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Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

But that is so revealing of the mindset.

  * We can have strong encryption just for the good guys
  * We can have master keys that only approved staff will use
  * We can block all the bad things on the internet and it'll be like they don't exist
  * If we have a back door into an encrypted device, only the good guys will use it

It's like no politician ever read about crime. Staff can't be blackmailed or bribed. No one working for the govt ever used resources for their own ends. No govt agency ever tried to blackmail an inconvenient public figure. Because a terrorist once made a terrible attempt at a bomb in his trainers, quick, we'd better make millions of people remove their shoes at airports. Clearly no terrorist has the wit to try a different approach.

The list is so damn long, yet people who really should know better get it wrong with depressing regularity. Are most politicians really that stupid? What are their advisers advising FFS?

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It's a huge lack of systems thinking. It's like they believe that the universe somehow cares about what they were trying to accomplish.

* If we reward schools for increasing student test scores, then we'll have better schools.

* If we fund a "war on drugs", we'll reduce the damage drugs do.

* If we enact rent controls and mandate the construction of below-market rate housing units, it'll help people afford housing.

This belief - that "having a goal and doing something that pattern-matches to helping" works - is incredibly dangerous in policy-makers. It's also incredibly difficult to fix, since the incentives for politicians are to make rationalizations that are convincing to voters, and that kind of reasoning is much easier to convey.

> If we enact rent controls and mandate the construction of below-market rate housing units, it'll help people afford housing.

To be fair, this does in fact help many people afford housing. It just doesn't fix the endemic issue.

You support his point. It is a systemic issue, political patches do not work.

I don't really see many people claiming that rent control is going to solve rent for everyone. Seems like a blatant straw-man fallacy.

These are political favors to local interest groups. It actively hurts the ability to find housing for everyone not blessed by the powers that be.

Dense housing is affordable housing. When there's an empty apartment that you're moving into, where do you think the old resident moved to? There's only a few options - a new place got built that they moved into, the old resident died, the old resident moved out of the housing area, or the recursive option that cashes out into one of the previous ones. If you stop building units ("affordable housing" mandates) or arbitrarily keep low-income residents from making housing bids (rent-control), the only bids for housing are going to be from tech workers and market-rate housing gets ridiculous.

Fundamentally, the problem is that there's X people who want to live in the area, and only Y housing units. The price is going to go up until the market clears. Handing out political favors so that the people who vote for you don't feel this reality isn't solving the problem: only building more housing will.

> the problem is that there's X people who want to live in the area, and only Y housing units

I don't think this is the same problem you would address by rent control.

> Handing out political favors so that the people who vote for you don't feel this reality isn't solving the problem: only building more housing will.

And yet, there are many people living in rent-controlled housing who would disagree with you. The person and problems you're painting do not exist outside your head.

>I don't think this is the same problem you would address by rent control.

Of course not. Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones. It explicitly creates winners in the voting district that implements it at the cost of losers everywhere else. It's in the same moral class as dumping toxic waste into a river.

>And yet, there are many people living in rent-controlled housing who would disagree with you.

I'm not at all surprised that the beneficiaries of political favors support handing out those favors.

> Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones. It explicitly creates winners in the voting district that implements it at the cost of losers everywhere else. It's in the same moral class as dumping toxic waste into a river.

I'd love to hear the argument for this. Again, many people living in rent-controlled houses would disagree. Just because people are poor you cannot write them off as votes.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html

>Economists are virtually unanimous in concluding that rent controls are destructive. In a 1990 poll of 464 economists published in the May 1992 issue of the American Economic Review, 93 percent of U.S. respondents agreed, either completely or with provisos, that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”

Ok, so economists agree that "a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available". Thankfully, economists don't run our country. How does this support the statement "Rent control is fundamentally a tool for getting political benefits at the expense of economic ones."? Quantity and quality of housing are arguably much less important than ensuring there is a viable working class—just see how terrible a place SF or Manhattan is to live.

There's two different questions that policies should answer - what sort of stuff do we get out of it, and who gets that stuff. These are often referred to as allocative and distributive, though I'm remembering the precise technical wording from memory so I could be wrong on that.

