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"In a grotesque way, Florida’s disastrous UI system represents the successful completion of a project: They intended to build a UI system that failed those who

"In a grotesque way, Florida’s disastrous UI system represents the successful completion of a project: They intended to build a UI system that failed those who needed it, and they very much did." This is the lens that needs to be applied more generally. Just because a system is not achieving its stated goal does not necessarily mean it is failing - it often means that the true goal is simply something different. To take an obvious example, the US healthcare system is not failing in its primary mission, which is to transfer wealth from the population at large to a specific group. It is in fact spectacularly successful. Andreesen's article entirely ignores this. Things are not the way they are by accident. Ignore the reasons why and you are either being disingenuous or ignorant.

x0x0 6y ago
as @wpietri would say, posiwid
- greendave 6y ago
  Thanks. Had not seen that acronym before.
- milesokeefe 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
RobRivera 6y ago
Strong concur - put simply, i think many people should recognize bad UI, in any form, as just an elaborate abstraction of hardball haggling. If a company makes it HARD to get hired, it's probably to get you to accept an undermarket rate or sweeten the deal. If a boss makes it confusing to understand how the promotion process and compensation process works, it's probably to keep you from getting promoted and keep you in your seat to do your job and not complain
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Damorian 6y ago
I have no problem calling out your "obvious example" as completely wrong, to the point you destroy your credibility on anything else you say. A quarter of the hospitals in this country are for profit. More than half are non profits, most of which are religious, and the rest are community or government run. Ask any healthcare professional why they got into the industry and they'll tell you it was to help people. These organizations get their money from philanthropy, expensive elective surgeries, and private insurers. They don't make anything from Medicare, Medicaid, or people who skip out on the bill, yet they still receive the care they need. Can you think of any other industry that's like this? I can't.
- tobmlt 6y ago
  The private insurers are the massive wealth extraction vehicle the grandparent comment is talking about. It’s wealth extraction because they are a protected/reg-captured class of “private business”. I’d throw in that when you separate the entity paying for a service and the entity receiving it, prices are bound to get out of whack. Do that for decades and the entire system is in for a downward spiral.
- patrickyeon 6y ago
  Hospitals and their staff aren't the specific group that the system is designed to transfer wealth into. The health insurance industry is. https://naic.org/documents/topic_insurance_industry_snapshots_2018_health_ins_ind_report.pdf https://naic.org/documents/topic_insurance_industry_snapshot...
  - potiuper 6y ago
    Health insurance profits are modest compared with other industries and are capped via 80/20.
  - dcolkitt 6y ago
    The entire profits of all the major private health insurers in America was under $25 billion in 2018.[1] That represents less than 1% of US healthcare expenditures at $3.6 trillion[2] If the healthcare system is designed to transfer as much wealth as possible to the health insurance industry, it's doing a really bad job at it. [1] https://naic.org/documents/topic_insurance_industry_snapshots_2018_health_ins_ind_report.pdf https://naic.org/documents/topic_insurance_industry_snapshot... [2] https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...
fanatic2pope 6y ago
Indeed. Republicans have spent decades openly talking about eroding the federal government to the point where they could "drown it in a bathtub". The situation we find ourselves in now is the end result.
- pjscott 6y ago
  I keep hearing this, but governments in extremely Democrat-dominated areas don't seem less dysfunctional. I live in San Francisco, for example: Republicans have approximately zero power here, the government is too big to drown in the Bay, let alone a bathtub... and the government here seems less competent than usual.
  - northerdome 6y ago
    San Francisco falls very much into the category of vetocracy though. We have the highest building costs in the world and people freak out when anyone tries to build over three stories. Environmental review and lawsuits can sink any project. In SF a board of supervisors often vetos whatever the mayor proposes and everyone has their own idea about what solutions should be.
  - jonny_eh 6y ago
    I think the results are the same, but the causes are different. Republican controlled governments want their programs to fail, for ideological reasons. Meanwhile, Democrat controlled governments bias for the status quo, for fear of stepping on someone's toes. This used to not be a problem due to the healthy push and pull between two similarly popular groups of politicians. But with a heavily partisan system, no group cares what the other says, so there's no pushing/pulling towards action.
  - carapace 6y ago
    I grew up in SF, we're nuts. Look at Portland or Seattle for a better model of functioning left-ish urban gonvernance.
