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We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't

• extr 3y ago
  Started reading this and felt my head start to spin a bit, is it just me or does this author seem to have misunderstood the term "coordination failure"? This example about UEFI is like the perfect OPPOSITE of a coordination failure, seems like the issue at hand was just a classic engineering challenge. And likewise with the popcorn button/tragedy of commons example, don't really understand the connection and it feels like the author didn't either.
  • evancox100 3y ago
    Yes, author doesn't seem to know what tragedy of the commons is either.
• Fripplebubby 3y ago
  I agree, factually, with almost all the content of this article, although I find its tone a little grating. There's a joke online - "nobody speaks more confidently than a 15 year old who has smoked weed twice explaining how to smoke weed to a 15 year old who hasn't smoked weed before" - nobody writes an angrier blog post than someone who has watched two YouTube videos about a subject. Doing the work to improve society is boring and slow. It's talking to people in the community. It's local politics. It's generational shifts. It's a warm smile to the older person in the store, in the hospital, as we try to move the needle ever so slightly in the right direction.
  • TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
    There's a default assumption that progress is inevitably slow, but I don't think it's obvious that it has to remain that way. I think it's worth challenging our assumptions and really trying to dig in and figure out why certain processes are slow, and if it's possible to do anything to improve upon them. Lately I've been asking researchers why progress in their field seems so slow from the outside, and if they could explain what kinds of barriers prevent them for going faster. From what I've learned so far, the barriers are usually institutional and political, they're rarely slowed down by technical reasons.
    • bawolff 3y ago
      Perhaps that is selection bias? Perhaps the science people just like to blame the non-science people for the problems. Blaming the other side is one of the most fundamentally human things to do.
• travisjungroth 3y ago
  If your solution would work except for some reason, then you don’t actually have a solution. A drill that works in space except for all that vacuum and radiation isn’t actually a space drill. It’s a space drill for some alternate reality, meaning the one you’re not actually in. You haven’t solved the problem. You’re not as good of a problem solver as you think you are, sorry. Stop acting like you’ve solved it. You haven’t. In the exact same way, any solution that would work “except humans” is a non-solution. Maybe it’s a near solution, or a solution for a different time. But it’s not one right now. When you find yourself getting angry at the world, it’s worth considering that just maybe you’ve made the approximately easiest mistake in problem solving: underestimating the difficulty of the problem (especially someone else’s problem). If I ranted and raved about how it’s a crime against humanity we don’t already have underground moon bases, you would just think I’m unhinged. Sure, it’s theoretically possible, but problems don’t get solved at the speed of my imagination. “But if we had perfect coordination…” yeah, well, if it didn’t take so much energy to leave Earth’s orbit, we’d do it more often. But it does, so we don’t. We also don’t have total software security and all cancers cured. I’m sorry. Everyone is doing their best.
  • bruce511 3y ago
    I hear your point - if humans are part of the problem then an effective solution has to allow for humans in the loop. I'd extend that thought to be more narrow though. Local human political and economic factors need to be allowed for. So, for example, a medical solution will be different in a country that practices medicine for profit over those places where medicine is non profit. Equally the "can't build nuclear energy" problem us solved in places where public opinion counts for nothing, and environmental concerns are, um, less concerning. [1] If one focuses on the profit motive though, then the article is correct (it seems to be written for a US context) - we mostly don't fix the problem because someone is profiting immensely from the problem existing. [1] avoiding for the moment the merits of said concerns, which -may- be over-described for other political reasons.
    • bawolff 3y ago
      > So, for example, a medical solution will be different in a country that practices medicine for profit over those places where medicine is non profit. There are some differences, but doctors still need to eat, equipment needs to be purchased, etc. Making medicine non profit isn't going to cure cancer.
• acyou 3y ago
  Does the person who wrote this article think that a custom disk image == a custom logo? A mistake only possible from someone with extremely poor subject matter expertise, or by text predictive AI? Or, am I totally out of whack and have no idea what the author is writing about?
  • tempestn 3y ago
    See recent discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38515571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38515571
  • rileymat2 3y ago
    https://www.securityweek.com/many-consumer-enterprise-devices-exposed-to-attacks-via-malicious-uefi-logo-images/amp/ https://www.securityweek.com/many-consumer-enterprise-device...
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• nurettin 3y ago
  People talk like there is one cure for a hundred types of cancer.
• Daz1 3y ago
  Possibly one of the worst opinion pieces I've ever read.
• MostlyStable 3y ago
  On this topic (and, in my opinion, a much better article), one might be interested in Meditations on Moloch[0] by Scott Alexander. The moral is: fixing things is actually really hard even when you know how to do it. [0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
• manx 3y ago
  The solution to the collaboration problem is achieving collective intelligence, e.g. making a crowd smarter than the sum of their parts. I'm part of a small group who are working on algorithms for achieving that. We're applying system's thinking, game theory, bayesian statistics, computer science to find an algorithm that creates collective intelligence. Latest creations: https://social-protocols.org/global-brain/ https://social-protocols.org/global-brain/ https://social-protocols.org/social-network/ https://social-protocols.org/social-network/ Contributions welcome
  • mistermann 3y ago
    Do you have a document that gets into the meat of things yet, I wasn't able to find anything other than short introductions....
    • manx 3y ago
      The first link (https://social-protocols.org/global-brain/ https://social-protocols.org/global-brain/) is the best we have so far. Other than that, there's the almost finished prototype implementation on github (https://github.com/social-protocols/social-network https://github.com/social-protocols/social-network). Where would you like to dive deeper? I can also offer to jump in a call to discuss.
