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How the Hell Do You Govern in a Complex World
- ballmerspeak 6y agoI really hope Cave Jackson is Cave Johnson in a mustache holding a lemon
- ricc 6y agoI was imagining "Cave Jackson" as an African-American NFL superstar and he's wearing his football uniform (complete with helmet and padding) while making that speech.
- jkhdigital 6y agoAfter the Harry Potter bit I started thinking this might be authored by GPT-3... but no, it’s just good satire lol
- ctdonath 6y agoAs the Founding Fathers of the USA intended: establish minimal governance to facilitate polite commerce, and otherwise stay the he11 out of each others' business.
- ryanmarsh 6y agoI wonder how such an anemic federal govt could avoid becoming the client state of a major world power in the modern complex world where the stakes are so high, the opponents are playing the long game, and the oligarchs have no national loyalty.
- krapp 6y agoIt couldn't. obviously, if the US were actually founded as a libertarian minarchy and kept that way without a strong Federal government it would simply have dissolved into a fractious set of nations and eventually been consumed by European and Russian powers. Or New York. But most libertarians just want to be able to smoke weed, shoot guns and never pay taxes, and they don't think it through.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoIt's the other way around. If you bind their hands (e.g. constitutionally reduce the power of the central government and have the states and cities take over what it currently does) then oligarchs have to fight in every state and town instead of in one place for everyone. Then sometimes they lose, instead of the status quo where a federal government controlled by oligarchs has its hand in everything.
- plainOldText 6y agoToo bad HN doesn’t have double votes. Also, self organization is an important feature of a complex system.
- vulcan01 6y agoThe Founding Fathers (save one) also intended that slavery would exist. All of them were very rich. All of them were men, too (as their collective name suggests). The problem with appealing to the Founding Fathers is that they were profoundly uninterested in equality of opportunity, due to who they were. It is a useful exercise to consider what they would have done — that does not itself demonstrate anything.
- throwawayboise 6y agoThat the founders were flawed as human beings, is not an argument against limited government or more broadly the ideals that comprise the US Constitution.
- ctdonath 6y agoThe Founding Fathers intended the elimination of slavery, and banned it to a meaningful degree during establishment of the new nation, but had to compromise lest the fragile Union break before it could form. Slavery eventually eliminated (before most other nations), at tremendous cost not appreciated by many benefiting from that payment.
- imbnwa 6y agoFrance, Spain, and England all abolished slavery in their colonies at least 30 years before the American Civil War.
- 6y ago
- refenestrator 6y agoThe founding fathers of the USA hacked out a patchwork of compromises to put together a government. Great work, some of the ideas aged well. But they weren't prophets and they weren't building a plan for the cyberpunk future we're finding ourselves in.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoThe fetish for “founding fathers” as infallible superheroes is really weird.
- bpodgursky 6y agoMmmh, here's my take: they are not infallible superheroes. They were fallible human beings. Are there better people, today, who could lead the country? Of course. Will they ever actually be elected to do so? Sadly, no. America in the late 1700s was a weird moment in history where educated, forward-thinking intellectuals (not nobility, not just the moneyed elite — actually a lot of men who (mostly) deserved to be called intellectual) actually had a chance to make the rules. They made pretty good ones. Some flawed rules, but good ones. We're not going to get that again. The real-time feedback of TwitterDemocracy would prevent us from ever getting a document as general yet meaningful as the Bill of Rights, with basically unfettered rights to speech and assembly. So until I see a viable path to put people in charge who actually surpass them in wisdom and foresight, I'm going to stick to what they put forward. It has aged and worked amazingly well, and have 0 confidence that the politicians of today, if starting from scratch, would do better.
- tomrod 6y agoYou might be interested in reading on many of the other democracies out there that update their constitutions frequently.
- bpodgursky 6y agoThere are no other democracies out there that have the almost-unfettered rights to assembly and speech that the US has. This is important to me. And FWIW, there are (by most measures) no other democracies out there which have gone as long under peaceful rule of law as the US. Every other democracy (save by some measures the UK) has fallen to coup or revolution in less than this duration. Their latest constitutions may work to keep them stable as long as the US has managed. Or they may not. Time will tell.
- A12-B 6y agoA shame what this has caused.
- gumby 6y agoThat's why we are on constitution 2.27: they found that 1.0 was too minimal. The Confederacy tried to walk back in that direction a bit and found that it made their ability to run their "country" much harder (in addition to their other self-defeating pathologies).
- gilbetron 6y agoThat's a heck of a stretch of history. They wanted gov powers "limited" as opposed to "unlimited", but the concept that the US was set up with almost no government is a (false) Libertarian talking point. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/colonial-complaints-u-s-founding-fathers-wanted-activist-government/ https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/colonial-complai...