    - babesh 6y ago
fossuser 6y ago
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ It's hard to fix broken societal incentive structures when you're operating from within the society itself. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying though and sometimes you can change the incentive structure and fix the behavior, or you can still have some success within it and then leverage new found power to fix things. I think societal/cultural optimism matters here too - since believing change is possible helps fuel the coordination that can actually make change possible. I think it's an advantage the US has over more culturally pessimistic countries (and that Silicon Valley has over other more culturally pessimistic regions).
- minikites 6y ago
  >It's hard to fix broken societal incentive structures when you're operating from within the society itself. "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
avmich 6y ago
This misses the point. It could be well argued - or even simply stated - that, yes, US healthcare system has in fact primary mission to benefit health of US population. How'd you argue it's not the case? I, for one, know this is my idea of the system. Will you prove that those who proposed the system had other ideas? Can you get in their heads? Can you get in the heads of those implementing the system? They'll perhaps bring enough words trying to convince you otherwise - and some would be sincere. The problem is that a big system is a collective work - and different agents have different goals in mind. Sometimes they can have compromises - agreements on goals, partial or final. Sometimes they can trick each other into doing something which benefits some agents' goals, but not others. You can't make a big system realistically without many agents - so how can you make sure they all work with similar goals? We talk a lot about possibilities, but sometimes not enough about intentions - and especially verifiable goals. Politicians can promise many things, but it could be expensive to elect somebody who's stating something meaning something completely different - and this idea holds on various levels of public (not only public - see e.g. office politics) decision making.
- r00fus 6y ago
  > It could be well argued - or even simply stated - that, yes, US healthcare system has in fact primary mission to benefit health of US population. How'd you argue it's not the case? No, that's the entire point greendave was trying to make. The system's goal has been perverted or coopted. This is a logical result of a corrupted system. Relevant imagery: zerg infestation.
  - avmich 6y ago
    > The system's goal has been perverted or coopted. I think that's a good description. We can use this model to work on fixing the problem.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  I don't think you should judge a system's purpose by the stated intentions behind it, you judge it by outcomes. By observing the outcome of a system (or business, or legislation), you can draw a conclusion about its actual purpose. EDIT: milesokeefe's Wikipedia link says this better than I could.
JamesBarney 6y ago
> To take an obvious example, the US healthcare system is not failing in its primary mission, which is to transfer wealth from the population at large to a specific group. It is in fact spectacularly successful. The goal of every business is to transfer wealth from the population to the business. It is a capitalist[0] society's job to ensure a system that aligns those goals with society's. When people refer to the healthcare system failing, they mean the system is not doing a very good job of delivering on society's goal's. The abstract healthcare system itself doesn't have any goals. Doctor's, hospitals, and insurance providers all have goals, but many times they no only conflict with society but also eachother. [0] - In a non capitalist society you are trading the "aligning firms with society" problem for the far more difficult "aligning individuals with society".
nostrademons 6y ago
Complex multiparticipant systems don't have goals, other than to perpetuate their own existence. The health care system isn't conscious. It's the collective interaction between a number of constituent organizations: health insurers, private hospitals, doctors, taxpayers, government, patients, employers, etc. Some of them may have individual executives making decisions over part of the system, but if those executives' personal goals are significantly misaligned from "transferring money from the population to their organization" then the organization that pays them would've long since gone under. Hence the observed behavior. Similar evolutionary dynamics can be observed in all complex systems - life, biomes, religions, community, government, law, capitalism, tech companies, etc. Any system that does not optimize for its own survival will be replaced by systems that do. And the way to align that with the continued benefit of the humans that the system was supposed to benefit is to make systems "default dead", and then hinge their continued existence on them providing the benefit that they were created for. Unfortunately this is easier said than done, because another human evolutionary impulse is the drive to create systems that will continue to exist and benefit the person who created them (though not necessarily stated collaborators) without any additional effort.

