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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

Why is it that whenever the government does something, it takes me about ten minutes to come up with a better plan? I've considered that I could be wrong that my plan is actually better, or that I'm missing something (I surely am) but I don't find that compelling.

I'm starting to think that the outcome of our political systems in the West produces suboptimal compromises engineered by politicians who are quite frankly ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and really just not good specimens of the species. It's like the system is designed to be mediocre.

What's the alternative though?

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Have you ever worked at a company where they bring in a brand-new CTO or Lead Architect and they decide after a week or so that the entire dev org has been Doing it Wrong and it's only them, with their clear outsider's view, that can see the true way forward.

I certainly have. It usually leads to 3-4 wasted years of dev time on the brand new architecture that will never match all the features of the old stack, and during that time the old stack has fewer and fewer resources and the tech debt piles up.

It is absurdly easy to come up with a better plan in 10 minutes if you have absolutely no idea how it really works or how complicated it really is.

Yes, I agree that the fair default assumption is I just don't understand the true complexity of the problem. And this is certainly true.

However, I don't accept this answer. I think most of the time the government's plan is so bad, so glaringly flawed, that even from my position of ignorance, I'm confident I can beat it without hardly trying.

The plans Congress comes up with look like shit from your perspective because to you, a good plan is one that solves problems for regular Americans. Congress does not work for regular Americans. The plans they come up with are great plans for the people they work for. They are highly effective and channeling money to the rich and their corporations. Just look at the trend lines of the past 40 years - consistently increasing inequality between rich and poor. That kind of consistent performance is by design. As always, the purpose of a system is is what it does.

> Why is it that whenever the government does something, it takes me about ten minutes to come up with a better plan?

Because the edge cases often take more than ten minutes to reveal themselves?

See: "Tough on crime/drugs" policies, lead in gasoline and paint, etc.

I understand edge cases and hidden complexity very well as software engineer, see my comment above for why I don't accept this take.

You don't have to accept it for it to be true.

The point of "hidden complexity" is that it's hidden. Talking to an expert in public policy in the specific area in question might well reveal the "glaring flaw" is actually a known thing, with a good but counter-intuitive reason behind it.

I've seen precisely that in software; big precautionary comments in code that say "this seems weird, but here's why it exists; you can try and fix it, but you'll just increment the 'leave this code alone' counter again".

I understand that well, and it surely applies in some cases. In others, I think the government did such a bad job that it is not only possible, but quite way to come up with better alternatives, that are actually better considering the full complexity of the problem.

If you're a software developer, consider how the first 90% of any project is the easiest.

Well, assuming you are competent, the answer is obvious. Unless your outcome preference vector and mine are the same, any decision for policy made by both of us will be less optimal for one of us than a decision made by that person.

Simply put, you can make better decisions because you don't have to negotiate.

Yes, it's very clear that my solution would be better liked by me because it fits my preferences.

However, it also appears to me to be objectively better for society at large, in as much as I'm able to be objective.

> I'm starting to think that the outcome of our political systems in the West produces suboptimal compromises engineered by politicians who are quite frankly ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and really just not good specimens of the species. It's like the system is designed to be mediocre.

the problem is that one of the political parties has it as an ideological point that government doesn't and can't work, and sets out to sabotage everything to prove that they're right. Like how florida deliberately makes it impossible to get your unemployment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

There is, unfortunately, not a good fix for this, as similar parties exist worldwide. But banning Murdoch media and de-consolidating media control in general (returning local stations to local management, etc) would be a good start.

Cause right now this is your local news station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI

I don't accept your leftist explanation that the problem is the right. It's much more nuanced than that.

If you went to work for a company that you didn't like and you sandbagged all your work you would be fired. Somehow this is considered acceptable when your employer is the taxpayer.

A large part of the problem of "why doesn't government produce good outcomes" is exactly this - people who have a vested personal interest in producing bad outcomes, because that's what they run on.

How do you fix it? Not easy obviously, but certain propaganda networks are a large chunk of the problem. Murdoch's networks specifically, and Sinclair's network controlling local broadcasting.

I'm not saying that behavior is ok, but neither is it the exclusive domain of the right. Both parties engage in this kind of nonsense.

‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947

https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...

>I'm starting to think that the outcome of our political systems in the West produces suboptimal compromises engineered by politicians who are quite frankly ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and really just not good specimens of the species. It's like the system is designed to be mediocre.

Yes.

Democracy is slow and average, because ‘everyone’ gets a voice.

Authoritarianism is fast and exceptional, because only everyone that matters gets a voice.

Problem is that fast ‘large decisions’ can be catastrophic, and those without a voice eventually rise up...

I've heard it said that a benevolent dictatorship is a better government than democracy for that reason (e.g. Singapore) until it stood being benevolent because the leadership changed or the leader grew corrupt. There's some truth there. That's not an argument in favor of authoritarianism, of course.

> it takes me about ten minutes to come up with a better plan?

Because your plan doesn't please campaign funds, interest groups, and voters in a bicameral legislature and a long electoral college selected President .... and skate past 200 years of federal and state laws.

There's a reason why Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin were able to achieve things quickly.

Yeah, this is a big part of it.

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