9 ms·

Three Cheers for Solutionism?

44 points by panic 6y ago

robfig 6y ago
It seems to me that US politics took a turn for the worse in the past 20 years, and my response has been to disengage. Randomly, I picked up The Politics Industry by Michael Porter and Katherine Gehl, and I found it pretty convincing: (a) The system of elections and legislation is responsible for the poor outcomes we see. It's not the specific personalities. (b) That system's rules were written by the Republican and Democratic parties to entrench their power. It is NOT encoded in the constitution or otherwise set in stone. Both parties are winners with the status quo -- they do very well financially by drumming up tribalistic competition instead of cooperation and problem solving. (c) The result of the current rules is that a politician's ONLY job is to appeal to primary voters, which is why they take an ideologic or hard line stance. "Reaching across the aisle" results in a primary challenger that costs them their job. As an "average voter" that thinks the best route is probably somewhere in the middle (the world is complicated, and government is neither omnipotent nor impotent), me and everyone like me are not represented. They present a surprisingly straightforward remedy: (1) Adopt non-partisan primaries with Final Five ballots, which a couple states have already passed variants of (Final Four just passed in Alaska!) (2) Ranked choice voting to remove the Spoiler reason ("don't throw your vote away") that keeps independents or third parties out. I came away optimistic about the future. Highly recommended! Here's their site if you'd like to learn more: https://gehlporter.com/ https://gehlporter.com/
- ThomPete 6y ago
  this is why Trump was such a welcome change despite his style. he owed no one and thus were able to remove 8 rule for every one he implemented, challenge china, challenge coventional wisdom about middle east and get results that all the “experts” claimed to be impossible, change the global supply chain into something quite different than what the economists and experts said were oossible. Live him or hate him, Trump were a proper disrupter who saw things from a radical different view and i believe he will be much better judged by our dependents than most people today aknowledge
  - licebmi__at__ 6y ago
    I would like to agree, as bringing pro worker rethoric, pushing against delocalization, a change of EEUU foreign policy, and not really being entrenched on the career politician POV were actually the parts of Trump I did like when he was running on 2016. But unfortunately I think he failed to deliver, and ultimately the positive changes were few and outnumbered by the negative ones.
  - badconvincer 6y ago
    All I saw was the drastic reduction of American hegemony by pulling out of bases and countries, losing the entire Asian pacific region to Chinese hegemony (partially due to the killing of TPP), losing Eastern European/middle eastern allies to Putin/Erdogan and denigrating moral standards that enabled authoritarians and dictators both at the government and lower levels. Picking a fight with China was probably the only good thing to come out of his presidency.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    > Trump were a proper disrupter who saw things from a radical different view Of late that seems to be a decidedly non-democratic view (and by democratic I mean government, not party). I'm not sure that's the kind of disruption we needed in 2020.
- handmodel 6y ago
  I agree with a lot of this although I would get ride of "to entrench". I think assuming intentionality is both a big assumption and not really necessary to describe the issue. This happens simply because the dynamics of a winner take all election. George Washington was against parties but it was inevitable they would form and did so quickly (not necessarily because of an evil condition but simply because it is good game theory) The fact that the major parties are not fighting against rank choice voting leads me to believe that they don't have a preference for a two-party system necessarily. It just isn't a main motivator.
- emodendroket 6y ago
  > (c) The result of the current rules is that a politician's ONLY job is to appeal to primary voters, which is why they take an ideologic or hard line stance. "Reaching across the aisle" results in a primary challenger that costs them their job. I'm not sure how that's the conclusion you're drawing from this round of Democratic primaries.
  - CGamesPlay 6y ago
    He obviously isn't drawing that conclusion from "this round of democratic primaries". In a comment addressing 20 years of history, your attempt to revoke it involves looking at what one half of the parties did in the most recent few months.
    - emodendroket 6y ago
      OK, but go back all the way to Bill Clinton and it's clear that this pattern does not fit the trends in the Democratic Party at all. In fact, the Dems have been quite successful at beating back progressives for decades. Big hole in the "polarization" narrative. Party insiders pulling out all the stops to make a Sanders win unlikely just makes it obvious in a way it might not have been previously.
      - orange_joe 6y ago
        Pew seems to indicate that the democratic party (or at least the electorate) has moved significantly leftward, particularly after the 2016 election. It doesn't seem that polarization is unique to a particular party. Moreover, I would argue that a self described socialist becoming one of the most important voices in the party is actually evidence of this leftward movement. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-polarization-1994-2017/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-...
        emodendroket 6y ago
        The whole point I'm making is that the Democratic Party has beat back the challenge from its base far more effectively than the Republicans, to the point that the argument just won't fit. Despite Sanders' high favorability among many Democratic voters, there's no evidence he's going to be very "influential" anytime soon.
- zhoujianfu 6y ago
  You may be interested in represent.us, they were the group behind the Alaska initiative!
- mch82 6y ago
  > my response has been to disengage What if disengagement (demoralization) is what the people who oppose your politics want you to do? Wikipedia, “Demoralization (warfare)”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoralization_(warfare) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoralization_(warfare)