x0x0 6y ago

as @wpietri would say, posiwid

greendave 6y ago
Thanks. Had not seen that acronym before.
milesokeefe 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

RobRivera 6y ago

Strong concur - put simply, i think many people should recognize bad UI, in any form, as just an elaborate abstraction of hardball haggling. If a company makes it HARD to get hired, it's probably to get you to accept an undermarket rate or sweeten the deal. If a boss makes it confusing to understand how the promotion process and compensation process works, it's probably to keep you from getting promoted and keep you in your seat to do your job and not complain

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Damorian 6y ago

I have no problem calling out your "obvious example" as completely wrong, to the point you destroy your credibility on anything else you say. A quarter of the hospitals in this country are for profit. More than half are non profits, most of which are religious, and the rest are community or government run. Ask any healthcare professional why they got into the industry and they'll tell you it was to help people. These organizations get their money from philanthropy, expensive elective surgeries, and private insurers. They don't make anything from Medicare, Medicaid, or people who skip out on the bill, yet they still receive the care they need. Can you think of any other industry that's like this? I can't.

tobmlt 6y ago
The private insurers are the massive wealth extraction vehicle the grandparent comment is talking about. It’s wealth extraction because they are a protected/reg-captured class of “private business”. I’d throw in that when you separate the entity paying for a service and the entity receiving it, prices are bound to get out of whack. Do that for decades and the entire system is in for a downward spiral.
patrickyeon 6y ago
Hospitals and their staff aren't the specific group that the system is designed to transfer wealth into. The health insurance industry is. https://naic.org/documents/topic_insurance_industry_snapshots_2018_health_ins_ind_report.pdf https://naic.org/documents/topic_insurance_industry_snapshot...
- potiuper 6y ago
  Health insurance profits are modest compared with other industries and are capped via 80/20.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  The entire profits of all the major private health insurers in America was under $25 billion in 2018.[1] That represents less than 1% of US healthcare expenditures at $3.6 trillion[2] If the healthcare system is designed to transfer as much wealth as possible to the health insurance industry, it's doing a really bad job at it. [1] https://naic.org/documents/topic_insurance_industry_snapshots_2018_health_ins_ind_report.pdf https://naic.org/documents/topic_insurance_industry_snapshot... [2] https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/NationalHealthAccountsHistorical https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...

fanatic2pope 6y ago

Indeed. Republicans have spent decades openly talking about eroding the federal government to the point where they could "drown it in a bathtub". The situation we find ourselves in now is the end result.

pjscott 6y ago
I keep hearing this, but governments in extremely Democrat-dominated areas don't seem less dysfunctional. I live in San Francisco, for example: Republicans have approximately zero power here, the government is too big to drown in the Bay, let alone a bathtub... and the government here seems less competent than usual.
- northerdome 6y ago
  San Francisco falls very much into the category of vetocracy though. We have the highest building costs in the world and people freak out when anyone tries to build over three stories. Environmental review and lawsuits can sink any project. In SF a board of supervisors often vetos whatever the mayor proposes and everyone has their own idea about what solutions should be.
- jonny_eh 6y ago
  I think the results are the same, but the causes are different. Republican controlled governments want their programs to fail, for ideological reasons. Meanwhile, Democrat controlled governments bias for the status quo, for fear of stepping on someone's toes. This used to not be a problem due to the healthy push and pull between two similarly popular groups of politicians. But with a heavily partisan system, no group cares what the other says, so there's no pushing/pulling towards action.
- carapace 6y ago
  I grew up in SF, we're nuts. Look at Portland or Seattle for a better model of functioning left-ish urban gonvernance.
  - babesh 6y ago

fossuser 6y ago

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ It's hard to fix broken societal incentive structures when you're operating from within the society itself. That doesn't mean it's not worth trying though and sometimes you can change the incentive structure and fix the behavior, or you can still have some success within it and then leverage new found power to fix things. I think societal/cultural optimism matters here too - since believing change is possible helps fuel the coordination that can actually make change possible. I think it's an advantage the US has over more culturally pessimistic countries (and that Silicon Valley has over other more culturally pessimistic regions).

