5 ms·

It's a competence crisis not a complexity one. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/ https://www.palladiu

It's a competence crisis not a complexity one. https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/ https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont...

chrisweekly 2y ago
Probably both, IMHO.
ykonstant 2y ago
I see both, incentivized by the cowboy developer attitude.
- conartist6 2y ago
  Ironically I think you got that almost exactly wrong. Avoiding "cowboyism" has instead lead to the rise of heuristics for avoiding trouble that are more religion than science. The person who is most competent is also likely to be the person who has learned lessons the hard way the most times, not the person who has been very careful to avoid taking risks. And let me just say that there are VERY few articles so poorly written that I literally can't get past the first paragraph, and an article that cherry-picks disasters to claim generalized incompetence scores my very top marks for statistically incompetent disingenuous bullshit. There will always be a long tail of "bad stuff that happens" and cherry-picking all the most sensational disasters is not a way of proving anything.
irskep 2y ago
I'm predisposed to agree with the diagnosis that incompetence is ruining a lot of things, but the article boils down to "diversity hiring is destroying society" and seems to attribute a lot of the decline to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Just in case anybody's wondering what they would get from this article. > By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority. TL;DR "the California PG&E wildfires and today's JavaScript vulnerability are all the fault of Woke Politics." Saved you a click.
- UweSchmidt 2y ago
  A more fundamental reason is that society is no longer interested in pushing forward at all cost. It's the arrival at an economical and technological equilibrium where people are comfortable enough, along with the end of the belief in progress as an ideology, or way to salvation somewhere during the 20th century. If you look closely, a certain kind of relaxation has replaced a quest for efficiency everywhere. Is that disappointing? Is that actually bad? Do you think there might be a rude awakening? Consider: It was this scifi-fueled dream of an amazing high-tech, high-competency future that also implied machines doing the labour, and an enlightened future relieving people of all kinds of unpleasantries like boring work, therefore prevented them from attaining high competency. The fictional starship captain, navigating the galaxy and studying alien artifacts was always saving planets full of humans in desolate mental state...
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    My own interpretation of the business cycle is that growth cause externalities that stop growth. Sometimes you get time periods like the 1970s where efforts to control externalities themselves would cause more problems than they solved, at least some of the time. (e.g. see the trash 1974 model year of automobiles where they hadn’t figured out how to make emission controls work.) I’d credit the success of Reagan in the 1980s at managing inflation to a quiet policy of degrowth the Republicans could get away with because everybody thinks they are “pro business”. As hostile as Reagan’s rhetoric was towards environmentalism note we got new clean air and clean water acts in the 1980s but that all got put in pause under Clinton where irresponsible monetary expansion restarted.
    - astrange 2y ago
      > My own interpretation of the business cycle is that growth cause externalities that stop growth. The evidence seems to be against this. https://eml.berkeley.edu/~enakamura/papers/plucking.pdf https://eml.berkeley.edu/~enakamura/papers/plucking.pdf
  - tivert 2y ago
    > along with the end of the belief in progress as an ideology, or way to salvation somewhere during the 20th century. That 20th century belief in technological progress as a "way to salvation" killed itself with smog and rivers so polluted they'd catch on fire, among other things.
SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
We haven’t gotten smarter or dumber. But we have exceeded our ability to communicate the ideas and concepts, let alone the instructions of how to build and manage things. Example: a junior Jiffy Lube high school dropout in 1960 could work hard and eventually own that store. Everything he would ever need to know about ICE engines was simple enough to understand over time… but now? There are 400 oil types, there are closed source computers on top computers, there are specialty tools for every vehicle brand, and you can’t do anything at all without knowing 10 different do-work-just-to-do-more-work systems. The high school dropout in 2024, will never own the store. Same kid. He hasn’t gotten dumber. The world just left him by in complexity. Likewise… I suspect that Boeing hasn’t forgotten how to build planes, but the complexity has exceeded their ability. No human being on earth could be put in a room and make a 747 even over infinite time. It’s a product of far too many abstract concepts in a million different places that have come together to make a thing. We make super complex things with zero effort put into communicating how or why they work a way they do. We increase the complexity just to do it. And I feel we are hitting our limits.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  The problem w/ Boeing is not the inability of people to manage complexity but of management's refusal to manage complexity in a responsible way. For instance, MCAS on the 737 is a half-baked implementation of the flight envelope protection facility on modern fly-by-wire airliners (all of them, except for the 737). The A320 had some growing pains with this, particularly it had at least two accidents where pilots tried to fly the plane into the ground, thought it would fail because of the flight envelope protection system, but they succeeded and crashed anyway. Barring that bit of perversity right out of the Normal Accidents book, people understand perfectly well how to build a safe fly-by-wire system. Boeing chose not to do that, and they refused to properly document what they did. Boeing chose to not develop a 737 replacement, so all of us are suffering: in terms of noise, for instance, pilots are going deaf, passengers have their head spinning after a few hours in the plane, and people on the ground have no idea that the 737 is much louder than competitors.
  - hypeatei 2y ago

chrisweekly 2y ago

Probably both, IMHO.

