[HN Gopher] On Cultures That Build (2020)
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On Cultures That Build (2020)
Author : vwoolf
Score : 53 points
Date : 2023-11-15 16:18 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scholars-stage.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (scholars-stage.org)
| reidjs wrote:
| This article really did not age well.
|
| As misguided as our policies were during the pandemic, It's sort
| of ironic reading this article knowing that American companies
| "built" the coronavirus vaccine.
| creer wrote:
| American and european companies yes, public institutions maybe
| less so - What public institutions did do, for once, is
| decisively pour money at these private companies and letting
| them do their thing. And that does count. But it's not exactly
| the common course of action.
| kragen wrote:
| lots of countries built covid vaccines; moderna in the usa was
| probably the first, but weren't allowed to provide the vaccine
| to people who wanted to vaccinate until november, long after
| the prc had vaccinated its entire military and political class,
| as well as any students studying abroad
|
| moreover, even inside the usa, moderna's vaccine was only made
| publicly available months after covid had killed most of the
| most vulnerable people
|
| here in argentina our first vaccinations didn't come until the
| next year, and they were russian sputnik v, not pfizer or
| moderna, because the companies in the usa couldn't produce
| enough to meet demand. the russians struggled with this too,
| but were still able to deliver earlier
|
| of course the following statement is even more true of the
| chinese and russian covid vaccine efforts
|
| > _In the 21st century, the main question in American social
| life is not "how do we make that happen?" but "how do we get
| management to take our side?" This is a learned response_
|
| whether it is true in general or not of the chinese or russian
| economies, i cannot say. the article argues that it is false in
| china, but virtually everything it says about chinese history
| is so wrong as to be nearly the opposite of what I understand
| to be the truth, so I don't trust it
|
| the fact that you couldn't get chinese and russian vaccines in
| the usa (and apparently don't know about them) has nothing to
| do with who could and couldn't build covid vaccines and
| everything to do with whose side management took
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > today's children rarely leave the sight of adult authority
| figures, and have learned instead to solve conflicts by appeal to
| authority
|
| My niece who dealt with the kid hitting her on the playground
| every day by throwing a cinderblock at his face respectfully
| disagrees. I'm not sure this author has seen a modern public
| school.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Playground fights are almost as old as playgrounds themselves.
| itishappy wrote:
| How'd that go for her? I've heard stories like this typically
| end with both children receiving a stern reprimand from
| authority figures, which may end up reinforcing the behaviors
| from the article. I'd hope that's not the case, but it's been a
| while since I've seen a modern public school.
| toolz wrote:
| > Private enterprise was caught as unprepared as everyone else,
| and has subsequently struggled to produce a tenth of the
| innovative counter-virus workarounds their Chinese counterparts
| managed to dream up (and that under much greater time pressure).
|
| It's absolutely mind-boggling that the first 3 countries hit hard
| by covid were China, Korea and Italy. China and Korea appeared to
| keep it contained and given everything we know about trusting
| these two countries, we chose to trust the Chinese model?
|
| In Feb of 2020 the U.S. committee of foreign affairs was posting
| documents detailing some of the lies China has told[0], but we
| chose to trust their data in one of the biggest crisis of our
| lifetime?
|
| Meanwhile, Korea was being pretty open with their approach and
| while I don't think it would've been effective in the U.S. it was
| certainly the more palatable approach and less damaging to the
| poor and most vulnerable population.
|
| We also saw Italy using the Chinese model for containment and it
| failed miserably, yet the U.S. stood firm in following their
| failures. Insisting that we protect the middle and upper class
| while demanding the lower class keep the "important" jobs running
| and giving the poverty class nowhere to turn.
|
| [0] https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/02/...
| chongli wrote:
| This piece hasn't aged well. What worked for China in the
| beginning of the pandemic had the opposite effect later on.
| While the West was opening back up and getting on with life,
| China was in the throes of a second wave while at the same time
| battling serious internal resistance to "Covid Zero" policies.
| In the end, the government relented to the pressure.
| toolz wrote:
| Indeed, and that was always the logical conclusion. We've
| never made perfectly effective vaccines that fast and we knew
| the virus was global. It was always going to find its way
| into China and run rampant to everyone without immunity
| whenever society opened back up and all of that is assuming
| their isolation actually works to begin with. There was no
| other option and I struggle to understand how that wasn't
| plain to see even in early 2020 when we had confirmed cases
| all around the world.
