Complex dynamics require complex solutions
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I think that complex solutions CAN be grasped by the large majority of voters, but their time and attention are so captured by sloganeers that they aren't exposed to the explanations.
So if I am taxed, things need to be done with those taxes. Not just line the pockets of whomever get it. I sure don’t.
Didn't recent events like LA fires demonstrate just how neglected those services are.
Having a better military in a war is great, but having overtly fat military industrial complex isn't that great.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/reservoir-pacific-palis...
A government should be preparing for them. Doubly so a government that believes in climate change. Which was the opposite of what happened with firemen raising warnings but they falling on uninterested ears.
My education was trash. I’ll grant you fire depts & transportation, though the transport stuff isn’t at all properly invested in. I don’t care to make car companies more money.
These are all the same as nothing to me. You can split hairs and say I am getting something not nothing, but that doesn’t change the lived experience of being poor, sick, and badly educated in the wealthiest nation.
This world doesn’t exist for people like me— it exists for all you folks.
And boy, lemme tell ya… I would be super happy to burn your world to the ground, and I say that with horror in my eyes as I look at the fires that Elon is starting.
and I'm sorry you were poor, sick, and badly educated, but the closest thing to "don't do that" was the American Rescue Plan's permanent child tax credit which cut child poverty in half and oh god wait that's a scheme in a huge bill and I've already lost everyone because that's still too complicated and now it's gone.
That's the problem. Every time you repeat the cynical meme that nothing can be done and all taxes are wasted and everything you sap strength from the progress that can be made when we actually pull in the same direction: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2019/09/26/the-offi... (see the image: https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8...)
I know you're pointing out what "taxes" get you, but most people look at the tax brackets for income taxes and correlate that with the level of government services they receive.
It's important to note that income taxes do not fund Social Security and Medicare. These are funded through FICA taxes, paid 7.65% from the individual and the employer match of another 7.65%. That's why if you are self-employed (or do 1099 work on the side), you pay self employment taxes, which is both halves to the tune of 15.3%.
So people actually pay their income tax (less the standard or itemized deductions) on the stairstep up to the top bracket IN ADDITION to FICA.
Not passing judgment on whether it's an equitable deal for everyone involved, but we do get taxed pretty heavily. Especially when you throw state income taxes (for those states that have them) and property taxes into the mix.
SS: https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/HowAreSocialSecuri...
How is Social Security financed?
Social Security is financed through a dedicated payroll tax. Employers and employees each pay 6.2 percent of wages up to the taxable maximum of $176,100 (in 2025), while the self-employed pay 12.4 percent.
Total income, including interest, to the combined OASI and DI Trust Funds amounted to $1.351 trillion in 2023. ($1.233 trillion from net payroll tax contributions, $51 billion from taxation of benefits, and $67 billion in interest)
US Social Security Expenditures in 2023: $1.351 trillion.
Do you see income taxes in there other than those from recipients?
I won't dirty up this post further, but Medicare is likewise funded; like SS, income taxes on Social Security benefits do go partially to fund Medicare, as those people are generally program recipients. The final funding source is Part A premiums.
I don't mind banter or disagreements, but please do not tell me I'm wrong when you have not even bothered to look. Your gut feeling is not a good basis to dispute someone's premise.
Medicaid is another $600 billion and is also supposed to be supported by the Medicare tax.
Social Security is mostly covered by its ~12.5% regressive tax (an extortionate rate, IMO). Medicare is not. In 2023, Social Security, per the CBO, had a ~$200 billion shortfall also (draining the trust fund), but that's small potatoes compared to the >$1 trillion hole in medicare/medicaid that is being supported by your income taxes.
You linked a nice fact sheet, but the reality as shown by the group who actually oversees where the money goes is a bit different.
In fact, I was trying to point out that our taxes were actually HIGHER than most people think due to FICA. Did I say these programs were covered?
My point was that they were taxed separately.
And to answer your question, the dirty little secret of government is that they raid the trust funds. Why else would the trust fund have interest income?
But it's not really from income taxes, it's from raising money through issuing debt.