eyelidlessness 6y ago
> my home state of California – where GOP opposition has been virtually eradicated – single-party dominance has failed to resolve basic governance issues. I’m sorry but what? Sure, CA is blue on a national map in national elections but it’s a very reddish purple for any smaller statewide analysis. As is my state (WA), and all other “safe” blue states. And while I can’t claim to be intimately familiar with local CA politics, when I do follow the local goings on they’re very similar to here: at every layer of government where the GOP is electorally disadvantaged, they still find ways to have outsized influence. And in these blue states, they often achieve that by undermining the platforms of their D rivals and sewing doubt in the platform’s merit. Essentially trolling as politics. But it’s surprisingly effective. CA’s ballot initiative system is often called out, because you can pass a new measure and defund it in the same go. Well, WA doesn’t have quite the same system but we have it staggered by ballot cycle, and yeah. It’s chaotic. Every time we decide we want to do something as a state, someone comes along and says “boy it would be great if the tax system (we quietly keep in place to make it painful for you) didn’t make you feel pain for this thing, do you wanna vote for a few more dollars in your pocket?” And of course people want a few more dollars in their pocket. It’s a mistake to think anywhere is safe from this. We can’t pay for anything anywhere. Because some people would rather hold it hostage for their advantage.
- purple-again 6y ago
  I think we are doomed to this forever by human nature. As a thought experiment ask yourself what you think would happen in the following scenario: We enshrine the two party system into law but allow all Americans to chose their party freely each year. You no longer pay taxes or receive services from the government but from your party instead. Do you think this would lead to harmony where the half of the country that wants high taxes and many services would join the D party and the half that wants low taxes and few services would join the R party, all living side by side in harmony? Or do you think this would lead to total chaos where the people with money to take (IE money to spend on services for themselves) all join the R party and the people without money to take all join the D party looking for services they can’t provide to themselves. I would say it’s pretty obvious what would happen but then again my world view is a bit cynical and of course not the only one. I would say it’s exactly what has happened to our system without needing the thought experiment to make the incentives obvious.
Ar-Curunir 6y ago
The issue with modeling SV as oriented towards creating "solutions" is that the incentives of VCs are at odds with that of actually solving problems: they're looking for short-term profits, social sustainability be damned. So Uber, which is a proposed solution to crumbling American public transit infra, splurges a lot of money to accelerate the crumbling of said infra, and in the process manages to make life worse for drivers (terrible pay), for the planet (via increased emissions), and eventually for riders (when prices will be too high and public alternatives gone). But this doesn't matter to VCs, who want short(ish) term profits. This issue generalizes into a critique of solutionism as a whole: technological "solutions" are not grounded in humanity: they don't actually take into account those affected, i.e. the everyday people who will directly interact with your "solution", and the millions more who will be indirectly impacted. You can try to suggest that your solution is politics-free, but in the act of interacting with, and affecting, society, it becomes political. I suggest "The Politics of Artifacts" for more on this.
eigenrick 6y ago
This article and the article to which the author is responding seems to miss the point entirely. There's nothing wrong with "solutionism" if people are making actual solutions to problems that they understand well. The derogatory term of solutionism was coined because of a trend where people built cool but gimmicky superficial "solutions" for perceived "problems" that in no way addressed the root cause of the problems. They were salves for symptoms by people who drastically underestimated the scope of the problem. They also seemed to have no idea how to engineer lasting solutions (because those are expensive and boring). Vaccines are an actual solution, though. They, in part with huge amounts of boring, un-sexy political action, can end the pandemic. So no, vaccines aren't solutionism, because they actually solve the problem, in a big, expensive and boring way
marchenko 6y ago
I think the removal of agency and oversight from the public that is often coupled with "solutionism" - not lack of faith in technology - is a primary reason solutionism has met public resistance. People are willing to sacrifice efficiency for accountability & involvement, and they do not want to hand off priority-setting to technocrats. I am personally hesitant to embrace a model where "governments have also found success in working together with the private sector to manage information flows during the pandemic", as the author describes Taiwan, especially when coupled with oversight by a bureaucratic cryptid like Marshall at the ONA. The current US versions of a misinformation "Fact Check Center" and "Meme Engineering Team" [0] have not inspired confidence. The list of top Marshall protégés may hint at tradeoffs associated with broader deployment of the ONA approach [1]. [0]https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/lessons-from-taiwans-experience-with-covid-19/ https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/lesson... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marshall_(foreign_policy_strategist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marshall_(foreign_polic...
zesterer 6y ago
My god these people need to read some Marx. You cannot effectively disentangle these things, they are mutually-dependent and both a product of the same socioeconomic system. The conditions that created Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and pharma companies are indivisible. There is no competition between methods and mindsets, only systemic failures and broken incentives that result in a conflict between them.