|
| Were we really banking on making a perfect vaccine before the
| world couldn't sustain lock-downs? If not, what was the
| "real" plan? I believe it was probably all just political
| game-theory, but it's hard not to wonder if there were people
| at the top hoping poor people could take the brunt of the
| contagion and die off before the rich people started going
| back into public.
| svnt wrote:
| In most places policy seemed to be dictated by preserving
| the essential function of the health care system and to a
| lesser extent the sanity of the health care workers.
|
| When ICU beds filled or looked like they might, we
| optimized for not having excess people drowning in cytokine
| storms in the waiting rooms. It doesn't seem very nefarious
| to me.
| toolz wrote:
| That was the goal of both Korea and China, both of them
| early on appeared to reach this goal. That goal is not
| nefarious, but choosing the Chinese model when we watched
| it fail in Italy does appear to be gross incompetence
| since we did know without question that the Chinese model
| would have drastic consequences whether it succeeded or
| not.
| svnt wrote:
| I guess I'm not sure what your implied alternative is to
| the "Chinese Model" which I don't think anyone can
| credibly say we accurately emulated -- what would you
| have preferred we do and whose model would that have
| been? Sweden's?
| toolz wrote:
| Today? It should go without saying we shouldn't have
| locked down. Somehow there are still people holding onto
| the idea it was a justified measure, but what we know
| today simply makes that option look absurd in hindsight.
| Sweden in particular? Sure, despite what the media was
| trying to sell, all of the scandanavian countries had
| similar strategies and (including sweden) ended up faring
| better than the average european country. So I wouldn't
| say Sweden specifically, because that's just a political
| hot topic. Norway, which also didn't actually lock down
| (just look at oxfords covid stringency index if you don't
| believe me) did very well.
|
| I suspect you're asking what would I have done at the
| time, though, and I think at the time the most practical
| approach was Korea's contact tracing and just like we've
| done for as long as I've been alive, staying at home
| would be something recommended for the sick. Lock downs
| were at no point in the pandemic a reasonable strategy,
| not even explicitly in the context of saving our
| healthcare system. Just look at how many hospitals have
| gone bankrupt and had to lay off huge amounts of staff.
| Our hospital system suffered the most because of
| lockdowns, not because of covid.
| aragonite wrote:
| > In Feb of 2020 the U.S. committee of foreign affairs was
| posting documents detailing some of the lies China has told[0],
| but we chose to trust their data in one of the biggest crisis
| of our lifetime?
|
| Have you actually read the document you linked to?[1] Are you
| seriously arguing China is not to be trusted because it "lied
| to us" about "Xi Jinping being the President of China", about
| it "lifting its citizens out of poverty and improving their
| lives", about it "not being a threat to Americans' way of
| life"?
|
| Almost every single "lie" listed in there is an _assessment_ ,
| a normative statement/conclusion, something you may agree,
| disagree, criticize as irrational, reach the opposite
| assessment etc., but for which the concept of "lying" is simply
| inappropriate.
|
| [1] 1. Lie: Xi Jinping is the President of China.
|
| 2. Lie: The CCP is lifting its citizens out of poverty and
| improving their lives.
|
| 3. Lie: China is a benign power, not interested in territorial
| expansion.
|
| 4. Lie: The CCP is not interested in spreading its digital
| authoritarian system to other countries.
|
| 5. Lie: The CCP is not a threat to Americans' way of life,
| including our education system and personal freedoms.
|
| 6. Lie: China's rise is inevitable
|
| 7. Lie: China is a champion of multilateralism and the "global
| south."
|
| 8. Lie: China is a market economy
|
| 9. Lie: China remains an unmissable opportunity for businesses.
|
| 10.Lie: China is a leader in the response to climate change.
| toolz wrote:
| Does it matter if the document is incorrect? It's an official
| document from the committee of foreign affairs showing that
| the U.S. stance on China is that they lie about various
| things.
|
| I don't care how substantial those things are, I care that
| the official stance was one that China lies a lot and then we
| proceeded to mimic their covid response while we had other
| options from more reputable sources (i.e. Korea).
| aragonite wrote:
| I fail to see any inconsistency between the two. One of the
| most often repeated cliches regarding China is "don't
| listen to what they say, watch what they do." Let's assume,
| hypothetically, that we genuinely (and not as a matter of
| political rhetoric) believe that everything China _says_ is
| a lie. This skepticism towards their words simply doesn 't
| logically extend to their actions -- especially when those
| actions (i.e. how they responded to their own Covid
| situation) were _in their own self-interest_ and could be
| independently verified. This is just a logical observation:
| Unless you believe that China intentionally responded to
| Covid in self-destructive ways in the hopes that US might
| copy their responses, there 's simply no inconsistency
| between the "official stance" you linked to and what you
| referred to as the subsequent "mimicking".