• paulddraper 3y ago
  > We know that providing free college to everyone would be a good idea What?? College is a colossal waste of resources for most jobs, terrible ROI. Given the utter confidence in being wrong, I'm not sure how seriously I can take the rest of the argument.
• derelicta 3y ago
  As long capitalism is allowed to exist, its prime directive aka "ACCUMULATE WEALTH AT ALL COST" will ALWAYS win over whatever mankind needs, for it is the capitalist class that effectively rules over the "free" world. This is no conspiracy theory. This is a cold, hard fact.
• 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  > "we".. stop thinking. just consume product and get excite for next product.
• anonyme-honteux 3y ago
  Many people here comment on the title rather on the substance. The title is indeed clickbait, but it is not scambait. Clickbait is when you want the reader interested in reading things, which is normal, scambait is when you do that but you have no points behind made after that. Here are the points made by the article and what I think of them : - Much more things can be improved than we think possible (100% true - obviously we can't to them all at once, but we don't need to.) - We don't need a new plan, we already have plans (True, for example you can take the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations as a starting point). - Coordination matters (And is possible, the UN had lead the historic achievment to eradicate fucking polio) - We have enough resources to act in the real world, but the way we make decisions is broken (True, Elon Musk spent an insane amount of money to make a dumb website worse, while US Foreign Aid #1 top priority is to help the government of Israel commits more crimes with no accountability) - Things will not change until a determined group of people take action (100% true, this is how every progress ever has worked out)
• lapcat 3y ago
  > strategic voting is rational behavior Is it? How many large-scale elections are decided by one vote? I'm well aware that that the 2000 US Presidential election was officially decided by 537 votes (in Florida, though recounts were not allowed). Nonetheless, 537 votes is not 1 vote. If one person had changed their vote, it wouldn't have made a difference. If two people had changed their votes, it wouldn't have made a difference. If three people had changed their votes, it wouldn't have made a difference. You could try to coordinate all of your friends and family (in Florida), and it still wouldn't have made a difference. Realistically, the chances of your vote changing the outcome of a large-scale election with millions of voters is practically nil. You have better odds of winning the lottery; as proof, people do actually win the lottery! But buying lottery tickets is not generally considered to be rational behavior. Admittedly, there are a number of smaller, local elections that have been decided by one vote. In general, though, I would consider strategic voting to be irrational, indeed delusional. If you want to significantly influence the outcome a large-scale election, then become ultra-wealthy and throw your money at politics. (Or you could just ignore the elections and buy off whoever wins.) The irony is that in a democracy, every vote is equal, which means none of us individually has any power as voters. You don't need "ranked choice voting" or any other convoluted system in order to "vote your conscience", as it were. You could just do it, but we just don't. I'm not suggesting that you ought to vote your conscience, by the way. It really doesn't matter one way or the other. But that's precisely why you could if you wanted to. From a kind of Kantian moral framework, you might vote as you would want everyone else to vote, and in that case, if you truly hate the two major political parties, then why would you vote for them, and want everyone else to vote for them? I don't believe that makes sense either strategically or morally.
• concordDance 3y ago
  The underlying point that the vast majority of problems are Moloch/incentive alignment problems is correct, but a lot of those examples are controversial. To take one: > We know that automation is chipping away at low-skill jobs, which means our workforce needs to be better educated, and that providing free college to everyone would be a good idea, we just don’t. University education is primarily a signalling mechanism. Getting a degree in English literature doesn't actually make you a better oil market analyst to an appreciable degree, it just signals the ability to do work with minimal supervision. And if higher education is indeed a positional good then funding everyone to do it is just setting money/time on fire.
• erremerre 3y ago
  I have not bough anything in Amazon since 3 years ago, and honestly, it was because I was given an Amazon card as a present, otherwise it would be 6 years ago. I go the extra mile to do that. I do because I hate the commingle inventory, and because I think is getting to big. I see no impact at all on my behaviour. My friends, avid amazon consumer see me like a strange person for not buying there. I don't evangelise neither I go the extra mile to explain the situation more than "Jeff Bezos doesn't any more of my money". I could repeat this situation with any single measure that we as individual can take. They are basically worthless.
• refurb 3y ago
  It seems like the point of this article is we could cure cancer if we wanted to. It’s just a matter of incentives. That’s not true. It’s not a money or effort hurdle, it’s a knowledge and technology hurdle. Now one might argue that with enough money the knowledge and technology hurdle could be overcome, but I would disagree. There are too many elements that are missing - biological tools, chemical probes, analytical techniques, laboratory procedures. Sure money could advance those, but we don’t know which ones we need. One key (of many) to curing cancer could be the discovery of some mammalian cellular pathway. But we don’t know it exists so how would you find it? And even if it was discovered, you might not know it’s important. Science often advances by the intersection of seemingly unconnected discoveries. You don’t know they matter until you do. It’s not a matter of just finding a specific area.
• SillyUsername 3y ago
  My take on the medical part is that this is mostly panic from disjointed priorities. Supply and demand (priority driven) affect the medical treatments available, and the a single cure is a stepping stone to greater efficiency. For example, take COVID immunisation, due to priority we had multiple companies work on these, and the best won, these delivery mechanisms are now updated with new viral variants, but they don't charge as though it's a totally new disease or drugs. In fact the cost is absorbed by the sale of the original and not in the sale of the updated vaccine which is at the same price point or less. Which leads me back to the point, if you run socialised medicine, and you have to choose which medicines offer the greatest return, why would you choose a 1st gen treatment curing one person when a older treatment, which you have infra for, and costs thousands not millions cures in 50% of cases? If you want to fix anything with 1st gen, we need to subsidise the research cost using the same priority as the needs of patients - that gives the demand. Misalignment is just going to cause articles such as this being written, where you don't actually hear about the other things that are a priority being cured. Did you know we have 3 successful treatments for COVID now for example, or in the UK we've started using proton beam therapy after it was famously denied treatment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashya_King_case https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashya_King_case a few years ago, and now I believe also available within the UK? These are both consequences of a change of priority and normal process, the worry in the article is that a cure isn't being used, which is both 1st gen and probably due to disjoint with the needs of the NHS/socialised medicine, but this would be expected to happen if a company (a single university) wants to carve a well paid niche in an area that has lower priority/demand.