44 points by panic 6y ago

It seems to me that US politics took a turn for the worse in the past 20 years, and my response has been to disengage. Randomly, I picked up The Politics Industry by Michael Porter and Katherine Gehl, and I found it pretty convincing: (a) The system of elections and legislation is responsible for the poor outcomes we see. It's not the specific personalities. (b) That system's rules were written by the Republican and Democratic parties to entrench their power. It is NOT encoded in the constitution or otherwise set in stone. Both parties are winners with the status quo -- they do very well financially by drumming up tribalistic competition instead of cooperation and problem solving. (c) The result of the current rules is that a politician's ONLY job is to appeal to primary voters, which is why they take an ideologic or hard line stance. "Reaching across the aisle" results in a primary challenger that costs them their job. As an "average voter" that thinks the best route is probably somewhere in the middle (the world is complicated, and government is neither omnipotent nor impotent), me and everyone like me are not represented. They present a surprisingly straightforward remedy: (1) Adopt non-partisan primaries with Final Five ballots, which a couple states have already passed variants of (Final Four just passed in Alaska!) (2) Ranked choice voting to remove the Spoiler reason ("don't throw your vote away") that keeps independents or third parties out. I came away optimistic about the future. Highly recommended! Here's their site if you'd like to learn more: https://gehlporter.com/ https://gehlporter.com/