minikites 6y ago
>It's hard to fix broken societal incentive structures when you're operating from within the society itself. "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

avmich 6y ago

This misses the point. It could be well argued - or even simply stated - that, yes, US healthcare system has in fact primary mission to benefit health of US population. How'd you argue it's not the case? I, for one, know this is my idea of the system. Will you prove that those who proposed the system had other ideas? Can you get in their heads? Can you get in the heads of those implementing the system? They'll perhaps bring enough words trying to convince you otherwise - and some would be sincere. The problem is that a big system is a collective work - and different agents have different goals in mind. Sometimes they can have compromises - agreements on goals, partial or final. Sometimes they can trick each other into doing something which benefits some agents' goals, but not others. You can't make a big system realistically without many agents - so how can you make sure they all work with similar goals? We talk a lot about possibilities, but sometimes not enough about intentions - and especially verifiable goals. Politicians can promise many things, but it could be expensive to elect somebody who's stating something meaning something completely different - and this idea holds on various levels of public (not only public - see e.g. office politics) decision making.

r00fus 6y ago
> It could be well argued - or even simply stated - that, yes, US healthcare system has in fact primary mission to benefit health of US population. How'd you argue it's not the case? No, that's the entire point greendave was trying to make. The system's goal has been perverted or coopted. This is a logical result of a corrupted system. Relevant imagery: zerg infestation.
- avmich 6y ago
  > The system's goal has been perverted or coopted. I think that's a good description. We can use this model to work on fixing the problem.
ryandrake 6y ago
I don't think you should judge a system's purpose by the stated intentions behind it, you judge it by outcomes. By observing the outcome of a system (or business, or legislation), you can draw a conclusion about its actual purpose. EDIT: milesokeefe's Wikipedia link says this better than I could.

JamesBarney 6y ago

> To take an obvious example, the US healthcare system is not failing in its primary mission, which is to transfer wealth from the population at large to a specific group. It is in fact spectacularly successful. The goal of every business is to transfer wealth from the population to the business. It is a capitalist[0] society's job to ensure a system that aligns those goals with society's. When people refer to the healthcare system failing, they mean the system is not doing a very good job of delivering on society's goal's. The abstract healthcare system itself doesn't have any goals. Doctor's, hospitals, and insurance providers all have goals, but many times they no only conflict with society but also eachother. [0] - In a non capitalist society you are trading the "aligning firms with society" problem for the far more difficult "aligning individuals with society".

nostrademons 6y ago

Complex multiparticipant systems don't have goals, other than to perpetuate their own existence. The health care system isn't conscious. It's the collective interaction between a number of constituent organizations: health insurers, private hospitals, doctors, taxpayers, government, patients, employers, etc. Some of them may have individual executives making decisions over part of the system, but if those executives' personal goals are significantly misaligned from "transferring money from the population to their organization" then the organization that pays them would've long since gone under. Hence the observed behavior. Similar evolutionary dynamics can be observed in all complex systems - life, biomes, religions, community, government, law, capitalism, tech companies, etc. Any system that does not optimize for its own survival will be replaced by systems that do. And the way to align that with the continued benefit of the humans that the system was supposed to benefit is to make systems "default dead", and then hinge their continued existence on them providing the benefit that they were created for. Unfortunately this is easier said than done, because another human evolutionary impulse is the drive to create systems that will continue to exist and benefit the person who created them (though not necessarily stated collaborators) without any additional effort.