• hamilyon2 3y ago
  I am on a fence regarding this. Coordination problem is not a simple or easy one. Totalitarian/dictatorship answer to it of course exists, (not sure if author implicitly suggests it), with a lot of obvious downsides. For example dictatorship really sucks if you have to open a new market, to the detriment of incumbents, of course. Hand-picking winners and manual resource allocation works remarkably bad in most contexts. Fall of USSR and what followed it is too recent, too bright examples to ignore. So, while the question asked is really, really, interesting and i am sure we can do better, "just do" isn't really an answer and oversimplification. Resources are finite. Talent can't be applied everywhere at once, there is not enough talent. Why this solution (higher education for everyone) and not that (education reform with changed focus)? And so on. I think author knows this better than me, single article has to focus on something, and in general "something needs to be done" is a sentient i can agree with
• inglor_cz 3y ago
  "We actually have a cure for blood cancer now, by the way. Like, we’ve done it." Proceeds to link to a highly experimental and complicated treatment that was only tested in vitro and in mice. Yes, it is plausible that it could work in humans, but further clinical trials are absolutely needed. I don't trust the author's judgment if he can look at something like that and label what he sees "we have a cure for blood cancer now". If the author is so incapable of seeing and understanding finer details, I am not suprised by the angry and frustrated tone of his article. Yeah, there is a lot of inefficiencies in current systems, often result of lobbying of special interest groups. No doubt about that. But a hypothetical author's autocracy would likely look much worse. For a smart person, he is way too gung-ho about what needs to be done.
• czierleyn 3y ago
  By the way, the idea of the ‘Tragedy of the commons’ has been thoroughly debunked and should, in my opinion, not be used anymore in an argument as if it has any value.
  • manx 3y ago
    Do you have a good link to read about that?
• ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  Contrary to the tweet, I would classify "build nuclear" as equivalent to the programmers pulling out the plugs to smother suggestions for obvious progress. This can be seen most clearly in Australia, where very much despite, not because of the previous government, renewables are toppling records weekly and offering the opportunity of a lifetime to the Australian people. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/21/nuclear-energy-australia-smokescreen-climate-denialism-coalition https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/21/nuclea... Meanwhile, News Corp and the ousted government, almost exactly at the time they lost all control pivoted to suddenly advocating nuclear as a tactic to slow the rollout of renewables.
• tmaly 3y ago
  It seems companies use to be about more than profits. At one point they appeared to contribute to the social good. There was some shift and now everything is about eking out every last penny of profit. My dad use to tell me about going to Woodstock in 1969. It seemed somewhat spontaneous. I had a friend that went to the Woodstock concert in 1999. He described it as a complete hell hole. Everything seems to be turning to crap for the sake of profit.
• BMc2020 3y ago
  as this fantastic video about the popcorn button explains. Our economic race to the bottom has been sabotaging almost every aspect of engineering in our society. To save a few cents per microwave, the cheap microwaves don’t include a humidity sensor and then lie about having a popcorn button when it can’t actually work properly, which leads to everyone saying “don’t use the popcorn button” and now nobody uses the popcorn buttons even on microwaves that actually have a humidity sensor and a working popcorn button.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • eru 3y ago
    That's pretty silly. The 'economic race to the bottom' is exactly how we can all afford microwave ovens in the first place. Of course, you can make a special case for microwave ovens, and we could afford them to be slightly more expensive. But we need the general cost cutting and optimization in the economy to drive progress.
    • croes 3y ago
      Yes, but then we get useless microwaves and in the end dangerous microwaves.
      • eru 3y ago
        Who buys those useless microwaves? Most gadgets I ever bought were far above legally required minimum requirements. Ie those minimum requirements were not a binding constraint. Why would that suddenly change?
        • croes 3y ago
          Who said useless? Just not as useful as it used to be.
          • 3y ago
• transfire 3y ago
  I have a saying, “Capitalism is the means by which we screw each other over.” But it’s better than the alternative “Communism, the lack of means by which we screw each other over.” I don’t think Socialism is the answer, which is simple Capitalism with bits of Communism sprinkled in to soothe over the more egregious failures (or to pretend to do, which is even worse). We need something truly new.
  • Conscat 3y ago
    I assume what you really mean by socialism is "democratic socialism" or "market socialism", because they kind of fit your description, but not other "socialism"s like anarcho-syndicalism.
  • seventytwo 3y ago
    I’m fond of the idea that capitalism is like fire. You can use it as a tool and for cooking and warmth, but it must be regulated lest it get out of control and consume everything it touches.
    • josephg 3y ago
      Yeah; I like to think of capitalism as an eldrich god that we've summoned from beyond the veil and attempted to yoke for our own betterment. Its incredibly powerful, yes. But it fundamentally doesn't care about human flourishing. To use a line from the Economist, we have to tame capitalism's excesses in order to get the most benefit to society.
    • eru 3y ago
      It's more like the state that's this creature that engulfs everything. Nation states have been extremely successful. Nearly every square metre of landmass on earth is claimed by one nation state or another. Capitalism stays out of stuff just fine. Few people organise their family or friendships or their bowling club along capitalist lines. Even companies themselves are usually structured as quasi-socialist command economies, and the market mostly only is for interaction between companies.
