Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

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> Politicians may (and will) disagree passionately on what government should do. But they all say that for whatever the government does, we should do it well.

I'm not sure how far that can hold. That works if you believe that the government, regardless of which politicians are in power, is doing good work in good faith. I might think that (for instance) universal healthcare is more important than airport security and we'd be fine with pre-9/11 airport security standards, but given that that's not happening, I still support making airport security more effective and more painless.

But if you fundamentally disagree about whether the government should do a thing—like, say, whether we should move towards amnesty or deportation for people who have illegally immigrated here—it doesn't follow that you should say "Fine, if we're deporting people, at least we should deport them well." Or if you think it's immoral for government to fund abortions, you wouldn't conclude "Well okay, at least we should do a top-notch job of funding abortions." Would it not be better for government to do its job poorly?

18F in particular seems like it is prone to the same danger always present in private-sector tech: technology helps social changes happen faster and more effectively, but it has nothing to say about whether the social changes are good or not. Technology enables us everything from unbreakable encryption to trivial government surveillance; it has no opinion on whether unbreakable encryption or trivial government surveillance should exist. If you're worried about that, you either need to move out of pure technology development, or you need to impede the production of dangerous technology (which is guaranteed to be a losing battle).

OP here. I think about this every day.

Ultimately, it comes down to how you construct the root origin of the problem facing government right now. For me personally (hence why this post is on Medium and not on a *.gov) is the lack of both faith and trust (two very different things) in public structures of all kinds, not just the federal government.

We've lost that faith and trust for very good reasons, to be sure. We may forgive, but not forget those indiscretions to put it mildly, and they go back to the founding of the republic.

The problem as I see it though is that faith and trust have fallen into such disrepair, it's become a self-replicating negative cycle. So few people believe govt can do anything well (in terms inclusive of ethics/effectiveness/efficiency) which leads to apathy, which leads to skilled people leaving govt or not joining, which leads to further degradation, which leads to a further undermining both in perception and in actual funding or authorities from Congress, and on and on it goes.

That cycle is not just observed at the federal level of course. Even more pernicious to me is the apathy it creates at the state/city (or even community) level, even if one person or one small group's potential for positive impact is exceedingly more likely at the level!

I certainly still have my ethical red lines, and I recite them to myself on a near daily basis so I don't normalize the "might" of the feds with "right". But I still see the one of the core origins that got us to this point being the cycle above, so trying to break the cycle is still my #1 priority for now.

I think it can hold pretty far. The government does a lot of stuff that is quite uncontroversial. We mainly think of the controversial things, but if you take a look at the sweep of it, there's little that most people would object to a "let's do it well" standard:

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

And mostly the definition of "do it well" is something that people can agree on. E.g., people have strong feelings on immigration, but pretty much everybody can agree that all the processes related to coming and going should be clear, transparent, fair, and not wasteful, even if they disagree about the right amount of inflow or deportation.

So sure, there are corner cases where somebody might say, "I can't work on that." And if they do, more power to them. But I've visted 18F a few times and every single project I talked with people about was something in the, "duh, let's do that better" category.

> which is guaranteed to be a losing battle

Not necessarily. You aren't always trying to stop a particular tech development, just slow it enough to make sure that defending remains easier/cheaper than attacking (in some ways, this is the underlying dynamic of civilization), even though the targets are always moving.

I think there's a world of difference in how the statement was intended and your examples. Personally I read it more as "If this is going to happen anyway we should make it as efficient and pleasant as possible to those impacted"

Yeah, getting deported would suck but there are things in the process that could make the experience a lot less dehumanizing and cruel. Things as simple as making sure the person understands the proper pathway to legally immigrating. And even more important would be making sure that the proper pathway is properly documented and easily understandable.

I do agree with you that technology (and some tech people) don't seem to care if the change they are enabling is positive or not.

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