I was not making the point you thought I was making.
The trust fund, to be clear, is only for social security. It is not for Medicare.
I should point out for full accuracy that Medicare part A also has a trust fund that is similarly draining (although this one is almost insolvent), but most of the programs in Medicare are not funded by the part A trust.
Final edit: The Medicare trust fund also has a generous contribution from "general revenue" of the government - aka tax dollars.
Not sure I get your second point- I am aware of what is meant by the trust fund; actually, I thought it was the only one- you enlightened me about Medicare's. (If you re-read my post, you will see my use of the plural "funds" in "trust funds" was referring to the money itself, not multiple funds).
Anyway, I see 12-years of reserves at current projections for the HI (Part A fund for Hospital services), while the SMI (Part B for Doctors and outpatient services) isn't even listed- this fund is the one that seems to be the dog. Wow. And it's not even close. Yowza.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum
I don't think it's fair to bring Medicaid into the discussion. There's no separate tax for it, and the vast majority of people don't receive it- it's a subsidy to the poor. If you'd like to discuss that I'd be happy to, but I'm more comfortable on fiscal realities than judging what amount to local humanitarian efforts; my opinions might not be well received because they are not particularly generous. Additionally, I think it is far outside the scope of my original point that people's taxes are much higher than they think.
I'll close on this note: I think it's important that people speak in specifics, especially in trying times. Both platitudes and demagoguery are damaging to the public discourse, as is information presented out of context and the substitution of opinion for fact.
I spoke out of my rear-end on Medicaid (you did kind of catch me out of left field), and I generally try not to do that. I did some more digging (unlike SSA, they are not very forthcoming), and I'll take my medicine.
Thanks for the eye opener. Take care.
lots of taxes though yes
Sure, I get transportation and infrastructure. So do a whole ton of countries. We are the wealthiest country in the world. If all the average person will get is transportation and infrastructure, it can be improved from what it currently is.
He wrote, using his 5g phone connection and the internet from the safety of his home. Outside, a car sits silently in the driveway.
Because I’ll be both direct and honest: this is the type of bullshit that causes me to withdraw from interacting with the bulk of humanity.
Mock me all you like.
I’m a blue collar worker right on the edge of high end white collar work. I see on a daily basis that which I can never possess.
The system produces these outcomes because that is the desired design goal of the system. If this is “civilization” I want no part of it. But then, we don’t get that choice anymore do we? Where could I go on Earth to escape my fate? Because all I see is my own death is the only escape
Instead of mocking you, let me send you love and respect. I hope you enjoy your life and find your freedom in your own way, and have fun doing so, preferably with other people.
Nobody is mocking you, however your taxes allow you to do this without having to live in a shack in the woods and forage for food.
Or, like, at least fix all the potholes maybe?
The impediment that sucks up ~40% of CPI is housing, and that is overwhelmingly constrained by really crappy zoning and building regulation at the local level. Not much the federal government can do against that without going full constitutional crisis or amendment.
Okay but social security isn’t the government’s money, it’s ours. The program is profitable afaik (gets more than it pays out). Govt is just holding/managing the money and needs to track it as debt when they use that money for anything other than giving to people.
Housing cost in popular areas/major cities is not solely an American problem. So a lot of the American-specific stories about why it's high - "zoning", "parking requirements", "NIMBY's" aren't fully satisfying.
Few places have solved it. Big successful cities often keep growing around the world which means constantly increasing demand which means an affordability trend that rarely goes in the right direction.
In a classically-efficient market, where those with the $$$ to do major development projects often substantially overlap with those who have major $$$ stake in prices staying high, few things are more necessary than housing so why wouldn't we expect the price to approach the max that individuals could bear?
Removing regulation isn't enough, IMO, since nobody with the money to make major investments in housing wants to rock the price boat too quickly or suddenly. You need proactive regulation on both pricing and public development efforts to undercut the current market.
- the developers point is pretty clearly wrong, see: https://x.com/josh_coven/status/1853501120783790255
- developer productivity lag is due to land use regulation: https://www.nber.org/202502/digest/stagnation-us-constructio...