That's the distinction that drove me to make the political versus economic benefits distinction. Rent control as a whole makes things worse - there's less housing, it's of worse quality, and it drives up the cost of market rate housing. On the whole, it's a bad allocation of resources: we'd much rather have cities with more housing that's of higher quality (because people are more than willing to pay for it). The problem is that this sort of policy creates winners and losers, and the losers are often the ones who get to set local policy.

There's two solutions - have a ban on rent control at a higher jurisdictional level (Washington State does this), or bribe current residents to lift rent control. The latter should make everyone better off - we pay for keeping the working class viable with the overall economic gains made by lifting rent controls.

Anyhow, my overall point is that we should hand out the who-benefits stuff without making society worse off as a whole, simply because the locals who happen to live in an area are able to hold overall policy hostage.

>pay for keeping the working class viable with the overall economic gains made by lifting rent controls

The economic gains from lifting rent control are going to go to slumlords, not just get dispersed to everyone. Also, housing isn't an elastic supply market. when rent goes up it doesn't necessarily mean the quantity of housing will increase as a result since housing is often limited by zoning, drainage, and many other things than profitability of rentals. Also when you consider the destabilizing effect of people having to move every few years due to rental price fluctuation, it's not really a clear cut benefit to "bribe current residents to lift rent control" if that were even an option.

>we should hand out the who-benefits stuff without making society worse off as a whole, simply because the locals who happen to live in an area are able to hold overall policy hostage

but this is how democratic communities work... local communities decide what is 'making society worse' where they live; as they should, since it obviously effects them the most.

>local communities decide what is 'making society worse' where they live; as they should, since it obviously effects them the most.

Local optimization is not the best strategy, even according to the those doing the local optimizations. Both participants in a Prisoner's Dilemma are better off if they hand their decision-making over to a third party, conditional on the other person also doing so. The Bay Area as a whole wants affordable housing, they just don't want to make the Bay as a whole better off by making unfair sacrifices in their neighborhood.

It's a classic coordination problem, caused in large part because decision-making is too local compared to the regional benefits of housing construction.

I don't know about the universe; I think it's rather a weird sort of overly-strong faith in the capacity of other humans. Legislation at every level seems to treat the people implementing and enforcing the legislation as a fleet of magic genies, who will Do What You Mean and achieve exactly your goal with no side-effects.

Though also, do note, if you apply systems thinking to legislators, establishing that they're "doing something that pattern-matches to helping" is exactly in line with their current incentives. You need much more direct oversight to give them an effective feedback loop for the consequences of their actions, rather than just the "optics" of the actions themselves.

Things like https://www.trudeaumetre.ca/, but done by an opposition-minded third party who won't give them an inch but won't like like campaign ads, would be a good start. Ultimately, something like prediction markets on the upholding of each elected candidate's campaign promises during their tenure would be amazing, in the sense that sufficiently-large bets would be a form of lobbying without lobbying.

Thanks for your comment about applying systems thinking to legislators. It much more clearly captures the point I was trying to make about political incentives.

The best ideas I have for fixing political structures are weird utopia-ish things that you can't get to from democracy. Things like government-by-prediction-market, which would distribute decision-making to people who think they have a better idea than everyone else and pay for performance.

* If we fund a "war on climate change", we'll reduce the damage of (or hey, even stop!) climate change.

That's what being politician means. This job isn't about solving problems, it's about making an appearance that you solve them.

Suppose a terrorist did something with his shoe that he wasn't supposed to. Here is how it should be solved:

"Based on our research, the probability of dying because of the terrorist attack is XXX, which we can reduce by YYY using blah-blah, therefore we should allocate ZZZ funds in that area."

Would you vote for this guy? Well, most people won't even understand what he is talking about.

So here is what happens in practice:

"Okay, I don't know how to decrease national debt or prevent poverty, so let's find something else. Oh hey, terrorism! I know how to solve it. Forbid shoes at the airport. Sounds simple enough. So we can say 'we successfully fight terrorism'. And just in case people don't care enough, make this issue the most important one and add 'hey, think of the children' into the mix."

So the general population becomes scared of terrorism 'cause guys running for office told them they should be.

It's not politicians who are stupid, it's people who vote for them.

