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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just...” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.

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— <https://squareallworthy.tumblr.com/post/163790039847/everyon...>

Did you just

It can be part of a viable solution.

Someone’s plan when investing in early Solar panel R&D went something like: If everyone would just… “follow their economic interests” driving down the cost of panels will dramatically increase adoption further driving down costs in a feedback loop.

Unlike most “if everyone would just” plans that one actually worked because the desired behavior aligned with people’s interests.

> Someone’s plan when investing in early Solar panel R&D went something like: If everyone would just… “follow their economic interests” driving down the cost of panels will dramatically increase adoption further driving down costs in a feedback loop.

I'm not sure if that is a good paralel. The difference is that we didn't needed "everyone" to innovate on solar panels. It was enough if "someone" was, and those who did not got left behind with their inefficient processes. That's not a true "everyone would just" situation.

Getting a handful of people to act differently is rarely the issue, especially if they think they’ll get rich by doing so.

The customer base continually expanding is the “tough” side of the equation. 100’s of millions of people behaving differently is the hard part of those “If everyone would just” plans.

Its not just a tendency to assume the best or worst, instead of investigating and dealing with reality. Its a full blown feature of evolution:

Its OP. Signals engagement and understanding to society, while expending no energy on work. Idealisation is not retardation, its optimisation.

You need both people with their heads in the clouds dreaming of fantasy futures as you also need those promoting the status quo. The former gives us direction and hope (motivation) while the latter gives us stability. There is a balance. To use reinforcement learning terms: exploration and exploitation. In reality there are many more subsets that each pull in different directions. I agree that this is optimization and most of them play essential roles. But it also means we should adjust the weights and pay attention when one starts to dominate and throw things out of balance. And I'd argue that this is exactly what has happened in academia. The bureaucrats won and threw things out of balance. I'm not asking to go somewhere we've never been before, but I think many have because they don't know what the past looked like.

  > “If everyone would just...” then you do not have a solution

Unfortunately this is not a reasonable argument. I get where you're coming from but what I'm asking is that everyone just do their job. Surely "do your job" has to be a reasonable version of this.

What I mean by "not be a dick" is to check the alignment, the goals of the process compared to what we're actually achieving. What is the point? The author of the article lays out a lot of reasons and even is stating how these things are well known. Which unfortunately means someone needs to actually take action. When we're in a situation where many people want change but no one is willing to fight for that change, then we will just keep doing what we've been doing and headed where we've been headed. Even if that is knowingly off a cliff.

I don't need everyone to just do something, I only need a few more people to stand up. And yes, I will tell those that are saying "keep your head down" to shut up. Some things are worth fighting for and for me, one of those things is the integrity of science.

>[W]hat I'm asking is that everyone just do their job.

>I don't need everyone to just do something.

Naked contradiction. Either everyone needs to just do their job or not everyone needs to just do their job.

>Surely "do your job" has to be a reasonable version of this.

There are entire fields of research centered around answering why people don't 'just' do their jobs like good little worker bees in exquisite detail. Some terms I'm aware of that you may find useful to look into, in rough order of how general to the problem they are: Agency problems; the Case theorem; malicious compliance; work to rule; collective bargaining; moral hazard; perverse incentives; adverse selection; rent seeking; regulatory capture. If you want to read up on people trying to design actually working systems from scratch, look into the world of mechanism design, starting with auctions and branching outwards.

>When we're in a situation where many people want change but no one is willing to fight for that change, then we will just keep doing what we've been doing [...]

One could argue that the past ~century of scientific and technological development has probably beat any other 100 year period your could pick hands down along any natural metric. So "what we've been doing" is actually pretty great, and it may not be a good idea to stake such a hugely important enterprise on some newfangled and only theoretical ways of doing things.

> >[W]hat I'm asking is that everyone just do their job.

> >I don't need everyone to just do something.

> Naked contradiction. Either everyone needs to just do their job or not everyone needs to just do their job.

It's not a contradiction; "just something" is not the same thing as "their job". "I need everyone to do their job" does not contradict "I don't need everyone to just do something." (Emphasis added for clarity about the differences.)

  > One could argue that the past ~century of scientific and technological development has probably beat any other 100 year period

You could make this argument about most centuries. But it's a meaningless argument if the metrics you're evaluating on are implicit and assumed to be well agreed upon by all others.

My reply is the same to the other arguments you've made

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