I have more if you have more questions...
The core issue is that Americans don't get back much for their level of taxation. The USA is a fundamentally dog-eat-dog place. Given that, working Americans pay an absurd amount of taxes.
I pay over 40% of my income in local, state, and federal taxes. Despite that, it's not hard to imagine being thrown onto the streets to die after experiencing a single issue. Where is it going? Not to me, and not to any services I'll be able to access in times of difficulty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ta...
They then find out that every complex rule had a reason for existing. The rewrite takes time and resources to reimplement. As they go they hit snag after snag and add a specific business rule for that only to find out that they are just recreating the original "too complex and inefficient" codebase with a whole lot of effort and money wasted.
I think "DOGE" is conceptually a good idea, and if it were executed by a competent administration could lead to great outcomes, as was the case with the USDS.
I've rewritten several of such projects, successfully reduced complexity and improved performances just by knowing what I am doing.
This code is a mess, I don't understand what it's doing is very different from I get what it's doing but this code is a mess.
The first should probably be a strong sign you should not start rewriting the code, while the second can be a decent position to consider rewriting it.
Being unable to understand the code in its entirety does not mean that somebody is unable to understand pieces of the code. Refactoring those pieces into easier-to-understand portions can be done, even when the end-to-end flow is still being contemplated.
Right, but the main point still stands I think, that if you don't understand the full code, you run a risk at introducing bugs when refactoring portions of it.
Code that seemingly does nothing might in fact do something due to non-local effects, ie global variables in disguise, and other pitfalls. A "favorite" is using reflection to modify some non-local variable rather than accessing it directly, making it very difficult to find during code searches.
Sometimes these bugs can be glaring, other times they can be more subtle and only be detected once they've inflicted significant damage to customer data.
I used to think that there existed some queries that would benefit just from being rewritten from first principles. And then someone rewrote them incredibly naively. That is no better than the original!
0. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/top-50-ri...
Because money is a circuit, tax is a percentage and money doesn’t stop at its first use.
The velocity of money is about as good a high-level measure of where the balance between “Wall Street and Main Street” lies as you’ll find - and there’s not much juice left to wring out from your typical American when a typical dollar is spent 1.2 times before it winds up accumulating interest in a billionaire’s bank account all over again (and that’s with the Federal government spending at unforeseen levels running an all time high and increasing deficit).
And nobody knows what that is.
Anybody decomposing GDP into "MV" first needs to explain what M is, and they can't.
Therefore “tax the rich” logically means “give the rich the power to choose who actually pays the tax”
As it turns out the best way to “tax the rich” is to increase the number of competitors (Including, if necessary, publicly funded competitors. ) in their markets and squeeze the profit share down towards the zero theoretical minimum.
Or “euthanise the rentiers” as somebody once said.
It feels like you're confusing this with corporate taxes.
When you have a system that deliberately uses unemployment as its escape valve, then the costs just get passed on until somebody loses their job and can't do anything about it because there are not enough jobs to go around.
In this example, to the concern about a power imbalance there was an immediate, trained response of „it can’t be done” - there’s simply no way to diminish the concentration of wealth.
It’s fantastic because you acknowledge that the imbalance is there and that it’s problematic - that can’t be argued. So instead you argue that it’s inevitable.
Intricate web of beliefs. Stable and resilient to any challenge.
Ironically, dismissing an argument with an ad hominem--like calling it a "trained response"--is also a mechanism that makes ideologies resilient.
I'm well aware that discussion or debate isn't an effective way of having a person question their ideology.
Ironically, by ascribing this dark pattern to me you could also be seen as employing an ad hominem, because it casts me as a dishonest, disrespectful person.
Alas, I am a human full of contradictions and vices. If it helps you maintain your mental composure, do feel comforted by my perceived malice :)
Particularly as I explained the mechanism by which it can be done. Did you miss that bit?
What I find interesting is how rigid the "tax the rich" belief is, even when the obvious problem with it is pointed out.
Almost like the people who believe it in really want to LARP as Robin Hood and won't hear any objections to the contrary.
