What has surprised me the most is how uneducated people have become on complex matters. I work in the public sector, in digitization which gives me some pretty

What has surprised me the most is how uneducated people have become on complex matters. I work in the public sector, in digitization which gives me some pretty high levels of access because there is literally digitization in everything. I’ve never met a bureaucrat at any higher level of office that wasn’t dedicated, hardworking and intelligent. I’ve never seen a decision or any important matter decided upon without good reason. I have seen a lot of terrible decisions, but they were all made on a solid base that later turned out to be wrong. Politicians are another story, but the vast majority of them are really great at what they do, and if you gave them more than 15 seconds on a tv channel you’d probably get a very different view of most of them than you have now, I know I did, and I wasn’t even particularly negative toward them before it. So there is that, the reality of a complex public sector, which simply isn’t perfect in a democracy, where one of the highest virtues in political decisions comes down to compromise. Yet whenever I go out of my bubble, I’m constantly met with jokes about how monkeys could do better, or drain the swamp type comments. Not just from idiots either, but from virtually anyone. Almost all the time I can dismiss it, by giving an example of why a decision isn’t just black and white. Like open source and the public sector. I talked with a comp.sci. professor about it once, and he had excellent points on why public funding (in it) should mainly go to open source software. Except in reality, a municipality like mine operates 470 different softwares of which 90% haven’t got an open source alternative. Not only that, our entire IT staff is schooled and certified in things that aren’t open source, and even if I could magically replace them over night without it costing millions of dollars, it’s almost impossible to find open source focused replacements. Faced with the complex realities of modern management the professor toned down his argument, but at the time it got me thinking. How did we become a world of people who think we can analyze anything and come up with a solution on how to do it better? And when I say that, analyse, is really the wrong word because we watch a few 15 second clips on politics here and there through out the year, and suddenly we think we can run our institutions better than the people who are actually educated and experienced at running them? We see a few clips of plastic in the ocean, or get snow in April and we think we’re climate scientists? I say we, because I’m just as guilty of this as you are. Compared to people who buy into the social media memes, my only personal advantage, is that I was schooled in verifying my sources before I believe them, but just imagine if you weren’t.