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Comment by helen___keller | Hacker News Reader

> Everything else - government, media, academia, military - is in decay and has lost all of its legitimacy.

This seems like a stretch. Media certainly fits both of these, but it's hard to claim academia is in decay by most measures, and I have no idea how you could possibly claim American government or military are illegitimate OR in decay without resorting to completely subjective measures, such as how partisan the republic is or how few things get done (of the things you care about, no doubt).

(Note: one could construct a plausible claim that military is in decay based on what percentage of spending goes to operations instead of R&D and acquisition[0], but I'd argue this doesn't mean our military is in decay so much as entering a period of restructuring as a result of a series of unfortunate long-term planning misses)

[0] as seen on HN, https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2021/04/welcome-to-decad...

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On academia, I work closely with a lot of professors at Oxford, MIT, Caltech and the like and they uniformly believe academia is in decline and with horrible institutional incentives accelerating that decay.

The decay of the US government is visible in the crumbling infrastructure, the homeless people on the streets and in tent cities, the trash, the shitty COVID response, the partisan bickering. It has no claim to leadership, it is not inspiring to anyone whether in the US or around the world. It is in crisis and it is a cultural crisis which is very hard to fix.

> The decay of the US government is visible in the crumbling infrastructure, the homeless people on the streets and in tent cities, the trash, the shitty COVID response, the partisan bickering. It has no claim to leadership, it is not inspiring to anyone whether in the US or around the world. It is in crisis and it is a cultural crisis which is very hard to fix.

You're throwing a lot of things out here, but they generally fall under being either (a) subjective, (b) deliberate policy choices by a democratically elected government, or (c) emergent properties of deliberate policy choices by a democratically elected government

Ultimately, if the people of this country don't want government spending on the sick and homeless, then it's not a decaying and illegitimate government, it is a well functioning and legitimate government as decided by a cruel populace.

Not to say the the government is perfectly legitimate, I could write an essay on issues with the way our government is structured and how certain design choices diminish citizen's representation in the government (for example: gerrymandering, first past the post electoral college allocation, and the near-permanence of effectively arbitrary state lines). But even the sum of these do not make our government illegitimate.

> it is a cultural crisis which is very hard to fix

I can agree on that much atleast.

Legitimacy is generally not an objective thing. So there’s not much of a point in arguing here further.

I think he is talking more about where the opportunities are for the talent.

In the past, if you wanted to work on cool shit, government/military had plenty of projects, and research was being done in academia.

Nowdays, if you want to work on cool shit, you go to tech companies.

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