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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

If I had any illusions that big tech could run the world better than anybody else, I'd be more sympathetic to this position. I'd love to see a tech company try to function in a world where they can't just lay people off, or pivot in another direction, or sell off assets. In the real world, governments need stability, continuity, and at least some level of concern for people rather than OKRs. Tech companies are successful at making money—some of them, some of the time—but there is absolutely no evidence that they'd be good at doing anything else. They're optimized around a different set of rules, and a different game than governments are. It's just hubris and ignorance that would lead them to think they can apply their ridiculous systems to the world outside their gates.

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>They're optimized around a different set of rules, and a different game than governments are. It's just hubris and ignorance that would lead them to think they can apply their ridiculous systems to the world outside their gates.

What's ridiculous is that you can look at governments today, at any level, and imagine them being run worse.

It's incredibly easy, we have examples of dictatorships and fascism in living memory.

I’m going to guess that people that look at democracy and denounce it as the worst possible system have either not heard of fascism, or have heard of it and think that they would do well being ruled by literally anyone that happens to run the system that imposes it

It's really easy for me to imagine my government being run worse than it is today.

But anyway, it's a fallacy to think that just because something is bad, replacing it with just anything at all would be an improvement. The thing you replace government with would have to be better suited to it, which there is just no basis for saying Silicon Valley is. In fact, there's enough evidence that SV is bad at governing their own very very small kingdoms, even with the benefit of an existing infrastructure and rule of law, established by others, in place.

Man, it's weird for me to be in the position of defending government. I'm not that guy. But tech leadership is just laughably unsuited to replacing them.

Tech people tend to be good at tech (duh), but not as good at relating to people. Well, government, politics, and civics are all about relating to people - many of them who are different from you, and different from each other.

So, as you say, the tech people are unsuited for this role - maybe even uniquely unsuited. But they don't know what they don't know, and in blissful, arrogant ignorance, they decide that of course they'd be great at it. They wouldn't. They'd be terrible at it, even at local government.

Tech: "Government is easy, just kill everyone and replace them with robots".

Of course that isn't significantly different than authoritarianism: "Government is easy, just kill anyone that says anything bad about you".

Turns out democracy is just really hard.

Yes, believe it or not, government is not always maximally evil, corrupt and incompetent at all levels, all of the time.

We live in a complex reality full of nuance, not a cartoon.

Yes, very easily. Go to a second or third world country and you will see what a bad government looks like.

The stability of western governance breeds the idea that this is just the natural state of things. Same thing with anti-vaxxers thinking we don’t need vaccines because they have no memory of what life was like before them.

I'm not sure if you're aware of how much irreducible complexity the overall government apparatus deals with.

Yeah there are simple things that can be improved, like not using physical mail, and better appointment handling and such. That exists. But if you talk to people working in this business... those are the easy parts and people are working on those.

Then there is thousands of requests for building permits and these have to be checked, or people die because of buildings collapsing. And you need a skilled person to look at each individual location one at a time, because of physics. Those parts are really hard.

> What's ridiculous is that you can look at governments today, at any level, and imagine them being run worse.

That's a pithy and meaningless statement that doesn't add anything constructive to the conversation. If we take it as true, then we'd have to assume that you're actually optimistic about government, since it suggests that the only direction we can go is up.

But of course the reality is that that for as dysfunctional or corrupt as we might see some operating government, of course it could still be even much worse so still. That doesn't even require imagination, since examples abound across modern geography and even recent history.

If you can't even imagine things that are plainly visible in reality, then, sure I can see why you might struggle to imagine what could be worse. But we're not all so afflicted.

Well let's look into history on Red Khmers or pre-WW2 massacres of Stalin's Russia. Yes it can be much worse.

I am not having any illusions about Tech companies who are either running as dictatorship or feudalism (Board + C-suites making decisions like aristocracy), rest either goes along or is punished.

You don’t need to imagine. Just look at some other countries. Look at Russia, for example, it’s even the worst one.

Americans are so spoiled by their state, it can be better, but it can be so much worse.

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