• oatmeal1 3y ago
  It's ironic for him to suggest government-run healthcare when it doesn't benefit from the #1 best coordinator of resources on the planet - price. He accidentally highlights the reason we have so many coordination failures - smart people with little wisdom think they can solve every problem, using other people's money, with no consequences for their failure. Not everyone should get free college, and not every house should have fiber optic cable. We have the opportunity to fix all easily fixable issues if we let go of our ego, and admit how our conceited actions have caused the coordination failures we see today. We absolutely will not achieve a better future by continuing the exact same self-aggrandizing approach to problem solving that brought us here, where we think every problem is simple, that our morality is above reproach, and that by the stroke of a pen we can alleviate any ill. “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." - Hayek
  • seventytwo 3y ago
    Price absolutely still exists in government run health care… do you have any idea how it actually works in developed countries?
    • anonuser123456 3y ago
      PP is referring to the price mechanism of markets. Not an arbitrary set price set by a regulator / central planner. By definition if government runs a sector, there can be no pricing mechanism. Otherwise the government isn’t running it; it’s just a market.
      • devbent 3y ago
        The government is the payer, hospitals and doctors can still compete in pricing. Plenty of US states have an effective duopoly of healthcare insurers, which is no different in effect from having a single payer. The main difference is with for profit insurers, some % is skimmed off the top as profit instead of going into patient care.
    • deleted 3y ago
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• tazjin 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • Yiin 3y ago
    Not sure I like jokes like this, because they imply suggested ideas are bad, because suggested target is bad.
    • tazjin 3y ago
      What a way to misread my comment! Good morning to you from Moscow :)
  • deleted 3y ago
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• charcircuit 3y ago
  >It happened because the people writing the image parsers made an incredibly stupid mistake and then didn’t bother testing it, because the software industry doesn’t bother with QA anymore. I too remember the good old days when software used to be written without security vulnerabilities, especially in media format parsers. Oh wait, that never existed. In fact in the old days people cared even less about security.
  • 1970-01-01 3y ago
    In the oldest days, we had formal verification of software. That didn't seem to stick around after Microsoft took over the PC world.
    • charcircuit 3y ago
      I don't think there was ever a time this was true industry wide.
• avalys 3y ago
  No, we can’t “fix everything” because not everyone agrees that these are problems which need solving, or that your proposed solutions are actually an improvement. I feel like most people go through this thought process around junior year in college. “If only they would put me in charge, I could fix everything.” Yes, the world is not that simple, what a surprise…
  • curtisblaine 3y ago
    Exactly this. We could build a network of commuter trains, but not everyone thinks that commuting as a life style is the future they want, so they comprehensibly don't want to pay that with their taxes. We could build enough houses to give housing to everyone, but many people don't want their neighbourhood turned into a concrete jungle or a "bad" neighborhood at their expense, so they would vote against a candidate with radical plans about housing. We could elect representatives choosing from a multiparty system with multi-preference, but many countries that do have large coalitions that regularly transition into government crises every time one of the parties thinks they'd have a better chance on a new election. I find this kind of reasoning more and more frequent on the Internet: someone starts their rant with "we all agree that A is bad", while in reality 1) we don't even all agree that A is a problem 2) we don't all agree that, A being a problem, it is worse than the alternatives 3) sometimes, saying "A is a problem" is the only socially allowed take even if you don't care / don't think it is
  • grecy 3y ago
    > your proposed solution is actually an improvement. Whenever we try to improve anything in this world (software, hardware, humans, society, laws, constitutions), we measure a bunch of things beforehand, then we measure again after implementing the change. If it's faster or cheaper or lighter or taller or some measurable amount different, we can quite easily determine if the changes have in fact improved upon the way things were. In the case of many things at a societal level, it's not difficult to compare to other countries that have already implemented a bunch of these things to see the likely outcomes.
    • tgv 3y ago
• ProjectArcturis 3y ago
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  • 7e 3y ago
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• kevmo314 3y ago
  > We could be running fiber-optic cable to every house in America, and we even know how much it would cost. That's the problem, isn't it? It costs too much. Of course we can fix everything, we could also do everything in the universe, but the question is at what cost? So here's my modest proposal: > I am here to remind you that it will only get worse unless we do something. The problem isn't painful enough. Have you ever had a tough time convincing your team to address some looming problem, the problem actually manifests, and surprise! It becomes top priority. COVID was a great example of this. When the problem is painful enough we as a society can do a lot. So maybe instead of the Sisyphean task of "fighting the good fight", maybe we just ... make it more painful first?
  • croes 3y ago
    >COVID was a great example of this. Was it? How many fought against social distancing, masks and vaccines? Same with climate change, how many fight against necessary measures.
    • junofan 3y ago
      The problem here is we need solutions that work, not magical thinking. Otherwise credibility goes in the toilet. It’s self-evident in the face of an aerosol-generating respiratory pandemic that social distancing, surgical face masks, and immunizations that don’t produce a muscosal response do not constitute a complete solution. At best, they’re good things to do that may help a bit. Likewise, ending our own reliance on fossil fuels by decree won’t work—energy transitions are driven by economic viability.
    • xboxnolifes 3y ago
      A lot of the people fighting against these things are not feeling the pain. Many people in my family are some degree of anti-vaccine / masking mandates. I can guarantee you that if a single close family member ended up hospitalized due to covid, their tune would do a fast 180. All of their beliefs are based on whether someone they care about had something happen to them.
      • 3y ago
• hnthrowaway0328 3y ago
  Human problem IS the most difficult problem.