Nitpick. Zero is not the theoretical minimum profit, you can have negative profit.
Zero is the profit predicted by basic economic theory in a market equilibrium.
Complexity in the tax system will be gamed by people who have the resources to do so (and those are not poor people). That means if you want a controlling force that affects everybody (e.g. to avoid runaway values in how rich individuals you are) you need simple rules that can't be gamed.
In society those simple rules also have the added benefit of being more broadly accepted since they are more broadly understood.
But if someone asked me to build a system that could be gamed by the rich I would aim for as much complexity in the rules as I can get away with, each piece added with a good marketing slogan, in effect resulting in the CEO paying less taxes than their poorest worker.
I've seen it at least three times on hackernews and countless times on reddit.
The question is, how to make democracy stable against interference by very wealthy people?
One idea that occurred to me was to have non-linear money that becomes proportionately less valuable as it is accumulated into larger and larger amounts. Add $100 to $1000 and you increase that value by approximately $100, but add $100 to $1000000 and you only increase that value by say only $1. Of course this is impractical in this form, but this is in effect what progressive taxation does.
So maybe a democracy could be made stable against billionaires by having progressive taxation which prevents people from accumulating more than a certain proportion of GDP, say.
This would lead to a sort of capitalism in the small but communism in the large.
The revenue from this progressive taxation wouldn't even need to fed into the governments fund's, if its purpose was to supress billionaires then it could just be destroyed or 'burnt' and still achieve its purpose. Another possibility would be to distribute it to the citizens of the country as a sort of 'divident to shareholders', but you would have to be careful with this because some would-be billionaires might use this as a lever to build their popularity.
So a stable democracy would be a voting system plus an army (to prevent takeover from outside) plus progressive taxation (to prevent takeover from inside) plus a few other things to deal with things like citizenship and immigration.
Or move the money abroad and hide it, no one knows how much they have.
... from other nation states - an even harder question, in that they have even more money and tools like Twitter, TikTok, Facebook.
I know that my comments do not address the original meaning of "Big Government", but over time "Big Government" has come to encompass anything the government does. Apparently including things that I depend on, but don't know about because they just silently work. Until someone turns them off.
Also, remember (or learn) that it was Carter, not Reagan that the bulk of the deregulation.
See Dan Davies - Unaccountability Machine
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The version of the narrative that we fight about is the stupidest version of that subject.
Gamer's Gate taught me this. From the outside, everyone looked like stupid assholes. I definitely have more empathy for one side vs the other, but each side's narrative is forced into the minimal version that carries the most moral weight. The great tragedy is that we use the moral narrative that appeals to US, not to THEM or even to BYSTANDERS.
See Jonathon Haidt - Righteous Mind
And Amanda Ripley - High Conflict
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I think the greatest qualities of humanity are curiosity, humility, patience and empathy. To me, nonviolence is not about naivety or tolerance of evil or being unprepared, it's about maintaining the ability to learn about the world and the people in it.
Historically nonviolence has been one component of a diversity of strategies - nonviolence itself implies the possibility of violence.
The emotion of anger makes people feel right and righteous in themselves - no matter if they are helping or hurting overall. A person's anger does not know what side they are on. Anger makes the world much, much simpler.
Our current political environment does not allow for complex problems or complex understanding of other people's needs. You have to fit in my simple worldview. You have to be exactly as angry as I am at all the people I'm angry at.
No matter who you feel started this or who you blame, this is all happening inside each of us. We are all being exploited and treated like broken toys. The fight is making us all act and speak very, very stupidly.
So if you feel like you have to fight, and you already know who to fight and how to fight them - I am not trying to change that. I am NOT saying that "the other side" has a valid point of view or that the other side has some good people. I am saying that the other side is made of flawed people each with their own history.
I am asking you to find some time for curiosity, humility, patience, and empathy for the humans in the world.
The tragedy of all anti-war movies is that they show us the horror and terror and destruction of war ... but 'this' is the fight we need to fight, this fight is needed, this fight is good.
Abstractions and conceptual thinking can simplify reasoning if used responsibly, but more often this cognitive shortcut is abused to reach emotionally convenient conclusions.