| toolz wrote:
| It was in China's own self-interest to under-report their
| casualties to covid. They were forced to choose some form
| of action, but that does not mean their choice was the
| correct one. Also, there was little to no independent
| verification of their reported numbers. China doesn't
| just let foreign interests come into their country and
| investigate.
| lsy wrote:
| While I agree that much of what is wrong with society boils down
| to a lack of civic participation and familiarity with
| institution-building, what I think this article perhaps misses is
| that social and technological changes militate against the
| effectiveness of a robust civil society. As conglomerates and
| governments can expand their reach through communications and
| management technologies, it becomes more feasible for
| institutions to manage large jurisdictions at a distance without
| intermediaries. And that same ability to grow to a large size
| also prevents smaller organizations from arising and seeing any
| effectiveness in their efforts.
|
| I also disagree that Silicon Valley represents any kind of
| solution to this issue. The centralization of power in the Valley
| is almost more extreme than in the "old world", as multinational
| companies dominate the industry and destroy competition. Most
| people will do better for themselves financially by joining the
| elect of the fiefdoms of FAANG than by fruitlessly attempting to
| build a smaller company or product, and the big companies keep it
| that way through massive networks of financialization and
| regulatory capture.
|
| In order for civic and social institutions, or small self-built
| institutions, to be attractive to Americans, people who join them
| have to have some experience of succeeding in their aims, and I
| think this is less and less the case, as the institutions that
| already exist suck the oxygen out of the space of potential
| action.
| creer wrote:
| Silicon Valley is (still) an example of vitality. You don't
| have to join small companies as a founder or for more than a
| reasonably well paying job. You don't have to be part of the
| few who will rack their brains trying to find ways to sneak in
| between the FAANGs.
|
| Civic participation, by constrast, is difficult because it runs
| into the giant morass of public institutions laws and rules.
| Well serving the political forces in places but again not much
| to do with the FAANGs. (For example, while the city of Mountain
| View professes its pride in Google, it fights everything that
| Google wants to do inch by inch. Google doesn't exactly find
| much "proud cooperation" with its city.)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| It took emigration to another country for me to first
| experience the web of overlapping voluntary associations as a
| basis for town life which Tocqueville had noted when describing
| (an earlier instantiation of) the Old Country in _Democracy in
| America_ (1835).
| igammarays wrote:
| Best part was in the footnotes.
|
| > There was a time when average Americans could get together and,
| in one afternoon, build an entire barn.
|
| > Yes! A barn! Can you imagine average Americans doing that
| today? Not a chance!
|
| > They'd spend weeks debating the membership and organizational
| structure of the Barn Architect Selection Committee, whose
| members would then get into a lengthy squabble over the design of
| the logo to appear on their letterhead. Ultimately this issue
| would become a bitter and drawn-out dispute, be taken to court,
| and the people involved would start complaining of depression and
| anxiety, and psychologists would announce that these people were
| victims of a new disease called Barn Committee Logo Dispute
| Distress Syndrome, or BCLDDS, which would become the subject of
| one-hour shows by Phil Donahue and Sally Jessy Raphael, after
| which millions of Americans would realize that they, too, were
| suffering from BCLDDS, and they'd form support groups with Hot
| Line numbers and twelve-step programs. That's what we modern
| Americans do.
| jrumbut wrote:
| The Logo Subcommittee of the Barn Architect Selection Committee
| actually sounds like something Americans would form back in the
| halcyon days when we did build things.
|
| Some mediocre little guy got to call himself "subcommittee
| chairman" and be king for a day while he made pronouncements on
| barn logos (and got a little experience in leadership for
| future occasions). Everyone who cared about the barn logo had
| their say, got to give input and be heard, and so they felt
| they owned the end result.
|
| The committee was inefficient as hell, but the end result was
| that people were bought in because they got a little slice of
| the power and prestige. They didn't just get paid, they got a
| little standing in the community. They made their mark of the
| whole project and that feeling is one of the greatest
| motivators to work in the world.
|
| So when it came time to raise the barn they were dynamos
| because they wanted to see _their_ logo on high.