• mikewarot 3y ago
  I'd like to point out that computer security was solved in the 1970s after lessons were learned by the Military during the Viet Nam conflict. We've blamed everything except our operating systems, which are fundamentally flawed because they don't incorporate Capability Based Security[1]. Things that are not capability based security, but people seem to think they are, include: App Permission flags on your smartphone Windows 8 UAE SELinux AppArmor Group Policies [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security
  • bawolff 3y ago
    Capabilities aren't magic, and i don't really think they make sense during the low level boot process.
  • maxbond 3y ago
    Every major operating system has a capability model (eg SELinux or Group Policies). Mobile operating systems have had capabilities from the jump, but still get hacked. (That being said, capabilities are great, we should use them and they do help. If you're not familiar with this pattern, look it up, it's worth knowing.)
    • ryanjshaw 3y ago
      I don't believe that Linux capabilities are correctly named. They describe an ambient privilege, whereas capabilities represent explicit authorisation i.e. one invokes a capability to use it, and this is why entire classes of security vulnerabilities aren't possible in true capability-based systems. Unfortunately capabilities have long been misunderstood as equivalent to access control lists, and therefore ignored or misnamed due to the difficulty of building working capability-based systems Vs ACL-based systems. (ACL-based systems should be built on top of a capability-based core, and only apply to a smallest possible domain of objects - a single global namespace with an ACL-based access control mechanism is where the common security vulnerabilities of modern operating systems begin.) Smartphone permissions are also ambient privileges, but that's not the reason they get hacked: they get hacked because the operating systems are not designed around capabilities from boot and up, and have shared critical global namespaces with an ambient authority access control mechanism. Capabilities provide defense in depth, they don't make a system automatically unhackable but they do make it so that a critical attack path is highly unlikely to exist.
• solatic 3y ago
  Who is "we"? When engineers are not subject to licensure, don't be surprised when management, pushed by bean counters, let the bean counters make the decisions. Subject engineers to licensure, including ethics clauses, including clauses for building for repairability and minimum expected product lifetimes. Legally protect engineers from dismissal or retribution for invoking these clauses. Then see how much crap we continue to build.
  • drdaeman 3y ago
    And then, sadly, you’ll most likely get beaten by some foreign country’s slap-shit-together-and-ship-it junk. Because people don’t think in terms of TCO and product lifespans, they see that “-30%” and “$X.99” and buy things that possibly even unable to do what they really need them to do, because ad made a different impression. Solving junk requires much more than licensing and certifications (unless somehow it’s done globally, worldwide). It also bridging the consumer awareness/competence gap somehow.
    • glitchc 3y ago
      If medicine can achieve a gatekeeping function, so can engineering.
    • solatic 3y ago
      I would have agreed with you before COVID and the Russo-Ukrainian war. Today, the world is slowly changing direction on globalization. There is increasing understanding, at the national policy level, of the value of more localized supply chains, where local manufacturing is encouraged through tariffs. This is besides newfound focus on privacy and data sovereignty, and the race by cloud providers to build globally-accessible datacenters all over the globe. The next step will be a focus on localizing not just the data but the software itself: the operators, the code, and finally developers. > unless somehow it’s done globally, worldwide The vehicle for this is the WTO, or at least, it used to be, before the US decided to take its teeth away. Giving it teeth requires moral leadership. It doesn't happen overnight, but it starts with licensure, then working through the WTO to establish new rules and tariffs for violators.
• hehhehaha 3y ago
  All we need to do is alienate the incentives of the idiots, what could go wrong :)))
• bbor 3y ago
  Great article, but it feels a bit absurd to not mention the clear, obvious cause of all this: wealth inequality and corporate governmental capture because of capitalism. Like, that’s it. Almost any other form of government would be better setup for things in this essay like universal healthcare, and hopefully it’s obvious why the current stock-market-obsessed version of capitalism isn’t good for long term engineering tasks like testing and QA. Here they just say that we need better voting algorithms, which is a necessary but not sufficient fix — we’re not stuck with this bad electoral system because we couldn’t figure out a better one, we’re stuck here because it benefits those in power. Also this essay could do with a bit more “and AI is going to exacerbate this injustice” but that’s my bias lol
• arp242 3y ago
  For a lot of things the problem is essentially a problem of scale. Those "ancient human tribes" who did so much better were tribes of 100-200 people, and it's actually not that hard to "do the right thing" with a relatively small group of people. Blaming it on the two-party system is such a short-sighted US-centric point of view. There are plenty of countries with other types of democracies, and they have roughly similar problems. Details differ and some things are better (and others worse!) but overall: it's not that different. I don't know about all the individual topics that are mentioned. I'm not an expert of blood cancer and I'm guessing the author isn't either, but ... maybe it's not that simple? The "Preclinical proof-of-concept study" from August 2023 doesn't really sound like "we've solved it, end of story" to me. "We could fix everything, we just don't" seems far too simplistic. "Everything" encompasses quite a lot, and "I looked at this for a few hours/days and I figured it all out" is classic mistake that people make. Almost everything is conceptually simple. Actually doing it tends to be harder because all those details you didn't account in the high-level overview often do matter.
  • Aunche 3y ago
    He doesn't even give an example of "ancient human tribes," but modern day nomads whose traditions have also developed over thousands of years. If ancient human tribes were so great at avoiding tragedy of the commons, I would be eating a mammoth steak right now.
    • oh_sigh 3y ago
      Maybe losing mammoths wasn't actually a tragedy.
      • rocketbop 3y ago
        It was for the mammoths.
        • bawolff 3y ago
          And for the people who liked to eat mammoths More to the point, the word "tragedy" in context isn't saying that the end result is neccesarily a tragedy for the people involved. The "tragedy" is our (alleged) inability to have nice shared stable resources, not any specific outcome of any specific resource being exhausted.
