Comment by karmacondon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karmacondon | Hacker News Reader

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The Internet. The Apollo Project. D-Day. The Manhattan Project. Federal Highways. The National Park System.

How on earth could a small organization do any of these things?

I can understand why you feel like you're living a Strange Day in an alternate universe, because the reality of human social organization is completely opposed to your thesis. If small groups are superior to large organizations in every case and in every way, why in the hell have people been forming large organizations for so long? Are we all just stupid, incapable of seeing the basic truth that you see? Were the Romans, Mongols, British, Mayans and all the others just a bunch of idiots? People have been forming ever larger organizations for the same reason that NASA is a large organization: because it's the best way to to do big things. That's why Google moved out of the garage and hired several thousand people. If small organizations were always better, startups wouldn't require investment at all.

It seems like your reasoning is based on the Homer Simpson quote, "Because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." But I can assure you, we aren't all stupid. Organizations get big because big wins.

Would you please read my comment before replying?

The exception is with highly parallelizable tasks, like fighting a war. But space exploration isn't that sort of job.

So, here's your list:

D-Day. Federal Highways. The National Park System.

Those are highly parallelizable tasks.

The internet and the Manhattan project are better examples, but it's debatable whether those things would be invented regardless of governments. They were a matter of time.

Now, about the Apollo project: Congratulations, we spent a Metric Boatload of money, and it got us what? A flag on the moon. Whoopie. The US also got to thumb their nose at Russia for a bit. That is not space exploration. That is the ability to convert a large quantity of money into a really expensive, one-time-use space car that was designed to stick a pole in the ground.

More upsettingly, the Apollo project undermined real space exploration for decades. There were some viable ideas about how this could be achieved. You may be as interested and as surprised as I was when I first realized this was true: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclearspace-03h.html

Or you can dismiss this as readily as the rest of my comments. Either way, my new years resolution is going to be to swear off any kind of politics on any kind of online forum.

People get so hung up on one of them being fundamentally better than the other when in fact their fundamental differences and the tension that creates which is actually a decent compromise between a free market and a totalitarian state. "Free markets" are fully capable of leading to mass amounts of suffering. This "strife" we experience between different systems in friction is actually healthy I think.

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