3 ms·

Leo Szilard (he's credited with theorising purposeful fission and patenting core ideas long before the Manhattan project got off the ground) wrote a long time a

by ggm 1y ago

Leo Szilard (he's credited with theorising purposeful fission and patenting core ideas long before the Manhattan project got off the ground) wrote a long time ago about a (dys/u)topia where technocrats made the decisions. He had this idea "the bund" would fix politics by moving decision making to pure evidence based rational methods. It wouldn't work, but when I see appeals to authority (FDA) enter the room, it's usually to feel superior because its a logical fallacy in argument but the place it actually fits (which btw, is here, in this thread) is that compliance to standards and policing them, is not "argument" it's the "you only had one job" part of the gig. "yes Mr Kennedy, these friends of yours are very nice at parties, but unfortunately they are neither qualified, nor actually capable of fulfilling their role and so no, you won't be appointing them" is what the Bund would do. Being able to take a compliance body oversight function and leverage it to remove adjuvents because of one paper, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is precisely whats wrong in the current politicised situation. If people making generic cancer drugs for use in africa had to be held to the standards in the west, we'd all be better off. I have said elsewhere that if the US rejects flu vaccines because of the mercury, they should be checked for other compliance and standards, and subject to cold chain integrity shipped to economies who usually can't afford them, and can use them.

gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
Too mind-fogged to help you out here.. just wanted to point ou his most famous patent, the Einstein-Szilard fridge (considerably less famous than the Einstein-Szilard letter, so I feel there's another argument for or against technocracy right there)
- ggm 1y ago
  Because of concerns how toxic ammonia was, and how common leaks. Turned out to be useful many decades later when they were designing the cold chain for the H Bomb before solid duterium/lithium came along.
elcritch 1y ago
Ah yes because technocrats are never prone to groupthink or missing the forest because of the trees, et cetera. There was a fascinating article I read years back about how much of China’s top leadership had engineering degrees, unlike in western countries. Then the article pointed out how that led to things like the one-child act based on research in the 1970s predicting mass starvation. That one child policy is now leading to possible demographic collapse after causing decades of social strife. Be careful what you wish for, as you’re possibly a variable which could optimized out. Alternatively consider the long term ramifications of leaving pandemic responses purely in the hands of unelected epidemiologists whose primary focus is a virus and not the overall welfare of a population. Those are not the same thing after all, even if they seem like it at first glance. IMHO, alternative means of thinking are needed in a governmental system for the best overall outcomes.
- ggm 1y ago
  hence (dys/u)topia above. I think Szilard was off his rocker when he proposed this, it was before he had much to do with Teller. I suspect after the events of the bomb, he might have changed his mind. (he wrote rather bad scifi about talking to dolphins. Somebody else, Pierre Boule wrote it much more sexy/exciting, that became "the day of the dolphin")
  - elcritch 1y ago
    Ah it wasn’t quite clear if you were for or against the notion. Bad dolphin sci-fi sounds a bit too much for my tastes. Though it’s often the border line crazy folks who give us some of the best ideas or stories. Though they also often need refinement by, uh, more standard people. I say that as an ADHDer who sometimes benefits from the same. See more rational for needing mixed viewpoints!
    - selimthegrim 1y ago
      Is John C. Lilly good dolphin sci-fi?
  - gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
potato3732842 1y ago
>"yes Mr Kennedy, these friends of yours are very nice at parties, but unfortunately they are neither qualified, nor actually capable of fulfilling their role and so no, you won't be appointing them" is what the Bund would do. The irony here being that the degree to which Kennedy and Johnson bungled 'nam was in large part a doing of the professionals with their academic attitudes about how foreign policy and war ought to be conducted. Obviously you don't get do-overs with history but it's very possible that Kennedy's preferred cabal of self serving frat bros would have concluded "the Vietnamese are screwed either way but we come out looking better not escalating, dominoes be damned". >If people making generic cancer drugs for use in africa had to be held to the standards in the west, we'd all be better off. How can you say that without an understanding of how much it would shrink the market in Africa? $600 "perfect" insulin vs $50 "good enough" insulin. Metaphorically speaking.

by ggm 1y ago

gsf_emergency_2 1y ago

Too mind-fogged to help you out here.. just wanted to point ou his most famous patent, the Einstein-Szilard fridge (considerably less famous than the Einstein-Szilard letter, so I feel there's another argument for or against technocracy right there)

ggm 1y ago
Because of concerns how toxic ammonia was, and how common leaks. Turned out to be useful many decades later when they were designing the cold chain for the H Bomb before solid duterium/lithium came along.

elcritch 1y ago

Ah yes because technocrats are never prone to groupthink or missing the forest because of the trees, et cetera. There was a fascinating article I read years back about how much of China’s top leadership had engineering degrees, unlike in western countries. Then the article pointed out how that led to things like the one-child act based on research in the 1970s predicting mass starvation. That one child policy is now leading to possible demographic collapse after causing decades of social strife. Be careful what you wish for, as you’re possibly a variable which could optimized out. Alternatively consider the long term ramifications of leaving pandemic responses purely in the hands of unelected epidemiologists whose primary focus is a virus and not the overall welfare of a population. Those are not the same thing after all, even if they seem like it at first glance. IMHO, alternative means of thinking are needed in a governmental system for the best overall outcomes.

ggm 1y ago
hence (dys/u)topia above. I think Szilard was off his rocker when he proposed this, it was before he had much to do with Teller. I suspect after the events of the bomb, he might have changed his mind. (he wrote rather bad scifi about talking to dolphins. Somebody else, Pierre Boule wrote it much more sexy/exciting, that became "the day of the dolphin")
- elcritch 1y ago
  Ah it wasn’t quite clear if you were for or against the notion. Bad dolphin sci-fi sounds a bit too much for my tastes. Though it’s often the border line crazy folks who give us some of the best ideas or stories. Though they also often need refinement by, uh, more standard people. I say that as an ADHDer who sometimes benefits from the same. See more rational for needing mixed viewpoints!
  - selimthegrim 1y ago
    Is John C. Lilly good dolphin sci-fi?
- gsf_emergency_2 1y ago

potato3732842 1y ago

>"yes Mr Kennedy, these friends of yours are very nice at parties, but unfortunately they are neither qualified, nor actually capable of fulfilling their role and so no, you won't be appointing them" is what the Bund would do. The irony here being that the degree to which Kennedy and Johnson bungled 'nam was in large part a doing of the professionals with their academic attitudes about how foreign policy and war ought to be conducted. Obviously you don't get do-overs with history but it's very possible that Kennedy's preferred cabal of self serving frat bros would have concluded "the Vietnamese are screwed either way but we come out looking better not escalating, dominoes be damned". >If people making generic cancer drugs for use in africa had to be held to the standards in the west, we'd all be better off. How can you say that without an understanding of how much it would shrink the market in Africa? $600 "perfect" insulin vs $50 "good enough" insulin. Metaphorically speaking.