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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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.)

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