Comment by z3phyr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by z3phyr | Hacker News Reader

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Its beneficial for people in leadership roles to have some experience in the grounded disciplines; But it is not mandatory.

Historically, there have been many kings and emperors who were not professional soldiers or strategists. Yet many of the states they headed were successful in warfare. Many of the kings or emperors were great soldiers, but not good governors; yet still the kingdoms were governed. A leader has one job, to lead. It includes taking advice from specialists and make a decision.

In representative democracy, the true job of a representative is to convey the decision making to the people they represent. This includes heeding to the advice of specialists who have been assigned to help the "people", through that representative. A representative in that case is just a messenger. A messenger does not need to understand the contents of the message.

The representative is from among the general populace and the general populace in plural is hardly specialist.

Edit(1): I understand that this situation is unforgivable. A minister of Cyber-Security must at least be used to the "Cyber" part. I actually commented because in Representative systems which I am used to, the specialty of Minister does not matter much. The minister is a part of the cabinet, which is just simple power sharing for rubber stamping the decision making process. The minister generally comes from the parliament. Its function is to legitimize a bureaucrat's decision, which the rep always does. It does not hamper the actual cyber security program (It also does not improve it at an accelerated rate, this just proves that cyber security is not a relative major priority for the current Japanese government, but that's beyond the point), which is run by specialized bureaucrats (most probably). Friendly Americans, the Minister does not hold much power, but just legitimatizes "people's agreement" to the actual officer in charge.

Edit(2): Please forgive my English! I am not a native speaker.

Sure, but smart kings who aren't soldiers delegate to experienced generals. In America, an elected president may not be an expert, but the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sure will be.

So it still seems weird to me that the problem of cybersecurity would be delegated to somebody who a) doesn't know beans about it and b) has spent his life avoiding learning a thing.

This seems vastly worse than "kings who were not professional soldiers" or "...not good governors".

If the minister had never done cyber-security work, I would understand. If he had never done any kind of technical computing at all, I would basically understand.

But to have never used a computer? That's like administration by a king who has never seen uncooked food or left his palace. Past a certain point you have so few referents that expert advice becomes unintelligible. There's precedent here too, but it's the precedent of puppet kings and court intrigues - leaders who either do nothing at all or make their decisions without regard for any concrete facts.

My mom still thinks her computer will get a virus (all by itself) if she leaves it running when she's not around. Even with my explanations. So she shuts it off completely every time she's done. I can imagine her running a cyber security company and telling her employees to shut down the servers when they leave for the night ;)

And one of the reasons no one competent will allow her to run a cyber security company is that she disregards the advice of people more knowledgeable than she is, not because she doesn't have a deep knowledge of how computers work.

I guess that if her computer does end up being part of a botnet she would at least be mitigating damage by doing that :)

Yeah it's why I stopped trying to convince her otherwise. At most an attacker would have 60 minutes a day to do something :P

> Its beneficial for people in leadership roles to have some experience in the grounded disciplines; But it is not mandatory.

This isn't the Prime Minister or the Emperor. It's the cyber-security minister.

Right? They (PM and emperors) are kinda mandatory to have some experience in leadership too.

Onboard with the instinct to fight HN snark about management, but I think this is a different category. Representatives shouldn't be expected to be experts in _solutions_ to problems, but they should be expected to understand the public experience of the problem. (You know, in order to _represent_.).

Cybersecurity exists because of the ways people use computers; it's impossible to evaluate trade-offs that will affect the public without being in the user role. It's also an error of judgement not to have sought that experience.

Agreed, he won't know the ramifications of burgeoning security issues without someone else telling him what to think.

I think what you are describing is OK for leaders like CEO, President, a king or whatever. But their second level people (e.g. cyber security minister) should be subject matter experts in my view. Why would would you become cyber security minister or any minister if you know nothing about the subject matter?

In my company the CEO doesn't know much about tech or IT which is OK. But the CIO is also basically just a well spoken people manager who can't really judge any new initiative and it shows with a lot of stuff that gets started but set up in a nonsensical way so everything fails. And they keep hiring more managers who talk well but don't understand much either so things perpetuate because nobody in leadership knows how things could work if run by competent people.

What we've got here is... a typical Peter Principle. Japan being such an efficient countru, just took the Peter Principle to a whole new level.

I hope this guy gets the job done and we enjoy safe and secure Olympic Games.

Historically, there were no standing armies, so naturally the monarch could not be a professional soldier. But quite a lot of them since, including current royals, have military training. Before the age of standing armies they’d have had training in warfare and politics as well.

Even if you are going to delegate it to the generals, you need some appreciation of how it works and who seems like a good general.

I’m not saying people need to have phd’s and 20 years experience to manage. But probably more than a couple of years.

> there were no standing armies, so naturally the monarch could not be a professional soldier.

In medieval Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire, monarchs and noblemen were supposed to be trained knights - unless they wanted a career in the Church (and even there, you have the Borgia...). The whole vassalage setup was built on the assumption that civilians would defer to rulers precisely because they could defend them in lawless times - something that required money (for horses, armour etc) and long and specialized martial training. That's why quite a few princes died or were captured in battle, or why disabled or physically-unfit rulers were extremely despised: they were supposed to "get stuck in" on the field. A lot of non-firstborn nobles ended up as professional mercenaries simply because they had the skills and training already. There was no standing army at what we would consider "national" level just because there was no concept of "nation": a ruler would own as much territory as he could afford to physically defend at any given time with his most direct vassals.

This is also part of the reason why they fought all the time: because that was all they knew.

Maybe he's the guy in this story https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/9qyhic/wp_o...

The fact is that somebody that was deemed worthy to appoint government ministers appointed him to the role. If he can do the job great call if not questions should be answered.

> In representative democracy, the true job of a representative is to convey the decision making to the people they represent. This includes heeding to the advice of specialists who have been assigned to help the "people", through that representative.

I'm not familiar with the structure of the Japanese government, but it seems like he's not a representative. Isn't this something like a cabinet level position in the US like secretary of defense or agriculture, etc?

In that case wouldn't he be the expert that the representatives are supposed to depend on to understand the things they don't?

A cabinet is filled by elected representatives (diet/ parliamemt/senate) in a representative depocracy, unlike the US..

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