ThomPete 6y ago
this is why Trump was such a welcome change despite his style. he owed no one and thus were able to remove 8 rule for every one he implemented, challenge china, challenge coventional wisdom about middle east and get results that all the “experts” claimed to be impossible, change the global supply chain into something quite different than what the economists and experts said were oossible. Live him or hate him, Trump were a proper disrupter who saw things from a radical different view and i believe he will be much better judged by our dependents than most people today aknowledge
- licebmi__at__ 6y ago
  I would like to agree, as bringing pro worker rethoric, pushing against delocalization, a change of EEUU foreign policy, and not really being entrenched on the career politician POV were actually the parts of Trump I did like when he was running on 2016. But unfortunately I think he failed to deliver, and ultimately the positive changes were few and outnumbered by the negative ones.
- badconvincer 6y ago
  All I saw was the drastic reduction of American hegemony by pulling out of bases and countries, losing the entire Asian pacific region to Chinese hegemony (partially due to the killing of TPP), losing Eastern European/middle eastern allies to Putin/Erdogan and denigrating moral standards that enabled authoritarians and dictators both at the government and lower levels. Picking a fight with China was probably the only good thing to come out of his presidency.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  > Trump were a proper disrupter who saw things from a radical different view Of late that seems to be a decidedly non-democratic view (and by democratic I mean government, not party). I'm not sure that's the kind of disruption we needed in 2020.
handmodel 6y ago
I agree with a lot of this although I would get ride of "to entrench". I think assuming intentionality is both a big assumption and not really necessary to describe the issue. This happens simply because the dynamics of a winner take all election. George Washington was against parties but it was inevitable they would form and did so quickly (not necessarily because of an evil condition but simply because it is good game theory) The fact that the major parties are not fighting against rank choice voting leads me to believe that they don't have a preference for a two-party system necessarily. It just isn't a main motivator.
emodendroket 6y ago
> (c) The result of the current rules is that a politician's ONLY job is to appeal to primary voters, which is why they take an ideologic or hard line stance. "Reaching across the aisle" results in a primary challenger that costs them their job. I'm not sure how that's the conclusion you're drawing from this round of Democratic primaries.
- CGamesPlay 6y ago
  He obviously isn't drawing that conclusion from "this round of democratic primaries". In a comment addressing 20 years of history, your attempt to revoke it involves looking at what one half of the parties did in the most recent few months.
  - emodendroket 6y ago
    OK, but go back all the way to Bill Clinton and it's clear that this pattern does not fit the trends in the Democratic Party at all. In fact, the Dems have been quite successful at beating back progressives for decades. Big hole in the "polarization" narrative. Party insiders pulling out all the stops to make a Sanders win unlikely just makes it obvious in a way it might not have been previously.
    - orange_joe 6y ago
      Pew seems to indicate that the democratic party (or at least the electorate) has moved significantly leftward, particularly after the 2016 election. It doesn't seem that polarization is unique to a particular party. Moreover, I would argue that a self described socialist becoming one of the most important voices in the party is actually evidence of this leftward movement. [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-polarization-1994-2017/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/interactives/political-...
      - emodendroket 6y ago
        The whole point I'm making is that the Democratic Party has beat back the challenge from its base far more effectively than the Republicans, to the point that the argument just won't fit. Despite Sanders' high favorability among many Democratic voters, there's no evidence he's going to be very "influential" anytime soon.
zhoujianfu 6y ago
You may be interested in represent.us, they were the group behind the Alaska initiative!
mch82 6y ago
> my response has been to disengage What if disengagement (demoralization) is what the people who oppose your politics want you to do? Wikipedia, “Demoralization (warfare)”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoralization_(warfare) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoralization_(warfare)

eyelidlessness 6y ago

> my home state of California – where GOP opposition has been virtually eradicated – single-party dominance has failed to resolve basic governance issues. I’m sorry but what? Sure, CA is blue on a national map in national elections but it’s a very reddish purple for any smaller statewide analysis. As is my state (WA), and all other “safe” blue states. And while I can’t claim to be intimately familiar with local CA politics, when I do follow the local goings on they’re very similar to here: at every layer of government where the GOP is electorally disadvantaged, they still find ways to have outsized influence. And in these blue states, they often achieve that by undermining the platforms of their D rivals and sewing doubt in the platform’s merit. Essentially trolling as politics. But it’s surprisingly effective. CA’s ballot initiative system is often called out, because you can pass a new measure and defund it in the same go. Well, WA doesn’t have quite the same system but we have it staggered by ballot cycle, and yeah. It’s chaotic. Every time we decide we want to do something as a state, someone comes along and says “boy it would be great if the tax system (we quietly keep in place to make it painful for you) didn’t make you feel pain for this thing, do you wanna vote for a few more dollars in your pocket?” And of course people want a few more dollars in their pocket. It’s a mistake to think anywhere is safe from this. We can’t pay for anything anywhere. Because some people would rather hold it hostage for their advantage.

