Why Developers Should Run for Congress
infovegan.com
infovegan.com
Really? Paul Graham certainly is, but I'm willing to bet that the average programmer is not as good a communicator as the average lawyer. At least not to "normal" (non techie) people.
By the way, this article brings up something I've been wondering for a while: who impacts the world more, technologists or politicians? At the edge cases, I think (but am not sure) that it's the technologists (Bill Gates has certainly had quite an impact, I'm guessing more than most Presidents, even). I'm wondering about the average cases of, say, successful entrepreneurs versus elected officials.
The confusing, indecipherable, loophole-ridden mess is a feature, not a bug. That's the typical legislator's monetization strategy.
I tend to think of it as code written for job security: misnamed functions, buggy and non-existent commas. Testing by one or two WorksForMe-esque court cases.
The best politicians combine a cold blooded ruthlessness and extreme ambition with some idealism. The worst don't have the idealism, or are actively evil. Most good politicians are extroverts who love meeting people and are very good at organizational wheeling and dealing and power plays.
Most devs are the opposite of all that, and the few who do have some political skills end up as CEOs and such. By and large, developers can't even handle office politics. Legislative politics is to office politics as a knife fight in a dark alley is to a pillow fight.
2 years later I was lead programmer of the Dean campaign.
* "PG - He's for me!"
* "Paul Graham - He's the man!" [sic]
* "No more DC slackers, we want YC hackers!"
* "Paul Graham: Invest in America"
* "PG: Bringing the 'start' back to Capitol Hill!"
Related note: I'm available for campaign management jobs. :)
Getting elected in the first place is more painful, though.
Now a Programmer Party would be a wonderful idea, at least in theory. It could run on an agenda of tidying up the laws and making them readable and responsive to people's needs. On the other hand, you only have to look at political arguments here on HN to realize that programmers are as ideologically fractured as any other social group. As soon as a question of economics or the scope of government power arose, a schism would occur.
Clearly what we need is to declare a Politician class, and then create multiple objects derived from that class, taking full advantage of inheritance, polymorphism and operator overloading. This will solve all our problems, just as soon as we agree on which compiler to use...
Plus, something tells me Paul can raise enough money to win in a few minutes.
Many countries run parliamentary systems with party lists, such that candidates for office may be experts on a narrow range of issues rather than needing to appeal to a particular geographical constituency, but the US system is structured against that.
On a related note, it is interesting for those of us in California to watch how the candidacies of Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman are playing out.
Could PG say "what you can't say" if running (or holding) office?
I'm a relatively outgoing person for being a software developer - I do a lot of public speaking and so forth, but putting yourself up as a political candidate is incredibly stressful. You have to be an expert in everything - tech issues, yes, but also farm issues, banking issues, environmental issues, taxes, poverty, unemployment, zoning, etc. It involves walking door to door and telling people face to face that they should trust you and give you their vote and hopefully money and time. You have to ask people for money - all the time. You are asking for a job representing everyone around you, so it's hard to relax - you feel like you're slacking when you should be asking for votes or money or studying the issues.
It's also helpful to be very, very partisan. If you're moderate, the people that volunteer for causes like yours will seem extreme for you and saying that people on the other side are not horrible people can lose you volunteers. You have to juggle that. If you think office politics or developer cliques are bad or distasteful, wait until you see what the political circles are like. Everyone has an opinion (including people like us) and knows how everything should be run. When you don't do what they suggest, they might leave.
I love the idea - obviously I invested a lot of my time in it. I think technology can seriously improve our governance for the better and having tech aware legislators would be a good thing. However, before you do it, know what you're getting into. People think politicians are corrupt and stupid, but in general I think they're mostly smart, hard working and want to honestly help. Running for office is complex, stressful and trying. Before you throw your hat into the ring, contact someone you like, volunteer your time, help them understand these issues, build them these tools and convince them they are worth it. You might be surprised how approachable many of them are. Then, if you still feel the need to replace them, go for it. And let me know, I'd love to hear about it.
A 2nd-tier nation wants to become a major power in the middle to late 21st century. The real oligarchical powers that be in that nation bring about the following:
- substantive emphasis on education
- sane Intellectual Property laws
- entrepreneur-friendly tax laws somewhere on their territory
- lots of developer/tech-savvy legislators
1. Society should be run by the most qualified people
2. I am a tech-savvy software developer
3. Therefore, society should be run by tech-savvy software developers.
If the doctors of country X noted that there was a disturbing misunderstanding of medical issues in the legislature, I don't think they'd be unreasonable to suggest that perhaps a few representatives with medical degrees would help.
If he goes over there he will most likely be incapacitated by politics and most of his time will be taken by useless committee meetings, etc. I think he is doing much more good as in his position right now. It wouldn't be too much to say, I think, that he (with his excellent colleagues, of course) singlehandedly changed how people thought about early stage tech funding and incubators.
But I might rethink that if Paul Graham somehow got on a ticket. America needs engineers and honest businesspeople running the show instead of lawyers and activists.
That said, I do think there's a place for engineers that happen to be interested in law and passionate about government. I would appreciate it if maybe 10% of congress were former engineers/scientists/developers.