ykonstant 2y ago

I see both, incentivized by the cowboy developer attitude.

conartist6 2y ago
Ironically I think you got that almost exactly wrong. Avoiding "cowboyism" has instead lead to the rise of heuristics for avoiding trouble that are more religion than science. The person who is most competent is also likely to be the person who has learned lessons the hard way the most times, not the person who has been very careful to avoid taking risks. And let me just say that there are VERY few articles so poorly written that I literally can't get past the first paragraph, and an article that cherry-picks disasters to claim generalized incompetence scores my very top marks for statistically incompetent disingenuous bullshit. There will always be a long tail of "bad stuff that happens" and cherry-picking all the most sensational disasters is not a way of proving anything.

irskep 2y ago

I'm predisposed to agree with the diagnosis that incompetence is ruining a lot of things, but the article boils down to "diversity hiring is destroying society" and seems to attribute a lot of the decline to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Just in case anybody's wondering what they would get from this article. > By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority. TL;DR "the California PG&E wildfires and today's JavaScript vulnerability are all the fault of Woke Politics." Saved you a click.

UweSchmidt 2y ago
A more fundamental reason is that society is no longer interested in pushing forward at all cost. It's the arrival at an economical and technological equilibrium where people are comfortable enough, along with the end of the belief in progress as an ideology, or way to salvation somewhere during the 20th century. If you look closely, a certain kind of relaxation has replaced a quest for efficiency everywhere. Is that disappointing? Is that actually bad? Do you think there might be a rude awakening? Consider: It was this scifi-fueled dream of an amazing high-tech, high-competency future that also implied machines doing the labour, and an enlightened future relieving people of all kinds of unpleasantries like boring work, therefore prevented them from attaining high competency. The fictional starship captain, navigating the galaxy and studying alien artifacts was always saving planets full of humans in desolate mental state...
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  My own interpretation of the business cycle is that growth cause externalities that stop growth. Sometimes you get time periods like the 1970s where efforts to control externalities themselves would cause more problems than they solved, at least some of the time. (e.g. see the trash 1974 model year of automobiles where they hadn’t figured out how to make emission controls work.) I’d credit the success of Reagan in the 1980s at managing inflation to a quiet policy of degrowth the Republicans could get away with because everybody thinks they are “pro business”. As hostile as Reagan’s rhetoric was towards environmentalism note we got new clean air and clean water acts in the 1980s but that all got put in pause under Clinton where irresponsible monetary expansion restarted.
  - astrange 2y ago
    > My own interpretation of the business cycle is that growth cause externalities that stop growth. The evidence seems to be against this. https://eml.berkeley.edu/~enakamura/papers/plucking.pdf https://eml.berkeley.edu/~enakamura/papers/plucking.pdf
- tivert 2y ago
  > along with the end of the belief in progress as an ideology, or way to salvation somewhere during the 20th century. That 20th century belief in technological progress as a "way to salvation" killed itself with smog and rivers so polluted they'd catch on fire, among other things.

SV_BubbleTime 2y ago

We haven’t gotten smarter or dumber. But we have exceeded our ability to communicate the ideas and concepts, let alone the instructions of how to build and manage things. Example: a junior Jiffy Lube high school dropout in 1960 could work hard and eventually own that store. Everything he would ever need to know about ICE engines was simple enough to understand over time… but now? There are 400 oil types, there are closed source computers on top computers, there are specialty tools for every vehicle brand, and you can’t do anything at all without knowing 10 different do-work-just-to-do-more-work systems. The high school dropout in 2024, will never own the store. Same kid. He hasn’t gotten dumber. The world just left him by in complexity. Likewise… I suspect that Boeing hasn’t forgotten how to build planes, but the complexity has exceeded their ability. No human being on earth could be put in a room and make a 747 even over infinite time. It’s a product of far too many abstract concepts in a million different places that have come together to make a thing. We make super complex things with zero effort put into communicating how or why they work a way they do. We increase the complexity just to do it. And I feel we are hitting our limits.

PaulHoule 2y ago
The problem w/ Boeing is not the inability of people to manage complexity but of management's refusal to manage complexity in a responsible way. For instance, MCAS on the 737 is a half-baked implementation of the flight envelope protection facility on modern fly-by-wire airliners (all of them, except for the 737). The A320 had some growing pains with this, particularly it had at least two accidents where pilots tried to fly the plane into the ground, thought it would fail because of the flight envelope protection system, but they succeeded and crashed anyway. Barring that bit of perversity right out of the Normal Accidents book, people understand perfectly well how to build a safe fly-by-wire system. Boeing chose not to do that, and they refused to properly document what they did. Boeing chose to not develop a 737 replacement, so all of us are suffering: in terms of noise, for instance, pilots are going deaf, passengers have their head spinning after a few hours in the plane, and people on the ground have no idea that the 737 is much louder than competitors.
- hypeatei 2y ago