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> Terrible consultants, middlemen, and lifers making progress too hard or impossible. Can you elaborate on this? I hear lots of criticism around inept and ill-

> Terrible consultants, middlemen, and lifers making progress too hard or impossible. Can you elaborate on this? I hear lots of criticism around inept and ill-intentioned consultants and “govvies” alike, but I think a lot of it is a bit unfairly harsh. There are certainly some adverse incentives (chiefly that it’s easy enough to coast along with minimal effort in these jobs if you’re inclined), but I’d say the slight majority of individuals in this space are qualified, capable, and motivated to improve the world via good work—technical or otherwise. Slowly but surely, projects get done and positive change is made. > Not sponsoring software that actually directly helps people domestically This really isn’t true. Every US agency has technology initiatives, some more effective than others. See the work that the Department of Veterans Affairs does, as one example. The US government also spends ~$750B on grants annually, much of which goes to fundamental research as well as tech projects. If you really want to dig in, there’s an API to access data on every item of spending (e.g. contract awards, grants): https://www.usaspending.gov/#/ https://www.usaspending.gov/#/

opportune 7y ago
>Terrible consultants, middlemen, and lifers making progress too hard or impossible. I can mostly only echo hearsay, however I have been tangentially involved in government-focused projects. The big issue I see with the government getting involved in tech is that they don't know what they really want, they don't know how to filter out bullshit/upsells, and they'll frequently overpay for things they don't need and underpay for things that would be very helpful. I'm not one of those people who wants to defund the government or privatize everything, however I do think the government incentive structure needs to be redesigned and become less cushy while simultaneously becoming more lucrative, accompanied by a huge culture change. The government isn't inherently inefficient, it's only like that because we let it be, one has only to look at other countries (see: Estonia, China) to see how much more effective we could be here. Regarding actual spending, I want to measure that by its effectiveness, not by the total amount spent. The government could blow all its money on tech initiatives and EMR upgrades and have nothing to show for it, and I wouldn't call that helping people domestically. To address your examples, a lot of those grants are for defense contractors (which only indirectly helps people, at best, and is itself a pretty corrupt old-boys industry). Others are for things like direct academic research though, which I do think is decently well run in general, but isn't really a direct government relationship to tech.
- jointpdf 7y ago
  > The big issue I see with the government getting involved in tech is that they don't know what they really want, they don't know how to filter out bullshit/upsells, and they'll frequently overpay for things they don't need and underpay for things that would be very helpful. These are good points (as were your original ones). Thanks for the thoughtful reply—I’m just trying to push back slightly on the “government/contractors are all incompetent” narrative where I see it, since I don’t think that’s the root of the problem (the DMV area is the most highly education region of the US, as one counterpoint). Discussion around incentive structures is a lot more productive. I didn’t give very specific examples with grants, but I just wanted to draw attention to that as an often overlooked and major source of government spending. The federal grants process does have multiple stages of project performance monitoring/evaluation, though that process itself could be made more efficient. Also, sometimes grants do directly support software projects with public benefits. Just as a single example, Stanford DeepDive (now Snorkel) is a system for knowledge base construction that has been used to fight human trafficking, among other things: http://deepdive.stanford.edu/showcase/apps http://deepdive.stanford.edu/showcase/apps

opportune 7y ago

>Terrible consultants, middlemen, and lifers making progress too hard or impossible. I can mostly only echo hearsay, however I have been tangentially involved in government-focused projects. The big issue I see with the government getting involved in tech is that they don't know what they really want, they don't know how to filter out bullshit/upsells, and they'll frequently overpay for things they don't need and underpay for things that would be very helpful. I'm not one of those people who wants to defund the government or privatize everything, however I do think the government incentive structure needs to be redesigned and become less cushy while simultaneously becoming more lucrative, accompanied by a huge culture change. The government isn't inherently inefficient, it's only like that because we let it be, one has only to look at other countries (see: Estonia, China) to see how much more effective we could be here. Regarding actual spending, I want to measure that by its effectiveness, not by the total amount spent. The government could blow all its money on tech initiatives and EMR upgrades and have nothing to show for it, and I wouldn't call that helping people domestically. To address your examples, a lot of those grants are for defense contractors (which only indirectly helps people, at best, and is itself a pretty corrupt old-boys industry). Others are for things like direct academic research though, which I do think is decently well run in general, but isn't really a direct government relationship to tech.

jointpdf 7y ago
> The big issue I see with the government getting involved in tech is that they don't know what they really want, they don't know how to filter out bullshit/upsells, and they'll frequently overpay for things they don't need and underpay for things that would be very helpful. These are good points (as were your original ones). Thanks for the thoughtful reply—I’m just trying to push back slightly on the “government/contractors are all incompetent” narrative where I see it, since I don’t think that’s the root of the problem (the DMV area is the most highly education region of the US, as one counterpoint). Discussion around incentive structures is a lot more productive. I didn’t give very specific examples with grants, but I just wanted to draw attention to that as an often overlooked and major source of government spending. The federal grants process does have multiple stages of project performance monitoring/evaluation, though that process itself could be made more efficient. Also, sometimes grants do directly support software projects with public benefits. Just as a single example, Stanford DeepDive (now Snorkel) is a system for knowledge base construction that has been used to fight human trafficking, among other things: http://deepdive.stanford.edu/showcase/apps http://deepdive.stanford.edu/showcase/apps