• nmilo 3y ago
  David Graeber in Utopia of Rules: > "When historians write the epitaph for neoliberalism, they will have to conclude that it was the form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. That is: given a choice between a course of action that will make capitalism seem like the only possible economic system, and one that will make capitalism actually be a more viable long-term economic system, neoliberalism has meant always choosing the former." > [...] > "If the ultimate aim of neoliberal capitalism is to create a world where no one believes any other economic system could really work, then it needs to suppress not just any idea of an inevitable redemptive future, but really any radically different technological future at all. There’s a kind of contradiction here. It cannot mean convincing us that technological change has come to an end—since that would mean capitalism is not really progressive. It means convincing us that technological progress is indeed continuing, that we do live in a world of wonders, but to ensure those wonders largely take the form of modest improvements (the latest iPhone!), rumors of inventions about to happen (“I hear they actually are going to have flying cars pretty soon”), even more complex ways of juggling information and imagery, and even more complex platforms for the filling out of forms." The system we are in is inert and we need more than ranked voting to fix it.
  • panick21_ 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • nmilo 3y ago
      How so?
      • panick21_ 3y ago
        First of all, I don't actually think the argument is even very coherent. So lets break it down as far as I can understand. As background I would argue leftist in the 1970s created 'neoliberalism', its not and never was a coherent framework of policy proposed or defended by anybody. What it was is simply a framework for leftists to throw literally anybody that doesn't agree with them (outside of leftist anarchists) into that bucket. The function was to simply group all opposing view points under one umbrella to have a unified attack vector. Somehow extreme free market people, social democrats and social conservatives are under one umbrella and somehow together have organized a global conspiracy to defend this supposed philosophy. Swedish policy makers who wanted to reduce government share of GDP from 60% to 50% are just evil Friedman loving market fundamentalists. Neoliberals want to somehow reduce governments but also want military to globally enforce neoliberal hegemony. Of course, that makes total sense. Or it maybe just could be that we are talking about lots and lots of different groups with fundamentally different points of view. > If the ultimate aim of neoliberal capitalism is to create a world where no one believes any other economic system could really work This just fundamentally makes no sense, 'neoliberal capitalism' does not have any opinions. There isn't even a clear organization that represent 'neoliberalism'. So somehow what he is saying here is that all the people who 'believe' in neolibearlism somehow have convinced themselves that their live goal should be 'creating a world where no one believes in alternatives'. The idea that all those supposed neoliberals somehow have a coherent program of eliminating alternatives is ridiculous. Politicians don't want to successfully solve problems and get reelected in a land-slide victory, they much rather lose but preserve neoliberal world order. Anybody that believes this is actually delusional. The reality is solving problems is actually hard. The solution David would like (as far as I can tell) to see aren't a magical pill that will win election no matter how much he thinks they would be. And most of the problems aren't hard because of some neoliberal conspiracy against progress but because they politically hard and even if you can get politics to somewhat line up, actual execution is also very hard. See California High Speed Rail for example. > but really any radically different technological future at all Ok, so neoliberalism is somehow preventing technological improvements, if I understand that correctly. I guess one can make that argument, but I would like some actual facts and examples. Because I don't see it. Countries that are very neoliberal in global comparison have gone in very different direction. The Netherlands, inventor of modern capitalism, is revolutionizing transport thanks to the humble bike. Switzerland, has fundamentally changed its rail transportation system and massively increased rail modal share. They built the largest tunnel in the world to protect the Alps from to much trucking. Japan has people travel even more by rail and they are even building a crazy high speed maglev. If you look at the US, Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan, you see radically different conception of the future of transport. But these countries are all some form of neoliberal. What amazing transport technology is 'neoliberalism' preventing from taking over? What path of technology is prevented by being 'neoliberal'. > It cannot mean convincing us that technological change has come to an end—since that would mean capitalism is not really progressive. And 'it' (again not a thing) wouldn't want to ... > It means convincing us that technological progress is indeed continuing, that we do live in a world of wonders, but to ensure those wonders largely take the form of modest improvements (the latest iPhone!), rumors of inventions about to happen (“I hear they actually are going to have flying cars pretty soon”), even more complex ways of juggling information and imagery, and even more complex platforms for the filling out of forms. Again, there is no substance to this. Its in the nature of semiconductors that it can evolve faster then say massive rail infrastructure. To simply dismiss all progress in computing as somehow irrelevant is absurd. Improvements in software, sensors and data is what makes so many other things possible, modern manufacturing, modern research and development wouldn't be the same without it. His casual divisiveness about computation as trivial is simply idiotic. But its hard to argue with him since he provides no counter argument at any kind, just some vague assertion that (a) neoliberalism is a dominate ideology (b) technological progress is slow. If we look at most machines, efficiency is rising continuously. New EMU trains and electric lokos are more efficient, new passenger planes are significantly more efficient, rocket technology has improved by a huge margin, electric cars have unprecedented growth, electric bikes are revolutionary. I could go on. At the same time, as I have demonstrated above, countries are doing revolutionary things even with existing technology. The bike hasn't gotten better, but the Dutch have revolutionized transport anyway. He needs to demonstrate that technology is failing us to actually make this argument. > (“I hear they actually are going to have flying cars pretty soon”) The obsession with flying cars is a US obsession that is not talked about much here in Switzerland where I live. Instead we are in process of talking about Rail 2050 project and how it should look. Rail 2035 project is ongoing. The US has built itself into a car depended hellhole and the flying car is the only solution a car dependent nation can figure out. I guess for David this is also neoliberals fault, despite many other nations who are also 'neoliberal' according to him not having the same issues. And of course the obsession with the car is something that actual classical liberals never would have wanted. National highway program is a gigantic ongoing infrastructure project. A massive book of regulation about road building that encodes all the worst design principles in law and makes it impossible to build modern advanced infrastructure. Governments that use state power to take over private property and put highways threw that land. I guess that neoliberalism as well? I have not read this new book (and wont) but from what is written here it seems to me that he believes: - Neoliberalism is a coherent philosophy --> It isn't. - Assuming it 'was' an actual philosophy, its core tenant is the suppression of alternatives --> It wouldn't be. And even if it was, it couldn't successfully do so. - Neoliberalism defenders accept personal failure to preserve the NWO (Neoliberal World Order) --> They don't. - Neoliberalism prevents 'real' technological improvement --> It isn't. - Neoliberalism prevents solving 'real' problems -> It isn't since it isn't a dominant philosophy to begin with. To some it up, David Graeber is the 'perfect' leftist intellectual. Never clearly define your own own position and clearly state what and how things should be done instead but still strongly imply that it would be utterly amazing. Spread a bunch of vague smart sounding criticism about societies big evils (<insert thing here> capitalism). Throw some hand selected historical examples with health dose of historical revisionist takes. Throw in a strong dose of 'other intellectuals that don't agree with me are capitalist shills'. And there you have a great leftist table top book. Reading people like him rather then people who actually have real knowlage about the current situation and propose actual real solutions or at least processes that could be put into place to help real solution from existing are what is actually needed to make progress.
