Book Review: Hoover | Hacker News Reader

Book Review: Hoover

slatestarcodex.com

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I've recently been reading The Power Broker by Robert Caro, about Robert Moses, the Parks Commisioner who drove most of the building of the parks and roadway infrastructure of New York in the 20s-60s. It's a huge book, with a lot of asides into Alfred Smith, Tammany Hall, FDR, etc. (I'm only about halfway in, before Moses runs for Governor).

I can't help but notice parallels with Moses and Hoover, with the 'politicians' they decry, the ones they seem to celebrate, their sympathy for the masses crossed with personal antipathy toward individuals. I can't help but consider lessons this has for our current crisis, I can't help but think about how Truman relatively successfully navigated the assumption of the presidency from Roosevelt after being frozen out and manages to not totally bungle the end of WWII. I can't help but note how some people are who are completely effective in one time requiring action end up totally screwing up in others.

All that to say, I think we can learn lessons from Hoover, from the past, and apply them to our current situation and the future.

1) Sometimes, the egomaniacl jerk gets great things done. Later, they can use the power to screw up massively. 2) History lets us review responses to crisises and point out how they could have been done better, but we probably won't apply any of those lesssons to our own crisis. 3) Demonstrably compentent people can have demonstrably incompetent responses to crisises - demonstrably incompetent people rarely have compentent ones.

These lessons seem very logically sound to me.

I wonder, if we were to think of (realize) human minds as nodes of a supercomputer, connected via wires and human "biology" (data to screen to eyeballs to cpu (brain), cpu to fingers to keyboard to central controller), and designed a system to optimize away the obvious efficiencies, what could mankind be capable of?

If we could wire in all the nodes from HN, SSC, LW, IDW, [insert communities/professions of your choice], and then pointed this "thing" at the problems we have on this planet, what might be the result?

But first, I wonder if you have to believe it's possible, if that makes any sense. I have a strange feeling that might be the hardest part.

EDIT: assume this is workable. What should be the first two problems to address?

Curing disease. Not just the current pandemic, but cancer and everything else.

There are only 70,000 cancer researchers in the world. You could 1000x this and still only be 1% of people. 1000xing isn't likely to create 1000x the progress, but maybe you could hope for √1000x. So the progress of 31.6 years happens every year.

I wonder how much of the work those 70.000 cancer researchers do is theoretically unnecessary busywork like applying for research grants or dealing with office politics. Further I wonder how much of their research is optimized for looking reputable to the people writing the checks vs. what they think would really move the needle. Sure cancer is a complex problem but 70 thousand is already a massive amount of people so I can't shake the suspicion that instead of throwing even more people at the problem changing the environment in which they work would be much more effective.

I suspect that "helps cure cancer" is a popular touchstone for grant applications, no matter how indirect the association.

The first question I'd ask is: what if cancer is maybe too hard?

I doubt a whole bunch could be done on this covid thing, I suspect collaboration is probably going about as good as can be expected at this point.

I would propose the first project would be optimizing as much of the biological portions of the connection away, ie: design a platform that can be used for high bandwidth communication and management of projects at which this biological supercomputer can then be pointed.

Something like reddit would be an obvious component, it would require some new features here and there obviously, it works pretty well. The primary problem I see on reddit is rogue (delusional) nodes - these are not only not helpful, but incredibly harmful in my mind. A way would have to be found to see that these kinds of nodes are minimized, but my intuition tells me it would be much easier than we expect.

I think there's an impression that cancer is one disease rather than an adjective used to describe at least 70,000 different diseases (if one wants to be pedantic). Even the biggest killers of those probably have a 1,000 researchers max.

What are SSC, LW, IDW? Wait, Slate Star Codex, but the other two?

LW=LessWrong, and IDW = Intellectual Dark Web I think

Thanks!

Speak of the devil, look what I found: "OpenCovid19 Initiative, we are currently running an open-source face mask challenge to identify all existing designs out there and have them evaluated by the global community and experts. The goal: Validate the good designs and send them to manufacturers for production."

Community: https://app.jogl.io/program/opencovid19 (will submit this separately in a sec)

Challenge: https://facebook.com/groups/opensourcecovid19medicalsupplies...

Database: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e81ceSrVT6Bl4UaS1SxI...

Very nice, initiatives like this are what we need way more of. But as per my earlier comments, I see this an example of an instance of a sub-project, that would be run inside a larger framework.

If i enjoyed power broker will i enjoy this book? How do the two compare in terms of density? Power broker was very information dense

I have not read the reviewed book, so I can't say for sure, however, it would be hard for almost any book to be more informationally dense than The Power Broker.

Scott Sumner (an economist who specialized in the Great Depression) talks about bit more about Hoover versus FDR.

https://www.econlib.org/scott-alexander-on-herbert-hoover/

This was an extraordinary book review, and an extraordinary life, even if you discount for the biographer's positive bias towards his own subject. Hoover is really under-rated, and unfairly remembered for some of his policies at the start of the Great Depression. If he had not been elected president, his combination of engineering efficiency and competitive altruism, and his accomplishments as a businessman and philanthropist, would earn him comparisons to Bill Gates.

I feel like Hoover was, at least from this book review, a quintessential geek type: a great lover of systems, math, and detail, but people found him cold and aloof. (During the relief of Belgium, people accused him of thinking of the starving Belgians as just numbers on a sheet.)

And Hoover lived the geek fantasy, right? "You're so smart, we're going to put you in charge of everything!" And then it ACTUALLY WORKED.

> And then it ACTUALLY WORKED.

Well, until it didn't.

He also arranged the famine relief in the Soviet Union in 1922. There was a fascinating book published recently "The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin" that tells the story.

Slate Star Codex is one of my favorite blogs, much needed corporate and political philosophy. The musings on Moloch are psychedelic :)

It’s interesting to me also how these sorts of “skeptic” blogs are such strong affirmations of faith for me. Skepticism is what makes faith real.

This is the best book review that I've ever read. Or at least, the funniest. And perhaps the most honest.

"heroic defender of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion"

Kind of a deluded notion - 40 years after the US and UK fought the First and Second Opium war to steal Hong Kong and push opium and heroin on the Chinese population, Chinamen rose up and began pushing the imperialists out. The heroes were the Chinese men fighting to push the foreign drug dealers out.

(please don't interrupt the protagonists of history...)

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