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> I have lived in five countries now, but not one (local or state) government had an online presence that was nearly as good as the gov.uk infrastructure. It i

> I have lived in five countries now, but not one (local or state) government had an online presence that was nearly as good as the gov.uk infrastructure. It is a neverending source of wonder to me that, whilst our government may be a shambles[0], our government services are so fantastic. They really are very impressive and, for the most part, very easy to use. Clearly a group of people have invested a lot of time and effort into this, and to me they demonstrate very clearly the value of investing heavily in user experience. Also, the site is almost never down, which is good for somebody like me who tends to remember that they need to do thing X at random-o-clock at night. [0] Not intended as an especially partisan statement as I have been known to vote Conservative (and over the last few years have criticised both Labour and Conservatives pretty equally), but I think it's tricky to argue that, as an example, sending 3 million kids back to school for 1 day before changing your mind demonstrates competent leadership.

acta_non_verba 6y ago
This is the main advantage of western democracies, right? Institutions and the day to day running of the country are separate to the executive.
- iso1210 6y ago
  I believe they're known as "Unelected bureaucrats"
thu2111 6y ago
I think you're seeing differences between job cultures more than politicians vs civil service. Politicians are doing crazy stuff and reversing direction 24 hours later all over the world because that's what public health "experts" are doing. The WHO is notorious for it, they have routinely made contradictory announcements within days or weeks of each other in 2020 and this will probably continue in 2021. Public health is just making it up as they go along and this is reflected through politicians, who basically just do whatever they're told by their "expert" committees even if it makes them look foolish. gov.uk is run by software engineers, presumably pretty good ones. They make decisions based on data and know how to interpret it. One thing that has become super clear to me in 2020 is the huge quality gap between CS culture and public health culture, at least in research. Public health research papers and especially epidemiology papers contain not just severe errors all the time but are flat out deceptive in ways I just never see in the output of CS research or the software industry. For example I never encounter bogus citations in CS papers but that happens all the time in epidemiology papers. Public health research superficially looks and feels like science but when you scratch the surface the scientific method has gone AWOL, good data practices have gone AWOL, basic logic and integrity has gone AWOL. It's just a disaster zone.

acta_non_verba 6y ago

This is the main advantage of western democracies, right? Institutions and the day to day running of the country are separate to the executive.

iso1210 6y ago
I believe they're known as "Unelected bureaucrats"

thu2111 6y ago

I think you're seeing differences between job cultures more than politicians vs civil service. Politicians are doing crazy stuff and reversing direction 24 hours later all over the world because that's what public health "experts" are doing. The WHO is notorious for it, they have routinely made contradictory announcements within days or weeks of each other in 2020 and this will probably continue in 2021. Public health is just making it up as they go along and this is reflected through politicians, who basically just do whatever they're told by their "expert" committees even if it makes them look foolish. gov.uk is run by software engineers, presumably pretty good ones. They make decisions based on data and know how to interpret it. One thing that has become super clear to me in 2020 is the huge quality gap between CS culture and public health culture, at least in research. Public health research papers and especially epidemiology papers contain not just severe errors all the time but are flat out deceptive in ways I just never see in the output of CS research or the software industry. For example I never encounter bogus citations in CS papers but that happens all the time in epidemiology papers. Public health research superficially looks and feels like science but when you scratch the surface the scientific method has gone AWOL, good data practices have gone AWOL, basic logic and integrity has gone AWOL. It's just a disaster zone.