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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Ha, such a list is a great thing to argue about. But nevertheless, I am disappointed by the politics section.

The Big Question in politics is, as it has been for 2 centuries now, how do we deploy the brightest minds on the biggest problems.

Our biggest problem in politics is that decisions have to make sense to the median voter. If someone comes up with a process that can transcend that without the well understood failings of dictatorship, that would be game changing beyond game changing.

The world has too many problems with well known solutions. People keep reinventing square wheels instead of being honest about what worked and didn't in the past.

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"The Big Question in politics is, as it has been for 2 centuries now, how do we deploy the brightest minds on the biggest problems."

I am sorry to have to inform you, but this is a meritocratic, very naive view of modern societies that every single datapoint points against. That is not the biggest problem.

The biggest problem is: what to do when there is an ongoing state capture of your country by oligopolic pan-continental corporate structures?

Stop assuming that we just have to find out a solution. Solutions exist. We can have co-owned drone farms sustaining entire villages. We COULD have that. We already have tens of thousands of bright scientists who work on drugs where the patents go to the corporations, not for those who actually did the research anyway. Profits, however, are more important to those who make decisions about our ways of living.

I'd agree with what you describe, which I'd call policy-baked corruption for short.

I strongly disagree on the notion that deciding the way each of us lives is on the shoulders of the profit-driven directors.

This seems to me as a fundamental inability to coordinate without hierarchy, which probably has something to do with a limit on the number of trust relationships each human can maintain. The rest may be a consequence of that.

For instance, no matter how much you hate the President, you have no idea who you would appoint to be deputy secretary of interior farm management, so you’re not really offering an alternative solution.

> We already have tens of thousands of bright scientists who work on drugs where the patents go to the corporations, not for those who actually did the research anyway.

That's because corporations do the part of drug research that actually matters, viz. translational research and safety/effectiveness studies. And it would be just as expensive if non-profits were doing it, so talking about "profits" is just not relevant.

Both parts matter, but you are right it wouldn't be significantly cheaper to do the transnational and regulatory stuff publicly or by non-profits.

What probably would change is the choices on which conditions and drugs to target, and to what degree. Conceivably could shift from an ability-to-pay focus to an impact focus.

Exercise left to the reader to decide if that would be desirable and/or likely to be more successful overall.

I am mostly countering the libertarian "innovative hero" talking point that paints progress as an inherent part of profit-driven late stage capitalism.

Humans are cooperative by nature. We would have scientists even under different production systems. Therefore, I think it is a default failure state to just hope for heroes to emerge. Obama was portrayed as such, and he failed to tackle most of US's pressing social issues.

But the second biggest problem is that we can't agree on anything, including what the biggest problem is; however this is likely a symptom of the biggest problem.

There is no evidence to indicate that we can reliably identify the brightest people, or that they would do better at solving political problems. For example, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney both seemed quite bright in 2003, at least to the extent that they probably would have scored highly on standardized IQ tests. And yet they made major decisions which seem obviously stupid in retrospect. So how much did their intelligence really help?

High intelligence in political leaders too often leads to hubris. It must be tempered by some level of emotional intelligence, humility, and wisdom.

Don't confuse 'stupid' with 'self-interested'.

That isn't actionable. There is no reliable way to distinguish 'stupid' and 'self-interested' in advance. Many politicians are good liars.

Yeah, it's the classic confusion of expertise vs wisdom. Wisdom, I'd say, shouldn't even be considered an individual trait, as it comes from the aggregation of different perspectives towards a more holistic understanding. Only the mix of time, intellectual honesty and being observant distills that. A single individual has too many blindspots; a whole society, too much noise.

If you mean raw IQ, the brightest minds often lack the wisdom and good judgment necessary for sound political leadership. Orwell wrote eloquently about this, but unfortunately I don't remember where so I can't find a link.

In my opinion- the big question in politics is - "what is the big question in politics?" We spend so much time trying to figure out whats even important in the first place, and when theres this much disagreement on what the big question is, then figuring out which big question is the real important big question seems like a good place to start.

For any given individual, you want two things:

1) Minimize their suffering (satisfying basic needs).

2) Make sure they can develop their potential at their fullest (also quite close to a basic need).

So I'd say that politics should be about trying to coordinate society to satisfy those as much as possible for everyone.

That's a good normative standard, and one I wholeheartedly endorse, but the problem in politics is also that your normative standard there is far from universally endorsed. There is a significant (and, during times such as 1930s Germany and pre-1860s USA, very powerful) group that does not believe that the suffering of all individuals should be minimized. Less extreme but perhaps more pervasive is a value structure that discourages developing "potential" to the fullest in lieu of knowing your place and not going outside of your lane. That means that if you hold to that normative standard, your political life is likely going to be less about coordinating society to meet that standard and more about trying to convince other people that your standard is correct.

Yes, and the harsh part is that it's all the same problem. To "convince other people that your standard is correct" is the same as coordinating society, which is to repeatedly "convince other people that our solutions/approaches/ideas are acceptable (or determine if they really are)" for each problem we face or proposal we want to try to apply (unless you are a dictator or capable of mass deception, of course). It might be an impossible task. But with all this in mind, and as a personal preference, I can say that I prefer to spend my time trying to come up with better solutions for coordination than trying to succeed at coordination for a single point in my catalog of ideas. Of course I'll share them publicly and all that, but my political life won't fall into that. Which wouldn't be that terrible either, but I personally prefer to fail at the big problem instead.

