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Comment by idontknowtech | Hacker News Reader

Silicon valley in general seems to think everything should be a computer, or at least as efficient as one.

Cities are incredibly complicated things that no central planner can ever fully understand. There are layers upon layers, all interacting with each other, and all changing constantly.

Only a silicon valley programmer, blinded by hubris, would assume they can "optimize" a city, as if their unique ability to program computers enables them to analyze and improve incredibly complex social structures. They will fail.

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Hubris with regards to urban planning is hardly unique to programmers. Planning boards and transit authorities and city councils and everyone who's got opinions on those things is intervening, and sometimes messing things up. Cities are not in some romantic state-of-nature where everything is organic and bottom-up and intervening risks destroying the ecology.

Between fatalism and high modernism, there's room to actually improve things on the margins, check to see how it's going, and iterate.

Completely agree that hubris in this area isn't unique to programmers. I'm an architect, and plenty of architects have developed some truly idiotic ideas for ideal cities. Corbusier's plan for Paris was to level it and replace it with skyscrapers.

What bugs me is that the programmers of today seem to think they can optimize everything. Not only are they incapable, they're simply unqualified. At least professional urban planners have studied the topic in depth. Google throwing an engineering team at cities is just ridiculous. Might as well poll dentists on the best way to build software.

I wonder if some of that is not so much individual hubris as a corporate issue of "if you have hammer, everything looks like a nail."

I think you've articulated your point quite succinctly.

> Might as well poll dentists on the best way to build software.

A programmer with hubris would take VC money to "make better dental software" never having met a dentist or having done any dental work, perhaps only ever taken a scant look over at the monitor and deciding it's not fast enough or whatever. Then they'd build an MVP, try and sell it to some clinics, and upon being laughed out the door, would take more VC money to try and reinvent dentistry because their parents never told them "no"

Plenty of leaders in charge of SWEs will screw up software by itself, let alone a city. Usually because they fail to realize that software mirrors the org chart (Conway's Law).

A SWE shouldn't even think of software as simple. "Layers upon layers, all interacting with each other, and all changing constantly" describes any software org. And I can't even imagine running a city.

To take the metaphor further, it's like this except the software is hosted on GitHub and open to public commits with limited moderation. It grows and changes on its own without anybody really knowing what's happening in total. (Here your metaphor needs no expansion)

Biology is possibly even messier and less like a computer. For that matter, biology isn't even really machine-like, only pseudo-like in some ways. But some will rebut that the universe and everything is doing computation, as if it's meaningful to consider a rock or a dandelion to be a computer.

What's missing in this conversation is the notion of "computational complexity".

For practical purposes, everything can be modeled as a computer. But some things are impractically complex.

What's interesting is that modern computer software, and to some extent computer hardware (even after assuming perfect digital abstraction at the transistor level), is itself becoming impractically complex!

Only a silicon valley programmer... and virtually every modern(ist) government in the past 150+ years?

Attempting and failing to centrally control cities has been a recurring motif for ages. I'd love to say it's changing, and maybe it is, but not nearly as much as it should.

Yes definitely. But the fields of planning and architecture have learned lessons from those mistakes. These engineers, being fundamentally ignorant of their subject matter, are guaranteed to replicate the errors of the past. They're simply not qualified to do the job they're trying to do.

Pretty surprised to see this kind of remark on Hackernews, which is usually pretty much /r/fuckcars 2 in terms of how people view city planning.

But yeah, we can just barely even program a computer. Planning a city to a high degree of granularity is out of the question. Best we can do is apply constraints, observe the results, and iterate.

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