|
| Compare that to today when I give my TaskRabbit barn raiser
| $200 to raise my barn. They aren't invested in the success of
| the barn, they just want to do the least barn raising for the
| most money while I want them to raise the most barn for the
| least dollars. Our relationship is adversarial. I'm under no
| obligation to listen to anything the barn raiser has to say and
| the only way they can express dissatisfaction is by quitting.
| creer wrote:
| That's fair, yes. At the same time when the process takes
| long enough, it's hard to retain any sense of ownership by
| the end. Exhaustion is more like it.
| bluGill wrote:
| While the barn was built in a day, months were spend before
| hand perparing. All the lumber was prepared by a much small
| group. Building a barn (the old way - without modern cranes)
| requires many many humans to lift and old large heavy beams
| into place while other parts are all set together. Eventually
| it becomes self supporting and everyone can go home, but there
| is a time when you need dozens of humans all working together
| or the job cannot be done. This was carefully planned, and
| everyone coming to a barn raising would check (to various
| amounts depending on how much you trusted the organizer) that
| all the premade parts were already made so that they could get
| done in a day. Even after the barn was built there often was a
| lot time between a barn shaped building, and a building you
| could use for barn purposes.
|
| The barn raising is a big event that has obvious visual
| progress. I've seen bridged being built - they work for months
| with seaming little progress (putting in foundations!) before
| they put up beams - before then it looks like nothing, then in
| a few days they have the beams up and they are painting lines
| on the new bridge.
| creer wrote:
| Cultural sclerosis may "simply" be a mix of unintended
| consequence and deliberately intended consequence (sabotage). The
| impetus for much of our legal system might be fine but not paying
| attention to unintended consequences then results in sclerosis.
| This is easy to achieve in an accreting system of rules and laws:
| "Let's just add one more rule - that will sort it out right up".
|
| There are fields of (american) activity that clearly understand
| the strength in building things fast - and that are designed for
| that. The startup world is still one of these - both for starting
| a new venture and for deploying fast and sorting out the details
| later. This is about the "rules of the game" and the
| infrastructure (funding, legal entity formation, getting people
| to join, hosting, software tools...) All around, the
| infrastructure and culture support the principle.
|
| Other institutions seem built as-if for endlessly delaying
| projects. In most cases this was not the goal. And in some cases,
| that IS the goal: it works so well that some don't let it go to
| waste.
|
| Still other institutions DO exist so as to allow moving
| legislation at a decent pace but have fallen out of favor - with
| the executive prefering endless ad-hoc informal processes in the
| vague hope of achieving unity, consensus, peace well in advance
| of actual change. With not much change possible as a result.
|
| That is not to say that "emergency committees" don't make plenty
| of harm. Brings to mind the ruling against fat and in favor of
| carbs: [Senator: I do not have the luxury. My constituents are
| dying. I can't wait for your scientific data.]
|
| But this should be a deliberate area of effort: improving
| institutions for time effectiveness and correctness. Even from a
| basic economics point of view, there is quite a bit of economic
| growth potential that comes merely from responsiveness. Same from
| a quality of life point of view. When need is recognized, pouring
| money in study (scientific, engineering, legal...) including
| study of unintended effects, then moving on with a ruling. Which
| does not mean in the sense of "environmental impact study" which
| seems to have become a weapon: a financial barrier against doing
| anything.
|
| In other cases, strength should be in recognizing that headline
| cause X is not actually an emergency and tabling it until it
| naturally accretes more data or is simply forgotten.
| innagadadavida wrote:
| We don't appreciate the maintainers much. Look at Linux, Git or
| any other open source project. The initial inspiration was
| absolutely needed but continued maintenance culture is what made
| them successful and have lasted decades.
| creer wrote:
| It's maintenance but this one is "responsive" maintenance. It's
| not aiming at the status quo. The current Linux is serving the
| current mix of Linux applications - much broader and different
| from the "old" one. It's not just keeping it going until better
| replaces it. It is ITSELF the better thing that constantly
| replaces it. Which is all the more admirable. And results is
| well deserved increased market share. It is "building".
| kragen wrote:
| free software licenses means that any person or company can
| maintain their own fork of linux or git, and if the software is
| useful to them and nobody else maintains it to their
| satisfaction, probably will. git means they can easily
| incorporate the work of other people who are doing the same
| thing instead of duplicating it
|
| the maintainers are doing excellent and praiseworthy work, but
| this is not just a result of 'culture' but also incentives: if
| they aren't sufficiently responsive to user needs, they'll
| quickly find themselves maintaining software with a user base
| of only themselves
|
| the problem with this theory is that it can't explain the
| absence of successful forks of python 2, wikipedia, and firefox
| jonstewart wrote:
| The old Sam Huntington cultural determinism nonsense...
