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Comment by fatalogic | Hacker News Reader

As a former social worker I think most social programs don't work because they try to deal with multifaceted problems from a single point of action. It's like trying to fix a suspension bridge by replacing one cable while all the other cables are broken.

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do you think a UBI would be a more effective way of helping people in more complex situations?

It would help some people but for most of the people I worked with money was more a symptom of their issues than a root cause.

Lets say we have a child who is in 5th grade who reads at a 1st grade level. Most programs will say oh well he/she just needs more education so they create after school tutoring. That's great but there are so many things that can be hindering that child's ability to read. The real root may be a medical issue, family issue, cultural issue, structural or a combination of one or more.

People aren't equations, you can't just input x and expect y.

>People aren't equations, you can't just input x and expect y.

People react in mostly predictable ways to certain environments and situations. We're largely deterministic state machines. This kind of mystical thinking devalues the importance of a scientific, objective, data based approach to solving human problems. We aren't an exception to science.

I'd like objective data that sustains your argument then. I think approaching problems, including social problems, as rationally as possible is important. I, similarly, believe that leveraging all available data is important. However, as far as social issues are concerned, American psychology and western psychology in general have shown themselves to be inadequate when addressing the universal set of humans and not the western set. We've seen evidence of this not only in western vs. east-asian psychologies but also in the psychological treatment of refugees from areas like Sudan. I appreciate that there might come a day when human psychology is a solved problem, but unless that problem is currently solved then it seems like leaving room for mysticism is more pragmatic because it permits us to identify, and adapt around, areas of uncertainty while still providing some amount of care.

Admitting uncertainty or having probabilities isn't unscientific, but saying something is outside the realm of normal physics with no evidence is. Sure, psychology as we know it may be flawed, but retail, advertisers, etc. have a pretty good track record of systematically achieving results based on predictable human behaviors.

Social dynamics are nonlinear and chaotic.

You can't talk about a hypothetical world with a UBI without making assumptions about what programs we currently have that are lost to fund the UBI.

In the most "free market" version of a UBI vision, there are no government-subsidized social workers. If you are blind, deaf, learning impaired, addicted, etc you are at the mercy of whatever help you can find by paying for it.

But there are also visions of UBI that combine it with current social services, as opposed to replacing them.

Very good point. The assumptions I was implying were that a UBI would replace the broad, disjointed social welfare programs with a centralized, singular service that's relatively equal but weighted by need.

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