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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

No, we can’t “fix everything” because not everyone agrees that these are problems which need solving, or that your proposed solutions are actually an improvement.

I feel like most people go through this thought process around junior year in college. “If only they would put me in charge, I could fix everything.” Yes, the world is not that simple, what a surprise…

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But that’s what the post was kinda trying to argue, no?

The post presents a simplistic point of view - that there are universally-agreed-upon solutions to these problems that, through a failure of organizational or coordination capacity, we're unable to enact.

The actual reality - that these "solutions" are not as simple or effective as he thinks and that's why we're not doing them - is a lot less gloomy than the thesis he proposes.

His call to "build social systems that cooperate" basically just amounts to "All you people need to start doing what I say". Join the club, dude.

I don’t agree.

I got a feeling that in the political space we are given a binary choice between two dudes. The winner is then being courted by big-something to make a decision that benefits said dude.

All the nuance and actual say about pressing questions has been removed.

The feeling is understandable, but it’s a symptom of living in a complex world and not something some particular other political system could fully solve. The Netherlands, to pick a topical example, has a healthy multiparty democracy with over a dozen parties who win some representation - but as a consequence, the actual process of deciding who’s in charge happens after the election, with party leaders spending months courting each other to benefit each other in exchange for contributing their votes to a legislative majority. (They’re in a bit of a pickle right now, because a historically unpopular party which used to be frozen out by all the “big-somethings” has won the most legislative seats.)

Doesn't he cite several solutions that already exist and have been demonstrated? For instance, he cites voting systems that have already been implemented in two US states, as well as a video describing the mathematical proof of how that voting system affects the outcomes of elections compared to a simple first-past-the-post vote. That's not "not simple or effective", that's "mathematically proven to be effective".

You can’t even elect people who fix everything. There are industries relying on things not getting fixed, who can lobby.

> your proposed solution is actually an improvement.

Whenever we try to improve anything in this world (software, hardware, humans, society, laws, constitutions), we measure a bunch of things beforehand, then we measure again after implementing the change. If it's faster or cheaper or lighter or taller or some measurable amount different, we can quite easily determine if the changes have in fact improved upon the way things were.

In the case of many things at a societal level, it's not difficult to compare to other countries that have already implemented a bunch of these things to see the likely outcomes.

The critique is not that it's impossible for all changes to measure improvement, just that it isn't possible in many cases, because the ideas about what constitutes improvement differ.

And even if there was agreement on a set of aspects, measuring them is not the holy grail. You can rarely measure the effect directly. You have to measure some proxy (operationalize it). And the definition of that proxy is going to cause problems.

That, plus --of course-- vested interests, makes that you can't fix everything. The best you can hope for is gradual improvement, and a change of direction when the plan doesn't work out as hoped. Those are political choices, not technical.

Exactly this. We could build a network of commuter trains, but not everyone thinks that commuting as a life style is the future they want, so they comprehensibly don't want to pay that with their taxes. We could build enough houses to give housing to everyone, but many people don't want their neighbourhood turned into a concrete jungle or a "bad" neighborhood at their expense, so they would vote against a candidate with radical plans about housing. We could elect representatives choosing from a multiparty system with multi-preference, but many countries that do have large coalitions that regularly transition into government crises every time one of the parties thinks they'd have a better chance on a new election.

I find this kind of reasoning more and more frequent on the Internet: someone starts their rant with "we all agree that A is bad", while in reality 1) we don't even all agree that A is a problem 2) we don't all agree that, A being a problem, it is worse than the alternatives 3) sometimes, saying "A is a problem" is the only socially allowed take even if you don't care / don't think it is

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