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Comment by glymor | Hacker News Reader

He successfully defeats his straw man. But aside from greenpeace it's not a correct characterization.

Generally trying to pare down the size of the state, given it's own natural processes cause it to increase, would seem necessary simply to achieve homeostasis. In the last century the long term tread has been strongly on the side of increase but it can't always be or eventually the tax burden would reach unity.

The political side of this is very transparently Scottish left wing. "... among the UK's conservatives we see an almost masochistic addiction to cuts in public spending" the phrase "masochistic addiction" is a current Labour talking point. The actual cuts amount to 2.2% of GDP by 2014-15 added to the the 4.1% Labour had already set.

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It's a shame his politics are so polarizing and that he doesn't really develop conclusions as the juxtaposition of society's complexity and how humans manage complexity is interesting and does have political ramifications.

Humans seem to manage complexity by creating categorizations/abstractions until it's reduced to a workable amount. This can lead to a kind of fractal experience where zooming into any area presents the same seeming level of complexity as the whole did.

If you haven't made that particular zoom it's tempting to assume it's as simple as the assumption makes it look. "It's just" or "it should be easy to" are phrases that computer programmers are fairly familiar with and aren't overly fond of.

The political side would seem to be that if there's a lot of embedded complexity in pretty much anything then trying to change something, replace it with something cleaner or clearer, is going to be far harder than it would seem. Without trying to make the same mistake Stross did, President Obama and the disappointing gap between rhetoric and reality would seem to be a current example.

I'm sorry, could you unpack your point a bit more? I'm not even sure where he made an argument in that post, let alone "defeated a straw man". It's mostly just musings.

Are you perhaps misinterpreting his post as a question of how far the state can be pared down (given your second paragraph)? Because that's not the question; the issue of government size is nearly tangential and just parenthetically touched on. The question is the minimum size a society can be at our scale of sophistication. One could then speculate about how "governmenty" that society would be but that's really a separate question.

This is really an engineering question, not a political one. Since we're asking about the minimum, we're pretty much assuming that the component people have the optimal organization and the exact details of that organization don't matter to the answer much.

"Conservative politicians in the US...
I think these ideas are mostly delusional because they rely on a fundamental misapprehension about the world around us — namely that we live in a society that can be made simple enough to comprehend.

Let's take a look at the superficial structures around us..."

He presents a characterization, says these ideas are delusional because, then leads on to his observations. It's not unreasonable to think he was making argument.

The straw man he creates is equating anyone who wants to reduce state expenditure as wanting or believing in an over-simplified world.

That said, the characterization was insulting to anyone on the right, and about half seem to have taken it as their main takeaway and about half seem to have passed it straight by. So that might be why.

Is there any reason that your comment is more substantive than flipping the political ideology by 180 degrees?

He successfully defeats his straw man. But aside from the conservative groups it's not a correct characterization. Generally trying to pare down human resource extraction, given it's own natural processes cause it to increase, would seem necessary to achieve homeostasis. In the last century the long term tread has been strongly on the side of increase but it can't always be or eventually we'll run out of stuff to extract.

And while I am generally a fan of Charlie's writing and his novels I have to strongly disagree with him as characterizing the announced cuts as "masochistic".

The public sector was completely out of control - with some fantastically good services but also a lot of people doing very little and getting paid far too much. This has been embarrassingly bad in Scotland - where Charlie and I both live.

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