Also, not voting is what corrupt politicians want you to do. Vote for a candidate you do support, even if you know they won't win.
Congress people don't draft laws - staff does. Or rather, staff cuts and pastes text provided by lobbyists.
> The law is very tricky and English is an ambiguous language that needs to be made crystal clear from a legal standpoint (which typically becomes unreadable to laypeople).
Laws typically aren't crystal clear from a legal standpoint - that's (part of) why they're "interpreted" by courts and "implemented" by regulation.
And that's not even counting the expansion due to either malicious or stupid drafting. Consider RICO - it was touted as "for use against organized crime". It's now SOP for almost every criminal prosecution. (If an organization may have committed two crimes, it's subject to RICO.)
On competence - I'd agree that the law is tricky, but I don't think it's impossible for a non-lawyer to learn it. Law isn't like advanced mathematics. Sure, you need to be astute and pay attention, but you and I can read legislation, whereas non-mathematicians really can't access the literature on abstract algebra.
Also, I actually doubt that most members of congress actually write legislation. I doubt they even read most of the legislation they vote on.
As for self-interest... well, how big should dog's teeth be? To me, that depends on whether the dog is defending me from an attacker or, well, attacking me. Honestly, I think that the legal cartel has not had the best interests of the American people at heart. A fifty thousand page tax code is good news for tax lawyers. Software patents seem to do a lot more good for patent lawyers than for software developers. Non-compete clauses? I hate them, so do lawyers. Guess what profession is exempt (by statute) from non-compete clauses in all 50 states? (hint: it's the people who write the law on non-compete clauses).
So overall, I think that developers are smart, literate people who absolutely could learn how to competently create legislation, and that even if they aren't quite as good at it as lawyers, they'd be far more likely to represent my interests as a developer.
http://www.michbar.org/journal/pdf/pdf4article1451.pdf
looks like they may have become somewhat enforceable for lawyers in more recent years...
If by "better" you mean "more likely to win", then I doubt it. Programmers are addicted to logic and the public is addicted to flattery. They don't go together very well, at least not for one interested in maintaining integrity.
Warning - huge document, you should save it rather than try to view in the browser. See page 1 and section III.B.1 (page ~200 & surrounding).
What's being proposed is not so much writing regulations in Python (the sort of idea I have been fascinated with for some time), but requiring sellers of complex securities to supply Python code as part of their disclosure requirements. Calculations of potential returns and so forth can then be undertaken by potential buyers using the same methodology used by the sellers.
Currently, information about cash flow related to a security are described verbally in a special financial dialect of legalese, or sometimes in mathematical terms. Calculating the actual profits or obligations in $ is left as an exercise for the reader, and their calculation is only as good as their underlying assumptions about the meaning of specific terms. Should a dispute arise later on, the result is a long technical argument over how these calculations should be performed and whether the accounting methods employed are standard in the industry or not. Of course, if this argument takes place in a court it can become very expensive and last for years, which is why buyers of securities perform all their due diligence before purchasing the security. As this due diligence can easily become expensive and time consuming, a lot of buyers try to reduce the up-front costs by considering the rating assigned to the security by an agency like Moody's or Fitch, who are presumed to be specialists in evaluating these things. Unfortunately, excessive reliance on such ratings has resulted in significant loss for a lot of fund managers and investors in recent years.
So what the SEC is proposing (and which you have until August 2 on which to comment), is that in future some securities offerings should come with the cash flow calculations pre-documented in Python, which would be the equivalent of a mortgage calculator offered by a bank to people who are thinking of buying a house and which is supposed to give an accurate picture of what the monthly numbers will be for a given set of input conditions, eg interest rates or whatever.
Blog post about it: http://jrvarma.wordpress.com/2010/04/16/the-sec-and-the-pyth...
Proposal (pdf): http://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/2010/33-9117.pdf
So we might need to legislate in code and write a law compiler, but that can be rendered to english pretty easily through a "lawyer-verified" open source transformation. Hell, you could even render a flowchart.
I don't want to get into a flame war on HN, so I'll just end my replies here. :)
Whether the mob is every citizen or just the citizens that wear majority-approved costumes doesn't change the meaning I was trying to convey.
I respect people who do this tremendously.
However, my position is different. I say - the system is not legitimate, and I do not acquiesce to it. It would be hypocritical of me to try to take a share of power that I think is immoral, wrong, and shouldn't exist. In the meantime, I obey mandates that I don't believe in from a mix of fear and cowardice. I'm not proud of that, though, and it makes me sad to think about and acknowledge.
But I do respect the people trying to change the system from the inside.
Politicians really want people to believe it is. Then they can bring all those people who want change into the gov't and neuter them by convincing them to wield the power they detest, suffocate them in bureaucracy and the inertia of (for example) a $3.5 trillion "large company" (as PG put it), quagmiring them so that the people in gov't can keep their power and violence.
And it's been quite successful at doing that. The light to this is that gov't is stuck with its own inertia, and eventually drains its host society of so many resources that the society cannot sustain the gov't anymore. An informed society could then start operating on a voluntary basis instead of organizing systems of violence.
That's exactly why I do vote, albeit never for a Democrat or Republican.