Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolframhempel | Hacker News Reader

I love this article as it speaks to one of the most overlooked aspects of modern life: There are a lot of fundamental things that we take for granted and practice every day - a lot of things with lots of experts and powerful institutions around them - that simply do not work.

And once you have such a thing, and you've build your reputation, your power base, your institution around it, it is absolutely paramount to carry on with it, deepen it, and extend it - regardless of whether it works or not.

But continuing the thing that doesn't work doesn't require some malicious intent or ulterior motive. Quite often, it's just a question of "well, what else would we do?". And the answer to that is often "nothing" - or "we don't know" - so it's better to do something and feel like we have agency and are doing something about it than just carrying on with our lives.

View on HN

> a lot of things with lots of experts and powerful institutions around them - that simply do not work.

Part of what's going on is that "does not work" is usually a vague moving target.

"Does not work" can be said about any gap between the goal and where we are currently. If you have a system that, on average, closes that gap over time, then the system "does not work" for the entire time it's running. After all there's a still a gap.

Chesterton’s Fence is a kind of inverse impulse to what you're describing. It may be that we think our current systems are nonsensical, but when we change them we realize we've created new problems that the old systems were solving.

And then there's often disagreement about what the goal should be. He mentions decreasing the amount of crime by how we handle criminals. Not everyone agrees that's the goal of the criminal system. Some people very strongly believe that criminals need to be punished or harmed, and those people vote. But punishment and crime reduction are different goals and they may compete. A solution that reduces crime may not harm criminals enough for the blood thirsty voters, and vice versa.

So my reading on all this is that, yes we have gaps in our understandings of a lot of things. But many of those will not be fixed until there's more agreement about what the goals are.

I agree with that - but in many cases, I think I'd at least define "works" as "is a benefit towards the set aim, rather than a detriment". Although in many cases, it'd be fairer to define it as "is a net benefit towards the set aim when taking all costs and externalities into account".

In this way, I would argue e.g. that

- the war on drugs is a detriment, having significantly increased the price and thus the profitability of drugs and fostered a cartel ecosystem that is now a large percentage of the economy (and often the government) of many countries.

- the war on terror or the prison system might be a net benefit towards the aim of reducing terror or crime respectively, but is a net detriment when taking its costs (monetary, social, freedom etc.) into account.

Aren't those examples pretty well understood to have true motivations that differ from their "marketed" motivations? Those detriments are actually part of the hidden set goal that led to those programs existing in the first place.

* The war on drugs was motivated by racism and marketed on morality and harm.

* The war on terror was motivated by power & military-industrial-profits and marketed on fear.

* The prison system was motivated by punishment & revenge and marketed on lower crime.

It's the social equivalent of WONTFIX: Working as intended

Crowstrike.....

But anyway, there's a famous phrase: "The goal of a system is what it does"

Once you have more than 1 person, any idea that involves "goal", "aim", or a related concept is meaningless. Those things simply do not exist.

That's simply not true, goal of most businesses is to make money. You can clearly deduce this goal much more the bigger the company gets. What you say only makes sense if you are confusing the stated publicly goal, the appearance that company maintains and its true goal which is pursued by the executives (the capital).

How many people in a company have the one goal "make money for the company"? How many have that goal at all?

Companies don't have a goal. They are just a bunch of people.

Yes but the overarching structure they participate in is designed to pursue the goal of making money. If not every single person has the same idea then we cant deduce anything from the group as a whole? When you look at the heap of sand you also start saying things like this is not a heap of sand its just a bunch of sand grains?

Do you attribute intent to the sand? Where are you going with that metaphor?

My point is that there is no clear line between a heap of sand and a bunch of sand grains. But at some point the grains become a heap of sand regardless of this. Its easier for us to think about this multitude as a singular object. In the same way a collection of people as a whole can have goals, we can speculatively discern that even though a company has hundreds of people, all with their own goals and ideas. We can discern the general structure of all of them as a singular unit because it might be a useful insight. If a company as a whole given a decision always goes for the decision which will bring the most capital then we can say that the true goal of this company is to pursue money even though all the people might not be aware of this its still a useful and valid idea that is capable of predicting reality and so on.

If the goal of a system is what it does, then every system's loss function is defined to be the behavior of the system. So every system is optimal.

The conclusion that every system is optimal should give you pause that maybe that phrase isn't as clever as it sounds.

I'm not sure that "education" as the article states is one of them. But the war on drugs certainly is.

For me, the word "education" does not appear in the article hosted at the URL https://fermatslibrary.com/s/cargo-cult-science

Maybe fermatslibrary.com is a badly designed website that returns SEO spam like content depending on such things as IP address, browser or some other factors.

It's interesting that a URL is no ground truth, and that my comments below are discussing an entirely different text.

Education is mentioned on the first page in the 6th paragraph.

Upon reading your other comment, it's possible that whatever you are viewing the page on is not rendering the pdf containing the actual text and you are only seeing the annotations.

Education is definitely one of them. Kids learn at public schools by accident. Utah has some of the lowest spending on education in the nation and yet it has some of the highest standardized testing scores. Similar to the war on drugs sometimes public education correlates with actual learning, but sometimes arresting people who have drugs lowers drug usage. In both cases we don't actually understand what we're doing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com