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> So who should be in charge? Legislative committees? Government bureaucracies? Yeah, those should work :) These actually have a pretty great track record of,

> So who should be in charge? Legislative committees? Government bureaucracies? Yeah, those should work :) These actually have a pretty great track record of, specifically, setting the direction of technological development. Often in a way that's more of a "here's what we want; now, private industry, go do it and we'll offer you X in return" rather than specifying the minutia, to be clear, but it's absolutely not a crazy notion. And I don't just mean NASA or the US MIC (DARPA, notably), but things like postwar Japan's heavily-government-directed R&D efforts and research-pooling initiatives, or Germany's skating-where-the-puck's-headed moves on renewable energy R&D and manufacturing back in (IIRC) the late 90s and early 00s. That we ought to rely on public efforts to direct technological development, at least to some significant degree, isn't obviously a bad idea.

AlbertCory 4y ago
Oh, you want to hold up Japan, huh? Like from 1990 on? Or this, from the early 80's? https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Edward-Feigenbaum/dp/0451131533/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Edward-Feigenbaum/dp... Or how about the US? https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/07/25/192832/lessons-from-sematech/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/07/25/192832/lessons-f... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  No, weirdly enough, I wrote exactly what I meant to, not the thing you'd prefer I wrote so you could point out how wrong I was.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    You did say "These actually have a pretty great track record." So I presented three counter-examples. If you prefer to stay on an abstract plane, I think I'm out.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      > If you prefer to stay on an abstract plane My post wasn't abstract. I'm just not interested in going example-for-example when my point was never "this literally always works and nothing else ever does", which is the point you seem to wish I'd advanced. > So I presented three counter-examples. To what end? The thing you scoffed at and dismissed remains not obviously a bad idea.
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        You're right: it's worse than abstract. You said it has an excellent track record, but now you refuse to provide any facts. It's not "going example-for-example" -- it's called honest debate.
        yamtaddle 4y ago
        Trading anecdotes isn't going to produce a statistical analysis of approaches to innovation in an HN thread. Meanwhile, this is mainstream macro/IPE shit: government-driven technological innovation has a pretty damn solid track record, and I pointed to several specific and oft-cited cases to demonstrate this, out of a large field. This does not mean it always works out well, but the benchmark for "damn solid" in this space is very very far from "perfect", in much the same way that an excellent batter in professional baseball still fails to get on base more than half the time—your line of attack here is just as baffling as someone countering "Joe's a solid clean-up hitter" with "yeah but look at this list of times he struck out!" It's omitting the context of what constitutes good in the space—meanwhile, he's near the top of the league in RBI. Continuing to trade anecdotes about times Joe hit a home run or times he hit an easy pop-fly to center field is just pointless noise, entirely beside the point. That's why I keep pushing back that what you're trying to do here isn't even relevant to the point I was making, which point is quite far from being controversial, incidentally. I don't think both of us posting Amazon links to books covering the successes and failures of government-lead tech initiatives when I am not denying that plenty of failures exist in that space in the first place, is productive. If that's the way you want this to go, just pretend I've posted a series of links to mainstream macro, IPE, and tech and econ history textbooks in response to each of your (probably mostly valid!) "counter-points", because that's what I'd do, but it doesn't seem like a valuable exercise when I'm not even denying that examples of failures of these kinds of initiatives exist.

AlbertCory 4y ago

Oh, you want to hold up Japan, huh? Like from 1990 on? Or this, from the early 80's? https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Edward-Feigenbaum/dp/0451131533/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Generation-Edward-Feigenbaum/dp... Or how about the US? https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/07/25/192832/lessons-from-sematech/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/07/25/192832/lessons-f... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra

yamtaddle 4y ago
No, weirdly enough, I wrote exactly what I meant to, not the thing you'd prefer I wrote so you could point out how wrong I was.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  You did say "These actually have a pretty great track record." So I presented three counter-examples. If you prefer to stay on an abstract plane, I think I'm out.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > If you prefer to stay on an abstract plane My post wasn't abstract. I'm just not interested in going example-for-example when my point was never "this literally always works and nothing else ever does", which is the point you seem to wish I'd advanced. > So I presented three counter-examples. To what end? The thing you scoffed at and dismissed remains not obviously a bad idea.
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      You're right: it's worse than abstract. You said it has an excellent track record, but now you refuse to provide any facts. It's not "going example-for-example" -- it's called honest debate.
      - yamtaddle 4y ago
        Trading anecdotes isn't going to produce a statistical analysis of approaches to innovation in an HN thread. Meanwhile, this is mainstream macro/IPE shit: government-driven technological innovation has a pretty damn solid track record, and I pointed to several specific and oft-cited cases to demonstrate this, out of a large field. This does not mean it always works out well, but the benchmark for "damn solid" in this space is very very far from "perfect", in much the same way that an excellent batter in professional baseball still fails to get on base more than half the time—your line of attack here is just as baffling as someone countering "Joe's a solid clean-up hitter" with "yeah but look at this list of times he struck out!" It's omitting the context of what constitutes good in the space—meanwhile, he's near the top of the league in RBI. Continuing to trade anecdotes about times Joe hit a home run or times he hit an easy pop-fly to center field is just pointless noise, entirely beside the point. That's why I keep pushing back that what you're trying to do here isn't even relevant to the point I was making, which point is quite far from being controversial, incidentally. I don't think both of us posting Amazon links to books covering the successes and failures of government-lead tech initiatives when I am not denying that plenty of failures exist in that space in the first place, is productive. If that's the way you want this to go, just pretend I've posted a series of links to mainstream macro, IPE, and tech and econ history textbooks in response to each of your (probably mostly valid!) "counter-points", because that's what I'd do, but it doesn't seem like a valuable exercise when I'm not even denying that examples of failures of these kinds of initiatives exist.