections/concerns regarding some piece of the spec, identify the general solution, even if it sounds like a tautology - then get more specific until you have a solution. In this case, if your concern is based on the assertion that "we have not proven ourselves capable of implementing government that adequately services public works", we can examine that assertion. I'm not certain that it's true, but if it is, we can ask "why?" until we can form a hypothesis. Then apply the scientific method and repeat until you _know_ why. Then follow the same process for hypothetical solutions. ???. Profit. Sorry I didn't really answer your question, but hopefully this provides a framework for answering it and any others you should come up with.
- existencebox 10y ago
  No sorry needed, it was the shape of an answer, at least to the extent that I feel like I can respond: I realize the mental exercise and see the benefit of it, having done so in various isomorphic forms, and come to many of the same answers regarding systemically self-reinforcing power in the form of money and networked influence. I find very little in terms of either incentives or historical precedent to suggest that this will shift without some massive upheaval. At the risk of being overly pragmatic from this, aside from identifying some root problems of structural government run by fallible humans, I don't necessarily see it as a path to a solution due to the depth of the root problem your analytical framework would identify (from my analysis.) For the same reason it's not really "useful" (if we're being obnoxiously utilitarian) outside of a thought experiment to ask that question for linux (actually, to some extent, it's more useful in linux since toy OSes are more of a thing than toy governments, and have significantly more chance of both existing as experimental ventures and catching on in any real fashion) I'm not sure how this answer or thought process leads to progress? Now my turn to apologize, since this was a bit of a braindump-response.

notduncansmith 10y ago

TL;DR Those concerns are reasonable given our current implementation, but if we want to solve this problem we must liberate ourselves from the constraints of that implementation. It's like talking about whether a feature should be part of the Linux kernel or left to userland. You can say that ideally some functionality ought to be in the kernel without asserting that the current implementation of the kernel is compatible with such ideals. I think that most people shy away from this thought exercise ("assuming an ideal implementation were available, what would government look like if it were re-imagined from the ground up to address the challenges our society faces today?") because it ignores enough details about the current situation to feel like a complete departure from reality. If there are objections/concerns regarding some piece of the spec, identify the general solution, even if it sounds like a tautology - then get more specific until you have a solution. In this case, if your concern is based on the assertion that "we have not proven ourselves capable of implementing government that adequately services public works", we can examine that assertion. I'm not certain that it's true, but if it is, we can ask "why?" until we can form a hypothesis. Then apply the scientific method and repeat until you _know_ why. Then follow the same process for hypothetical solutions. ???. Profit. Sorry I didn't really answer your question, but hopefully this provides a framework for answering it and any others you should come up with.

existencebox 10y ago
No sorry needed, it was the shape of an answer, at least to the extent that I feel like I can respond: I realize the mental exercise and see the benefit of it, having done so in various isomorphic forms, and come to many of the same answers regarding systemically self-reinforcing power in the form of money and networked influence. I find very little in terms of either incentives or historical precedent to suggest that this will shift without some massive upheaval. At the risk of being overly pragmatic from this, aside from identifying some root problems of structural government run by fallible humans, I don't necessarily see it as a path to a solution due to the depth of the root problem your analytical framework would identify (from my analysis.) For the same reason it's not really "useful" (if we're being obnoxiously utilitarian) outside of a thought experiment to ask that question for linux (actually, to some extent, it's more useful in linux since toy OSes are more of a thing than toy governments, and have significantly more chance of both existing as experimental ventures and catching on in any real fashion) I'm not sure how this answer or thought process leads to progress? Now my turn to apologize, since this was a bit of a braindump-response.