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Comment by Sawamara | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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.

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