purple-again 6y ago
I think we are doomed to this forever by human nature. As a thought experiment ask yourself what you think would happen in the following scenario: We enshrine the two party system into law but allow all Americans to chose their party freely each year. You no longer pay taxes or receive services from the government but from your party instead. Do you think this would lead to harmony where the half of the country that wants high taxes and many services would join the D party and the half that wants low taxes and few services would join the R party, all living side by side in harmony? Or do you think this would lead to total chaos where the people with money to take (IE money to spend on services for themselves) all join the R party and the people without money to take all join the D party looking for services they can’t provide to themselves. I would say it’s pretty obvious what would happen but then again my world view is a bit cynical and of course not the only one. I would say it’s exactly what has happened to our system without needing the thought experiment to make the incentives obvious.

Ar-Curunir 6y ago

The issue with modeling SV as oriented towards creating "solutions" is that the incentives of VCs are at odds with that of actually solving problems: they're looking for short-term profits, social sustainability be damned. So Uber, which is a proposed solution to crumbling American public transit infra, splurges a lot of money to accelerate the crumbling of said infra, and in the process manages to make life worse for drivers (terrible pay), for the planet (via increased emissions), and eventually for riders (when prices will be too high and public alternatives gone). But this doesn't matter to VCs, who want short(ish) term profits. This issue generalizes into a critique of solutionism as a whole: technological "solutions" are not grounded in humanity: they don't actually take into account those affected, i.e. the everyday people who will directly interact with your "solution", and the millions more who will be indirectly impacted. You can try to suggest that your solution is politics-free, but in the act of interacting with, and affecting, society, it becomes political. I suggest "The Politics of Artifacts" for more on this.

eigenrick 6y ago

This article and the article to which the author is responding seems to miss the point entirely. There's nothing wrong with "solutionism" if people are making actual solutions to problems that they understand well. The derogatory term of solutionism was coined because of a trend where people built cool but gimmicky superficial "solutions" for perceived "problems" that in no way addressed the root cause of the problems. They were salves for symptoms by people who drastically underestimated the scope of the problem. They also seemed to have no idea how to engineer lasting solutions (because those are expensive and boring). Vaccines are an actual solution, though. They, in part with huge amounts of boring, un-sexy political action, can end the pandemic. So no, vaccines aren't solutionism, because they actually solve the problem, in a big, expensive and boring way

marchenko 6y ago

I think the removal of agency and oversight from the public that is often coupled with "solutionism" - not lack of faith in technology - is a primary reason solutionism has met public resistance. People are willing to sacrifice efficiency for accountability & involvement, and they do not want to hand off priority-setting to technocrats. I am personally hesitant to embrace a model where "governments have also found success in working together with the private sector to manage information flows during the pandemic", as the author describes Taiwan, especially when coupled with oversight by a bureaucratic cryptid like Marshall at the ONA. The current US versions of a misinformation "Fact Check Center" and "Meme Engineering Team" [0] have not inspired confidence. The list of top Marshall protégés may hint at tradeoffs associated with broader deployment of the ONA approach [1]. [0]https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/lessons-from-taiwans-experience-with-covid-19/ https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/lesson... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marshall_(foreign_policy_strategist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marshall_(foreign_polic...

zesterer 6y ago

My god these people need to read some Marx. You cannot effectively disentangle these things, they are mutually-dependent and both a product of the same socioeconomic system. The conditions that created Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and pharma companies are indivisible. There is no competition between methods and mindsets, only systemic failures and broken incentives that result in a conflict between them.