Reasoning that contains the string "this is like" is usually suspect. This is a red flag that the individual has categorized the subject of analysis into an overly broad abstraction, and is now attempting to draw a spurious relation to some causally unrelated thing that allegedly belongs to the same category.
The difficulty is that this way of thinking is evolved and natural to us. This low-energy, cheap heuristic served us well in our simpler ancestral environments. It's maladaptive in the modern environment.
- https://hbr.org/2019/09/the-dangers-of-categorical-thinking
- https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9343778-word-thinking-is-a-...
Now these are all potentially useful, context-dependent shorthands...but they're absolutely ripe for misunderstanding. Something I find myself doing a lot these days is asking people to explain what exactly they think is happening on an individual, human level when they declare anything greater then that is "doing" something...because of course, no large organization ever does anything - they're all composed of individuals taking action, potentially under direction but still as individuals.
(It's also a useful thought exercise to deconstruct sentences like "the US decided to do X" and understand who or what really is meant with "the US" in that sentence. The US government? The political class? Some mainstream opinion in the general population?)
But in general I agree with you, especially in the recent years. I find the level of anthropomorphization of countries lately honestly scary, and believe this is a strong sign of how much the political discourse already has shifted back into a "war" vocabulary.
The intensity with which people argue this stuff also makes me wonder if they're still understanding it as a metaphor at all. Emotional attachment to flags, nations, peoples, shapes on a map, etc is real and is also a central component of war propaganda.
Not sure I agree. Not because the large majority aren't intellectually capable, but because there isn't the interest/attention span in most people to understand the nuances of the complex problem that is demanding the complex solution. I feel this in myself increasingly and opt to just not have an opinion on proposed solutions when I believe the problem is much more complex and multifaceted than I'm even aware.
1) Welfare-enhancing
2) Politically-popular
3) Simple
Pick any two.
There are policies that meet all three ... but they've already been implemented, and no one debates them.
Another implication is also that there is no way at all to solve any of those problems, the best we could hope for is to manage them and mitigate the effects.
I think this line of thinking is ultimately authoritarian and paradoxically increases "simple solution" thinking or avoidance to think about political topics at all - because that would be all that's left to think about.
I like the approach of the OP much more, who argues that we should embrace the complexity of our currently world and try to understand it, instead of shying away from it. That's what I'd understand as "thinking for yourself".
I believe, the "simple solutions" can even have a useful role in this - as starting points. E.g. "why can't we just get more water from the Pacific to put out the fires?", "why can't the people in Gaza just go somewhere else?", "why can't we just build more housing?" etc. could be interesting questions to start tackling that complexity.
It's the same as when people talk about politicization, free speech, etc.
Read a really good book on this a few years ago by John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty (https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324004776), where they talk about the issue of applying the logic of "known uncertain" systems (like games of poker, or volcanic eruptions) to completely dynamic "radically uncertain" systems where any attempt to quantify outcomes is effectively completely made up. Election forecasts being one example, where there's no guarantee that you know the rules of the game, if they stay constant between elections and so on.
I think this is very timely because these days you see this kind of cargo cult empiricism where people will say "I am 30% confident that..." as if just talking in a quantitative language means you've somehow understood something about the future or have reason to be more confident.
Group (1) is the impediment to progress on the problem.
It's a huge complex effort, but it's definitely not coordinated and never will be.
https://about.bnef.com/blog/global-investment-in-the-energy-...
I personally don't think climate change can be _reversed_ and also don't believe a significant effort will be done in that direction except if it somehow becomes a global strategic stake, like the race to build nuclear weapons or race to space. And no, I'm not holding my breath, which is a tough thing to explain to children.