• bawolff 3y ago
  > What they don’t tell you is that we already have solutions for a lot of problems, we just don’t use them. Sometimes this is because the solution is too expensive, but usually it’s because competing interests create a tragedy of the commons. If you have a solution that can't be used because it costs too much money or other societal concerns, then you don't have a solution. Part of making a solution is finding something that works in the real world and not an idealized world.
  • BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
    “costs too much money or other societal concerns“ Uhh you coupled these together which is a little odd, since societal concerns might be more addressable than the basic fact of resource scarcity is.
    • swiftcoder 3y ago
      "costs too much money" isn't resource scarcity. It's at best a synthetic proxy for the general concept of resources (and at worst, the scarcity is entirely artificial)
      • BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
        Sure “costs too much money” is an umbrella term that includes scarcity as a cause but can include other things. When its a consequence of something other than scarcity, the purpose of the article is to point that fact out. Unlike issues of scarcity, societal problems are often solvable but for lack of widespread will, and awareness that solving that underlying societal issue could solve a more obvious and important problem we’re interested in solving is useful because it helps rouse that will.
  • janalsncm 3y ago
    There’s a difference between “too expensive given the budget constraints we have imposed on ourselves” and “too expensive for any society to afford”. The author is asking us to step outside of the current political constraints and simply question whether these problems are truly as insurmountable as our political system makes them. As for “other societal concerns” there are always societal concerns with anything. There were societal concerns with Social Security and free education for kids. Turns out those are good ideas despite the fact that they’re not free. In fact if you suggested them today a lot of people would shoot them down as infeasible. I don’t have any kids but I pay for other kids to learn to read. I’m not retired but I pay into social security.
• rileymat2 3y ago
  I have some problems with the way modern software is changing, but I don’t think it is QA related, more a race to the bottom with perpetual beginner focused UX. But as far as the author is referencing QA is there a good measure of quality over time? My recollection of consumer software started 30 years ago, and it was incredibly unstable. BSOD frequently, my uptime is far far better now. Save frequently, because you will probably lose your document at any moment; I still reflectively ctrl-s even though I can’t remember my last document crash. It references the image exploit in the article, that’s bad, but I got MS Blaster simply connecting to the network. No punting people with ping of death anymore.
  • Towaway69 3y ago
    Have ransomware attacks increased in that time? Isn't the increase in attack surfaces for ransomware actors an indication of decline in software quality? Software has become incredibly complex and interdepended.
    • rileymat2 3y ago
      I was trying to come up with a metric and threw that out because there is also more effort in creating ransomware and software ubiquity now. Thought about CVE counts, but that has methodological problems too.
      • Towaway69 3y ago
        The number of update reminders is a measure that I use. Updating software has become expected, as a reminder to open the app again. It would be nice if apps were developed as software for satellites: updating satellite software in flight is expensive, so constant updating isn't an option.
    • nolongerthere 3y ago
      90-99% of ransomeware attacks are really just social engineering. There is no question that software is more bulletproof today than it was in 2000 when nearly every website was susceptible to simple sql-injection, OSes didn’t have any sort of built-in security or access controls.
• narrator 3y ago
  This article focuses on policy recommendations, but that's not the issue in my opinion. It's people who are comfortable with the current system for whatever reason who don't want to find radical new approaches to solving problems that's the issue. I think Bukele in El Salvador has been a great example of changing this. Decades of murder and mayhem and having the highest murder rate in the world, and the guy makes it the safest country in Latin America in just a few years by calling B.S on the government's entire approach to criminal justice. It's one of the greatest examples of turning a country around in recent memory. We shall see if Melei can do it in Argentina with his approach to radically changing an economy that has been a basket case for decades. In the Elon Musk biography, the power he has to so effectively build a manufacturing company is he knows enough about all the aspects of the business that he can call B.S on people in any part of the company who aren't performing. It's the ability to go into power structures that are stagnant and tear out the parts that need tearing out.