- Eliezer 6y agoGolly, that wasn't the second paragraph I was expecting to read. Still feels a bit surreal when it happens to me.
- Waterluvian 6y agoI like to semi-ignorantly throw things out there for the off chance people will talk about it and I get to learn things: Less federal and state government, more local government. After decades of not being involved at all, I was shocked how easy it was to get involved at the municipal level and what kind of difference I could make. Also: stop depending on government. Want schools to improve? Go volunteer. I cold called a high school and got involved in a FIRST robotics team and it's been amazing.
- pm90 6y agoI think you got partially there. We need more of both local and Federal government. Having more people working on providing basic services is a good thing. We are an incredibly productive species: we need to use that increased wealth to improve the quality of life for people. Government is one way to do that. Volunteering is nice but it’s not the answer to systemic problems. I’m glad that you found a concrete way to contribute and find joy in doing so for your community... that’s great! But it’s not something that can replace Government or public funding.
- crumbshot 6y ago> Volunteering is nice but it’s not the answer to systemic problems. Agreed - a prominent example of this in the UK in recent years is the sharp rise in volunteer-run food banks. Which was a reaction to the huge cuts to public services, in both funding and availability, driven by our government's toxic right-wing ideology. It's great that people stepped up to help, but it shouldn't have been necessary, and indeed wouldn't have been if things were being run effectively and for the benefit of all.
- terse_malvolio 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_globally,_act_locally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_globally,_act_locally
- yboris 6y agoJust FYI - this is terrible advice when it comes to charity. Helping people in the developed countries costs a lot more than helping people in developing countries. One charity trains seeing eye dogs in the US -- costs about $40,000 per person helped. A cataract surgery in India can cost as little as $40. Best research on (and framework of thinking about) charities comes from GiveWell - https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities over 10 years of research on this topic.
- lxe 6y agoIs Swordholder a reference to Liu Cixin's Death's End?
- neural_thing 6y agoYes
- Nition 6y agoHopefully that means by 2024, that trilogy has gained the worldwide recognition it deserves. Such a good series.
- joubert 6y ago> We shall disperse the Swiss Armed Forces. We have signed a treaty with the Russian Federation, in which we pay them $1B a year (less than 20% of our previous defense budget). and they promise to nuke everyone should someone invade us. We believe that renting a nuclear umbrella is a cost-effective way to maintain territorial integrity. Does not compute.
- Craighead 6y agoMADaaS
- StavrosK 6y agoWhat doesn't compute? They're renting MAD.
- rq1 6y agoIt just does not work like this. Defence is a sovereignty matter. I thought we knew this for 2000 years now, since Punic Wars.
- rq1 6y agoI don’t know if they’re naive enough to believe that they’ll nuke anyone at all for them. Russia nor any other country won’t take the risk to be nuked in return if they’re not facing evident life-threatening events. As a Russian I would certainly negotiate with the invader on how to split and share the invaded country. I would say nuclear weapons in general are posthumous weapons.
- ricc 6y agoI think the point of the Russian hypothetical scenario is that the government does not care anymore. > I will not interfere in your lives in any way, neither as a tyrant nor as a friend. I will not light up the night sky, but neither will I block out the stars. But I think the Swiss, in this hypothetical world, still misunderstood Russia's defense position. > The only way, in which I shall “govern” is that I will take the nuclear football with me, and should we get invaded, I will nuke everyone. Not just the invading force, mind you, but literally the entire world.
- coldtea 6y agoYou're not supposed to do something special to govern. You're supposed to do what the voters voted you in for.
- Black101 6y agoAs bad as Trump was, I think that he is one of the president that delivered the most on his promises...
- tomrod 6y agoI wrote a long comment, but removed it since I don't want to be political on HN, even to correct a fallacy.
- Black101 6y ago> I wrote a long comment, but removed it since I don't want to be political on HN, even to correct a fallacy. Delete this comment, then?
- ganstyles 6y agoHe delivered on very few, if any, objectively. Pulling out of the TPP is the only one that comes to mind.
- Black101 6y ago
- macinjosh 6y agoYou don't.
- andreskytt 6y agoComplex systems, by definition, are difficult to govern democratically: effective changes are counter-intuitive, take time to work, make things worse in the beginning and can’t be attributed back to a single change. This puts evolutionary pressure on polititians who make right decisions. The error in the article is, that the complexity of the world stems from formal government. This is partially true but not entirely. The social, power, business, human, legal etc. structures would continue to exist regardless of whether someone governs them. The nature of the complexity would change but it would not disappear.
- toddh 6y agoProbably something like Culture in the novels by Iain Banks: Minds + Post-scarcity + Space Travel. As much as I like Star Trek, I don't have much faith in humans getting better at governing themselves.