We can attempt to think through how things will play out, given what we already see happening and simple assumptions about power dynamics. People will live through it all, especially the wealthy (cutoff threshold: unknown; or rather, where is the elbow/knee between suffering and resilience? I don’t know) - some of whom will experience some degree of climate shock (cf. the palisades, Malibu etc for a recent example) but will largely find ways to continue exploiting their advantages to survive, even thrive, while others will suffer the incrementally normalized dangers of simply being alive, like frogs slowly boiling in someone else’s kitchen. People will keep fucking, having kids, trying to work shitty jobs, trying to work fun jobs, doing science and research, making music and bad reality television shows and brilliant novels and bad novels, crossing continents for better lives (whether that’s economic opportunity or merely to escape climatic incompatibility with life) while others resent them for it, and people will continue to post on Hacker News long diatribes lamenting the state of things.
I do think it is accurate to say we are *doomed* to this in the sense of being *fated* to it though.
I guess what I am saying is that to call what will happen a doom horizon is just a hood we put over our own eyes because it is too upsetting to really think with nuance about the most probable trajectory.
My word choice and vocabulary was pretty poor, I also don't think humanity will die.
But more than the gradual climate degradation, I fear we'll have an increasing number unforseen failure modes that will make it pretty hellish to survive (e.g. whole swaths of land/water accidentally poisoned, non human viruses we can't properly deal with, environment adapts in ways that is a lot more unfavorable to us than we assume). As you point out, I'd bet on uncharted system dynamics leading to cascading failures.
If life continues while slowly getting worse I'd see it as a win, the worse scenario being a lot bleaker with people barely maintaining a viable number of human to keep society going.
It's not fate and I'm part of the generation that truely didn't give a damn about climate for most of it's life...which is perhaps why I feel I'm not in a position to just assume everything will be shitty but somewhat fine and the next generation will just be slightly worse.
This doesn't work as well with other people, with society. Even if they individually all try to approach reality as above.
Manipulation and coercion are just much more efficient at creating a predictive capacity with other people, because you don't need to deal with reality or complexity. You already know where people are going to (metaphorically) run if you are leading them and herding them.
I did enjoy the finer point Terry alluded to though, that even these simplified coercive memeing systems are based on a complex underlying system of reality. And when they get stretched too far, they break in unpredictable (complex) ways.
Basically, he says that simple solutions to complex situations work sometimes—for example when a simpler system can approximate your system.
But many times it's not true! So you need a complex solution to a complex situation.
That's kind of stating the obvious, no?
Some things are complex and will take months or years to complete - but if it doesn’t fit in a quarter where they can put it as a win on their list they feel offended.
People live in alternative realities depending on if they get their news from CNN, Fox, TikTok, Instagram, X, YouTube, or BlueSky. Here's a recent clip from Joe Rogan that illustrates this perfectly [0]. He talks about the different perspectives of liberals and conservatives on USAID.
It's likely this will get exponentially worse once our social media feeds become full of AI imposters competing with one another for everyone's attention with outrage bait and fake drama and entire fabricated social media bubbles in which each user is made to feel like the ruler of their own little fiefdom.
Video and audio content appealing to every unique combination of biases, superstitions, and political orientation will be available in an endless deluge. I got a preview of this recently when I saw the surreal, gross videos YouTube Reels serves up to my toddler. Similar slop gets eaten up by easy targets on FB. But the slop is going to become more and more sophisticated until everyone is consuming it.
I can only hope the solution comes before it's too late.
But here's the catch: the memes, short texts, or short videos are spread through a complex machinery of interrelating parts with global reach. Explanations are plausible, wrong and very profitable in front of the right eyeballs.
For our sake, I hope Tao is also correct in that damage to the federal system may not necessarily destabilize structures at other (state, county, municipal) scales as regards socioeconomic organization in the USA.
The world isn't being ruined by a meme. On the contrary, our problem is the complexity bias, which seems to have developed over the previous century.
As the result, nobody understands anything anymore. I fact it seems that more complex solutions have been worked out, that allow to run on sone kind of protocol, with little to no thinking involved.
Time is being wasted on dealing with problems in overly complex ways, and there is no room left for what can't be simplified.
>long-standing assumptions are tested and updated as new information about the current state of the world comes in
The entire problem is that this mechanism doesn't exist in practice. Real-world systems tend to accumulate incidental complexity that serves no purpose, with no real way to review it, as any potential mechanism is subject to the same accumulation. That's called corruption.