They are not stupid. They are just driven by wrong set on incentives. One which emphasizes short-term local success - i.e., being able to see the phone of the terrorist and maybe find something there and get a good press release and promotion, and maybe find some other terrorist (that rarely happens but has to be at least part of the law enforcement motivation) or drug seller (that happens much more often and is really what it all is about). Long-term problems do not figure much in that calculation - if the system gets corrupt and ruins security, it's not their fault, they didn't do it, they just did their job. And note that with drug war going on, which law enforcement is losing miserably, and terrorist threat to which they don't really have a good answer (not their fault here, nobody does, at least not in the enforcement realm) they may not exactly feel they have the luxury of long-term planning. Now add mass-media to that which provides extremely sensationalistic short-term reporting with almost no long-term focus - and you get perfect collection of incentives driving this behavior.

Change it up:

• We can have guns just for the good guys • We can have guns that only approved staff will use • We can block all the bad people from having guns and it'll be like guns don't exist! • If we have guns, only the good guys will use them.

Seems like any dangerous technology can follow this mindset. :P

If only good guys used guns, nobody would need them.

It actually is "we know bad guys already have guns, so better if good guys have them too".

Same with crypto, btw.

That's not completely true. If bad guys didn't have guns, we'd still want good guys to have them. I don't want police having to take on a guy with knives and a baseball bat, themselves only armed with knives and a baseball bat.

I do. The police shouldn't have access to weaponry that citizens cannot obtain except in very specialized circumstances, like say a particular unit in a city like Detroit or Chicago.

Why not? It works.

Cops without guns: https://youtu.be/cX5CPx4RKWw

Cop with gun: https://youtu.be/RdoeBXt06Bc

Those cops were very brave, but you're going to be hard pressed to find even a tiny minority of Americans willing to put cop lives in that kind of danger.

The British approach is safer for both officers and the public. By emphasising containment and de-escalation, British officers avoid the kind of chaotic and unpredictable confrontations that lead to fatalities.

Only one British police officer was killed in the line of duty last year - PC David Phillips, who was run over during a pursuit. In the same year, eight American officers were killed by vehicular assault, 36 were fatally shot, three died after being assaulted and two died of accidental gunshot wounds. In 2014, no British police officer was killed on duty.

Even accounting for the difference in population and the prevalence of firearms, there is a substantial disparity. Britain does have armed criminals, but our police are not routinely armed.

There were riots across Britain in 2011, precipitated in large part by the fatal shooting by police of Mark Duggan. Only one other person was shot by the police in 2011. In the same year, the FBI estimated that 400 Americans were killed by police officers, but no official count exists.

There is considerable interest amongst US police forces in learning from the British approach, as shown in this documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66pr23xUKZc

And the police of Britain are so anaemic that they let _THOUSANDS_ of children be abused rather than risk confrontation.

You are not selling me.

British cops do that quite regularly.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that the police are always the good guys.

You actually can't assume that anyone is always going to be the "good guy", or that anyone else will always be a "bad guy".

And if you could program a smart gun to have a sense of morality, capable of judging between appropriate and inappropriate uses of lethal force, you no longer need a human to carry it around, do you?

If the bad guys can't have guns, good guys can't have them either, because sometimes they are exactly the same people in different circumstances. That's the big hole in good guy vs. bad guy reasoning.

Government agencies & the military have to use computers. Those devices either will be secure or they won't be. How does the CIA, NSA, and DoD feel about that?

The system is concerned with legibility to itself first, more than reducing crime. Without legibility, there is no avenue to even be effective through! Specific instances of staff being blackmailed or bribed are simply addressed through the traditional channels of power, and thus creation of their possibility is not a problem.

Yes, the good guys will use it in many ways that were never intended....

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/us/politics/edward-snowden...

It's basically the "us vs. them" attitude - i.e. dehumanizing the "enemy". As soon as everyone realizes that it's just "humans vs. humans" we'll get more intelligent discourse, and, perhaps, some sort of actual progress.

> Are most politicians really that stupid?

They aren't stupid, they just don't share your interests.

"It's like no politician ever read about crime. Staff can't be blackmailed or bribed. "

More likely they know their audience (most voters) don't know about crime, terrorism and encryption to know how bad the plans are.

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