• eru 3y ago
  Compare https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-the-public https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-revolt-of-t... (And also https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/) > Our story begins (says Gurri) in the early 20th century, when governments, drunk on the power of industrialization, sought to remake Society in their own image. This was the age of High Modernism, with all of its planned cities and collective farms and so on. Philosopher-bureaucrat-scientist-dictator-manager-kings would lead the way to a new era of gleaming steel towers, where society was managed with the same ease as a gardener pruning a hedgerow. > Realistically this was all a sham. Alan Greenspan had no idea how to prevent recessions, scientific progress was slowing down, poverty remained as troubling as ever, and 50% of public school students stubbornly stayed below average. But the media trusted the government, the people trusted the media, and failures got swept under the rug by genteel agreement among friendly elites, while the occasional successes were trumpeted from the rooftops. > In Gurri's telling, High Modernism had always been a failure, but the government-media-academia elite axis had been strong enough to conceal it from the public. Starting in the early 2000s, that axis broke down. People could have lowered their expectations, but in the real world that wasn't how things went. Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button! EDIT to be more topical to the submission: > So for example, Gurri examines some of the sloganeering where people complain about how eg obesity is the government's fault - surely the government could come up with some plan that cured obesity, and since they haven't done so, that proves they're illegitimate and don't care that obesity is killing millions of Americans. Or homelessness - that's the fault of capitalism, right? Because "we" could just give every homeless person a home, but capitalism prevents "us" from doing that. Or if you're a conservative, how come the government hasn't forced the liberal rot out of schools and made everybody pious and patriotic and family-values-having? Doesn't that mean our lack of strong values is the government's fault? The general formula is (1.) take vast social problem that has troubled humanity for millennia (2.) claim that theoretically The System could solve the problem, but in fact hasn't (3.) interpret that as "The System has caused the problem and it is entirely the system's fault" (4.) be outraged that The System is causing obesity and homelessness and postmodernism and homosexuality and yet some people still support it. How could they do that??!
• RangerScience 3y ago
  Increasingly, I suspect the real value of type systems is that they force slower, "more correct" development, allowing you to "win the argument" with Management over taking the time to Do Things Right. They put a floor on code quality (albeit, IMHO, a pretty low one - you can also royally fuck up a type system) - preventing the worst excesses of rushed development.
  • Towaway69 3y ago
    If your neighbour is using a type less language and is making more profit than you, then your boss will question the choice of language. Development pace is set by the competition. Edit: and if there is no competition, the longer it takes, the longer it will take to be profitable.
    • Etheryte 3y ago
      This is a common misnomer, writing more code faster doesn't mean you get more product or value faster. It can look like it at first, but you'll quickly come to find you're actually producing more bugs and vulnerable surface faster instead. More code is not good, it's the opposite of what you want.
    • RangerScience 3y ago
      This. This is the argument I'm exhausted having. Rushing development works for... maybe a week. After that, every time, it takes longer overall than if it'd been done "right" the first time. Like a desk, you get one layer of crap and clutter. More than that and everything begins to teeter and fall. That said - you definitely have to ask yourself (as a developer) or your engineers (as management) "is there a simpler way?". But "simpler" is not the same as "rushed", even if both are "faster" - it's just a question of "on what timeline". Faster today? This week? This month? This quarter? This year?
      • Towaway69 3y ago
        What's the old saying - nine pregnant people won't produce a child in one month. I think that comes from the Mythical Man Month but not sure. I think "faster" has been replaced by "profit". Is there a more profitable way of doing it. Etc. Hence things such as AI/CoPilot and the rest. We as developers have lost the craftsmanship that coding once was. Crafting a good bit of code that might just be a single line but which has elegance and conciseness to get the job done just right.
• hatenberg 3y ago
  Our economic system controls the schedule and actions of essentially every human on the planet. When they get up in the morning. What kpis they have to meet to stay employed or bring food to the table. It transcends nations through trade treaties and competition, trillion dollar companies have “no choice” but to lay off workers to placate “shareholders” expecting infinite growth. And we know it is stripping the planet of its resources at a completely unsustainable rate, poisoning our very environment, some times burning the equivalent of entire forests for as simple reasons as “decentralized crypto NFT defi product scam” Game designers know better than to make a game with a single high score, and even better than to allow players who amass the score to use it to pay for new rules. Players know better than to continue playing a game that’s entirely and utterly broken for them. But humans … oh well
• smsm42 3y ago
  It is adorable when a person who knows a lot about some things decides that he knows everything about all things, all problems are simple to solve, just do this and that, and the reason all problems in the world aren't solved yet is because all other people just stupid and for some stupid reason refuse to do obvious things that are so clear to this person. I guess this is where the different between a lot of knowledge and wisdom shows up. Also, something I am wondering from the article. If socialized healthcare is the best system ever, and the only problem in curing cancer is the lack of proper incentives which the socialized healthcare provides, why the cancer is not cured yet? We have billions of people living under various fully or partially socialized healthcare systems. Any of them should have all proper incentives to cure cancer. Why China didn't do it yet? Why anybody in Europe didn't do it yet? Why Canada didn't do it yet? I mean I get it, capitalism is bad, profit is bad, profit motives are bad (even though I don't get how curing cancer wouldn't be fabulously profitable beyond anybody's wildest dreams, but let's assume that's the case). But there are a lot of countries which have socialized healthcare systems. What are those people waiting for? Or maybe curing cancer is not about finding proper incentives after all?
  • tempestn 3y ago
    I think you have some valid criticisms of the article, but they'd probably be better received without the condescending tone. (For example, calling someone "adorable" sarcastically is guaranteed to elicit defensiveness IMO.)
    • smsm42 3y ago
      Well, I think the approach taken by the author - all dolutions are known and easy and people are just stupid for not just doing the obvious - deserves it, for failing to ask - and even better, answer - the obvious question of why nobody else saw it before and fixed if if it were so easy.