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Comment by Excel_Wizard | Hacker News Reader

This feels to me as if the politicians have recognized that they need some technically competent people to even understand how to legislate in these matters.

However, if the top-level politicians, who remain technically inept, are the ones giving the orders, confusion will remain.

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> However, if the top-level politicians, who remain technically inept, are the ones giving the orders, confusion will remain.

The converse would also be true though; a technologically adept leadership that didn't understand society's principles would also lead to confusion, likely worse confusion.

Deeper still, a militarily adept leadership, or any other narrowly adept leadership, that didn't understand society's principles would also lead to confusion.

Politicians have to deal with society as a whole, and as long as no one can master every area of expertise, they need to have someone doing analyses on their behalf.

If you think they’re going to end up with “technically competent” engineers I have some bad news for you: they’re all gainfully employed. What they’ll end up with is the same thing committees always up with: bureaucrats who wouldn’t be able to hack in the private sector.

That's fine, it will represent the views of people who don't see technology primally as a way to extract wealth from fellow residents.

So your argument is that there's nobody both technically competent and willing to work in an important role for the government? I can tell you for a fact you're wrong, and if you don't believe me, you may want to widen your social circle.

Like most government positions, I'm not sure I would trust anybody that actually wants to take that position. It's going to skew heavily towards either activists or the corrupt.

In theory, anyway, I'd push for appointing people to such roles by sortition, although that would never work in practice. Politics as a duty rather than as a career.

There's plenty of people with the necessary skills outside of the private sector or outside of the SF/SV tech bubble. The key will be how they select the experts, if it's a revolving door from FAANG then we know it was all a sham.

Sortition from what pool? I'd favor educating congresspeople (and citizens) but where's the incentive to make that happen?

I think there’s an abundance of capable and willing people for government positions, but bureaucrats don’t select for these people. They select for other bureaucrats.

Sure, but establishing this office includes setting out staffing procedures, so there exists a mechanism for this issue to be addressed. Whether it will be or not is another question.

Just pay more. I can guarantee you there are plenty of software engineers currently coding dark patterns and rigging Candy Crush or what have you that would prefer to work for the government if they paid competitively.

Current senior software engineer positions at a FANG company pays better than the president of the United States.

OTA is just a government agency that existed some time into the academic computing phase, where lots of theory and conjecture was thrown around but no broad enterprise or consumer application was possible. Think like blockchain in 2019. It was defunded when those applications were just taking off in the 90s.

s/politicians/executives and you'll see that good decisions can be made by non-technical people, as long as they have been adequately informed by technical folks.

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