| Animats wrote:
| _" While this was happening, the civic and religious institutions
| that Americans traditionally relied on to manage their own
| affairs were quietly disappearing. Some organizations, like
| religious boards, unions, and bowling clubs, declined in number;
| others, like charities and NGOs, switched from a model of mass
| participation to a model of mass donations. Add it all together
| and you find that the percentage of Americans expected to be
| familiar with Robert's Rules of Order shrunk precipitously."_
|
| This is a good point. Do you belong to any non-governmental
| organization where the members can vote to fire top management,
| and this happens once in a while? A golf club? A maker space? A
| gym? A homeowners association? A mutual insurance company? A
| savings and loan? A school? Anything? Such institutions used to
| be common for non-profits. Now they are rare.
|
| Robert's Rules of Order is for meetings where the members hold
| the power. Motions are voted upon and then are binding on the
| organization. Unless the members have power, it's just a talk
| shop.
|
| When someone set up a local maker space, they set it up as a
| nonprofit with a self-perpetuating board. That is, the management
| chooses its own successors. I declined to contribute.
| kiba wrote:
| My makerspace is member elected.
| svnt wrote:
| The management isn't the board, that's the point. The
| management is overseen by the board and the board entrusts the
| function of the organization to management while they help set
| direction.
|
| Separately, I can't find the example but Robert's Rules for
| Order can be trivially DDoSed and have been in order to bring
| down or paralyze organizations. I think there was a
| conversation here about it some time back.
|
| Nonprofits are legally required to have boards, AFAIK. What
| would you have preferred the nonprofit do?
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _On Cultures That Build_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23569638 - June 2020 (189
| comments)
| 3seashells wrote:
| Taxation by a extractive hacking mindset disconnected from
| societal feedback by still working abstractions like money?
| bluGill wrote:
| Robert Moses and a few others like him are why we don't build
| fast. We can - we have just learned the hard way that some things
| are not worth building and so we threw roadblocks in the way to
| prevent those abuses. (safety standards are another thing we
| threw in that makes building take longer for what I think we
| would all agree is good reason)
|
| Sometimes I think we went too far the other way, but lets not
| swing too far back.
| javajosh wrote:
| Productivity takes two forms: building new things and optimizing
| old ones. The former is not sustainable, but the latter is.
| Nature will not permit unbounded growth, but she will permit the
| pursuit of arbitrarily tight tolerances. To me, this is the key
| cultural shift that America requires: not to build to expand, but
| build to improve. There is a feeling of compression, intricacy,
| delicacy here. That is, we can stay legitimately busy increasing
| the fractal complexity (and beauty) of society and infrastructure
| without expanding. If we nostalgically fetishize growth, we may
| feel better in the short term but we become a destructive virus
| in the long term.
| m0llusk wrote:
| This could just be a bunch of errors. The subway issue is a good
| example of this. The initial NYC subway was put in place with cut
| and cover construction. Because it was so long ago there were
| minimal obstacles. The Second Avenue subway was proposed early
| on, but even back in the day it was rejected as being far too
| expensive because of the complications caused by the soils,
| existing subway routes, and other infrastructure. Over the years
| the possibility of a Second Avenue subway was repeatedly raised
| and rejected as being far too expensive because of unavoidable
| complications. Then in the 1990s NYC politicians decided that
| miraculous new tunnel boring technology would make the Second
| Avenue subway easy and cheap. Modern technology solves all
| problems. It was a "no brainer". They decided to it was time to
| be a culture that builds. And the result was a terrible mess. The
| tunnel boring technology eventually worked, but only after much
| complication and multiple explosions of costs.
|
| So what is being advocated here appears to be the opposite of the
| truth. In the past things were relatively quick because we knew
| our limits and when to stop. We used to be a culture that could
| refuse to build. In contrast, this modern idea of being the
| culture that decides now is the time to build leads us astray so
| vast fortunes end up being spent on misguided adventures. Want to
| be a culture that is good at building quickly? Start by saying no
| to most things. And try to understand history as it is and not
| through meaningless comparisons of cut and cover subway
| construction to the modern wonders of tunnel boring machines.
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