Lots of competing opinions on what the big question in politics is, so I figured I'd add my own :)

To me, the biggest question in politics is: how do we build political / societal systems whose impact on human society is consistently positive and equitable?

This implies _fundamental_ changes in those systems. To wit: publicly-funded R&D returning value to the public purse, and not just to private companies (see: Mazzucato's "The Entrepreneurial State"); effective and highly coordinated wealth / corporate tax regimes (see: Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"); complete transformation of education and its relationship to both human psychology and technology (see: Papert's "Mindstorms"); eradicating the very concept of "good" and "bad" neighborhoods through massive and equitable investment in schools, housing, mixed-use zoning, mixed-income development, multi-modal transit, functional green space, etc. (see: Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein's "A Pattern Language"); and, backing it all, a modern, responsive, truly digital government that is empowered to invest in tools and technologies to continually improve both internal work and external service delivery (see: Cyd Harrell's "A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide").

I'm also a bit disappointed by the philosophy section, even though I work on two of the topics mentioned. The one on moral uncertainty is quite trendy, though (not one I work on). I wonder how they came up with the list? There's lots of AI in it, too much in my opinion. It's not as if real AI is coming anytime soon...

In my opinion, the Big Question in politics is: what are corporations not doing well, and how do we do the best job of doing that? (if not directly, then by proxy/with incentives)

Structurally, corporations tend to underinvest in R&D with big future payoffs and societal benefits/positive externalities that are hard to capture. That's where the government should step in, and it has been slacking on that front for the last 20 years.

Another job of government is to ensure the proper functioning of markets. Anti-trust is an important part of that. The government has been slacking on that front for the last 40 years.

That's without getting into education, transportation, and inequality, all of which are very important problems that are either unaddressed by or exacerbated by corporations. I don't think we have a major problem with identifying existing talent, and if we do it is a comparatively lesser issue.

What is the basis for claiming that corporations underinvest in R&D? How do you calculate the right level of R&D investment?

The disproportionate share of paradigm-shift innovation coming directly or indirectly from the government is a testament to that fact.

Which paradigm-shifting innovations are you counting there and what was the ROI on the programs which produced those innovations? Why would it be better to have corporations doing that R&D instead of government?

Basic research is a public good, and corporations will not provide enough of it.

There's a simple explanation for that though: the government has more money, and socialises the profits.

At one point the US government was spending 4% of GDP on NASA. Not everything NASA did was possible to commercialise, but entire industries from satellite communications and air purifiers to baby formula and memory foam were created based on solving difficult problems for spacemen. All of these now mass market industries pay tax on their US operations.

Even if a corporation could spend that sort of money on a space program it couldn't hope to collect a return from every industry that grew up out of that space program.

> what are corporations not doing well?

This is a fair question, but it should be accompanied with another one: what do the corporations do well? Will our alternative option make some things worse? What's our criteria of success and what's our backout plan if the criteria of success is not met by a certain timeframe?

I don't disagree with any of that. Corporations do many more things much better than government. That is always a premise of mine, and I usually don't state it explicitly in these kinds of debates.

If anything, corporations themselves should be begging the government to spend more on basic research. If it doesn't, it will not reduce taxes by the amount that it doesn't spend. It will merely reallocate research funds to pure defense or some other lower return endeavor.

There is a symbiosis between capitalism, innovation, and government. Capitalism without good governance turns into crony capitalism. Innovation would decline without adequate and competent* government expenditure (*historically there's no reason to believe that the government is incapable of profound basic research - quite the opposite). Good governance without a culture which appreciates market economies can slowly devolve into bad governance and a basket case country.

> Capitalism without good governance turns into crony capitalism

What are some signals you watch out for, with this?

- Antitrust enforcement

- Industry concentration

- Degree of divergence between popular will and policy (thanks Citizens United)

- Level and direction of inequality

- Bargaining power of labor (automation does not fully explain the cratering of this bargaining power)

- Level of corporate profits (compared to the past)

Generally, I'd also look at the correlation between increased productivity and happiness. If, in aggregate, we're producing more year by year, and yet people are becoming more miserable and anxious, something is wrong.

Unfortunately, the ‘brightest minds’ often underperform the naive median, sometimes disastrously. I see many problems that arise from your solution, that is, well-considered research and reasoning, dumbed down to coercive propaganda for ‘the masses’ until it no longer resembles the original substance, but somehow now benefits the messenger. As in: “...If you can bear to hear the truths you’ve spoken, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools...”

Let's say we've got the brightest minds on the biggest problems.

They come to you with the solutions to the largest problem: nationalize the energy industry globally, convert nearly entirely to mass transit systems, dramatically decrease consumption in the global north, and convert to a state-run economy because capitalism will collapse under decreased consumption.

What now? Is that going to happen just because the smart people are working on the tough problems? Of course not. The real biggest problems are not actually a matter of smart people knowing the solutions, but of competing powers (that are much stronger than you as an individual), propaganda, exploitation and human subjugation that prevent balancing against those powers, war, etc.

Worse, while it may seem like a good idea to have the wonks working on the biggest problems, consider the immediate precursor: who decides on what the biggest problems are? Right now, that will end up being heavily influenced by the moneyed interests that create the biggest problem. You'll stick entire generations of the biggest and most clever nerds on making better batteries and electric cars, but ever-growing consumption will make all of that moot and the descent into collapsing ecosystems and agriculture all the more inevitable because they were focused on a lack of tech (stuff to sell / consume) being the biggest problem rather than questioning core structures (an imposed economic requirement that consumption always increase lest we all go hungry and die).

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