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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

I disagree - this doesn’t make it more accessible for people who don’t have the means, it drowns the receivers in bureaucracy and forces them to do orders of magnitude more work out of a lack of understanding. It’s debatable whether or not these systems are built in good faith to allow benefit claimants to appeal or not, but what will happen here is the appeals process will be clamped down on, hard and heavy.

It’s the equivalent of downloading the entire source code of chrome to access a website. are you entitled to do it? Absolutely. Is it a gigantic pain in the ass for the person who has to serve you the 2GB of source code from their git mirror? Yep

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>it drowns the receivers in bureaucracy

Huh, the receivers in this case are the bureaucracy. The senders are the one that has to navigate said bureaucracy.

So, the entire thing is a wash. The systems are complex and confusing, many of them likely by design. Getting an appointment in some of them can take months. Knowing what you actually need can be daunting as quite often there is a byzantine set of requirements that depends on your exact situation and any missed information could take weeks or months to get another visit.

>the receivers in this case are the bureaucracy

As someone that has worked in a bureaucracy, yes, bureaucrats are themselves victims of bureaucracy. One could even say the primary victims, if you’re going by total exposure time.

Which is why they get paid, of course. I feel more sympathy to the recipients ts who are eligible for benefits but unable to receive them due to onerous paperwork. AI is an equalizer between the desperate amateur and the bureaucratic professionals who know how to effectively navigate their side of the system.

For example, I just hooked an agent up to call my internet company to negotiate a discount. Without that capability, I am either financially taxed by paying too much, or cognitively and time taxed by having to do it myself.

My wife works in handling large grant applications for government. She works with the applicants through the process and then evaluates the app when it comes in. She guesses that about half of her work comes from 3 or 4 cases which are clear failures on basic criteria, they have been repeatedly told they need to fix those cases and when the decision is made, they appeal it on every single minute point. They are absolutely entitled to do this, but the reality is it’s not going to help someone who doesn’t understand why they’re not getting the funding in the first place place. But because it’s government, the appeal gets treated as though it’s coming from a place of legitimate effort when in the last 12 months it’s a chatGPT phishing expedition.

Sorry, I don’t understand. Do you mean it’s fraudulent and just trying to find someone who rubber stamps it so they can get benefits they are not entitled to?

Yeah, say there's a "major criteria" A, which they don't meet, aren't close to meeting, and have been told they will fail their application on. There's then criteria B, C, D which are a bit more nuanced, and require a lot more detail. A is a prereq for B, C, and D, and directly impacts the criteria for B, C, and D. The application is failed for not meeting Criteria A.

The appeal comes in asking for all of the subjective feedback and analysis on B, C and D. Because it's government, she has to provide all of that but the reality is that if they fix _all of those issues_, the application will still fail due to the original reason. But it's 10x more work to actually prepare the report for B, C, and D to that level (which is one of the reasons A is a prerequisite). The groups are just looking for any reason on the other criteria to say that they've been unfairly treated and to raise publicly, when the problem is they don't meet the primary criteria in the first place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75oun5gvDAU&t=116s

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