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It's a reputational thing. We call on the great and the good because they usually have no skin in the game, so they're impartial. They have a reputation to uph
by bfieidhbrjr 6y ago
It's a reputational thing.
We call on the great and the good because they usually have no skin in the game, so they're impartial. They have a reputation to uphold so they'll do the right thing.
It cuts through all the local politics and power that caused the problem.
See Feynman and the solid rocket booster o rings in the 80's.
- est31 6y agoYeah you can be the smartest person on earth, if nobody listens to you then your advice isn't helpful to society. Not your fault, to be clear, it's society's fault, but that doesn't change anything about the helpfulness. A lot of people give a lot of proposals for how something should be done. What will tell you that the proposal is good? Especially if you are a politician who isn't educated in computer science.
- usrusr 6y agoAlso compromises. Exceptional status enables pulling through with uncompromising solutions that would be wildly impossible without that status. Unfortunately, some problems are solved much better with heavy compromises ("listening to every stakeholder"), other problems can only be solved well by an uncompromising solution. The meta-problem is telling one from the other ahead of time. I don't know if that's even possible.