The only way to compress and simplify the outdated complexity that has some chance to work is total system destruction and rebuilding, with previous iterations taken into account. But when you're stuck a local minimum it makes things even worse. Now, if you have another, easier way that would actually work in real world, I'm all ears.
Current society largely (but not completely) relies on experts building highly complex systems. This includes not only public infrastructure like waterworks, buildings and information systems, but also say the very bread you eat (to get it at a low price and high productivity[1]), the computer we're reading this in (mind-numbingly complex system), the internet. It's a feature of capitalism (really, a feature of many administrative systems and product interfaces) that the consumer thankfully doesn't have to be too much of an expert on say computers (say theory of CPU architecture, pipelines, assembly, etc..) to buy a laptop or use software. The consumer only needs to be able to tell which competitor product is best for his use (although often, as he should, relying on expert reviews). We are good at hiding complexity behind interfaces as well, packaging complexity and hiding away its intricate inner workings. All of this enables life in a complex society.
I think it's misguided or hypocritical to completely distrust experts specially when it comes to public policy, public administration and science, given how much we rely on experts for everything else. It's not even much of a choice, I believe: the fact that we rely on those complex mechanisms inevitably will make certain failures that often demand public attention also complex. Say a food company synthesizes a highly complex (and not present in most natural products), but good tasting, substance. Then we kind of need equally complex review of its impacts on human health. A highly complex computer network will need highly knowledgeable (and correspondingly highly complex) solution to certain bugs that might appear, specially in cases like cross-domain failures where complexity encapsulations fail for various reasons. Think how unlikely it would be that every discipline has been exploited to extremely high complexity, but just by chance we could get away with simple solutions for public-facing and public policy problems.
I like simplicity, and I even like the idea I wouldn't often require experts to understand a public or scientific issue of public concern. But I don't think I'm willing to give up most products of complexity, including computers, medical procedures and diagnosis, and more -- and even if I were willing (I might be able to live with say an early 2000s computer :) ), I don't think it's realistic or feasible to really do that. In part because of collective agreement, in part because of for example the sheer population we have to contend with today. Earlier methods of agriculture for example probably can't sustain that many people. We should therefore apply Einstein's wisdom: try to make things as simple as possible... but no simpler. And trust experts when sensible, when the problem at hand is complex enough to be beyond our comprehension (but still important).
Of course, experts can be wrong, but that is something we just have to contend with (like we have to contend with the possibility all the weird procedures we do to produce food or acquire and purify water -- which are managed by experts -- may go wrong, even with significant efforts to otherwise). We can, and probably should, demand explanations (which may be hard to understand for the general public) of the experts and they explain their reasoning. We can examine and expect that their scientific field is healthy, there is consensus and there is a good level of academic integrity. But we should not approach their well informed opinions on important issues from a baseline of arrogance and distrust, because likely they do know much better, in certain cases.
[1] Modern agriculture is highly complex. This includes special seeds, harvesting machines, soil science, weather prediction, and so on. Each of those is in turn highly complex requiring experts to exist at current performance.
Yes, it's on "Mastodon-the-Platform", but this particular post is on a server that literally has the words "maths" in its name.
Shrug ... no idea. Christian pung me back in March 2017 and said:
There's this new social network thing with different servers ... maybe we should make one to focus on Recreational Maths.
We thought for a while, and when we hit on the name (it's his fault ... he came up with it) we figured it had to be done.
But thinking about it ... there's very little "Recreational Physics" or "Recreational Mechanics" or "Recreational Electronics".
There is, I guess, "Recreational Programming" ... but that doesn't feel the same.
The analogy fails because the "solution" to a real world problem does not require solving the problem in a mathematical sense (i.e., fully tracing and analytically understanding the system) but rather intervening to make the problem go away.
For example, imagine your boss is harassing you. Terrance Tao says, ah, that is a complex system (two people interacting) as such we need a complex solution (a deep understanding of what lead to this occurrence, e.g., do you remind your boss of their unhappy childhood?) but the actual real world solution can be simple, e.g., change job.