This is hard, but typically, it happens when their interest doesn’t lead to the same decision as “the right thing.” This might not be inherently wrong: if you have a family who depends on you, keeping your job and making money is a morally valid choice.
What you want is for people to frequently see “doing the right thing” as the same as acting is what they see as their own interest: if being kind and polite gets you allies at work, and that’s how you get heard, respected promoted, or find a job, then people will be kind.
Things like cost-cutting to the point where there are legitimate risks to life are hard to find; therefore, people see others cost-cutting and getting promoted because they “stayed within budget” but (within their limited direct observation) never sanctioned. Engineers see project leaders getting away with it, but there are not good reputation mechanisms individualized enough: it’s “project managers always push for the cheapest…” Therefore, any PM who tries to go against the grain faces both prejudice and sanctions for not cutting costs.
You can implement reviews, promotions and reputation mechanisms that encourage behaviors that align short-term personal interest with the long-term benefit of the larger organization and stakeholders, but it’s really hard and non-trivial. Large organizations are far less efficient than they could be because of all the self-interested rent-seeking behavior, but the economies of scale are so strong that it doesn’t matter.
Not OP, but for me it was recognition that this perception is my own problem to solve, that the vast majority of the entire world is trying to do the right thing by their own perception, and that I lack enough context to be the judge. Which isn't to say there are no bad actors, but right about the time you think everybody but you is wrong, it's worth taking a step back and reevaluating.
Humanity has had people who did not care about doing the right thing since forever, and still we thrived. As long as someone is doing the right thing, we're on the right track.
It helps to give power to people who care about doing the right thing, instead of to people who don't care. Democracy tends towards the former, but capitalism tends towards the latter.
No, your skepticism is warranted. Democracy tries to select for people doing the right thing, but of course people interested in power will try to game the system by pretending to do the right thing.
I think that’s right. It’s hard to know from a distance “they are definitely doing the right thing” so the appearance of doing the right thing is valued. Then, as a politician, appearing to do the right thing is sufficient and then pretending to do the right thing is often cheaper/higher output per unit of input, so pretending is rewarded.
The problem is not democracy (everyone getting an equal vote) but representative democracy (everyone getting a vote on a person once every N years who then gets the power to do what they want which they hopefully did not lie about in order to get those votes).
Delegation (everyone getting an equal vote on all issues but being able to designate someone else to vote on their behalf on any given issue without forfeiting the right to vote directly on other issues) does not suffer this problem and is arguably more democratic.
Additionally certain forms of representative democracy make this problem worse like first-past-the-post voting resulting in strategic voting, i.e. voting not for the person you think best represents your interests but most likely to win while still representing some of your interests, encouraging politicians to do the bare minimum and avoid taking strong stances on divisive issues to remain "electable".
The problem is that representative democracy centralizes power in a ruling class (sometimes literally, due to nepotism and dynastic reputations) whereas delegation maintains decentralized power while allowing for that power to be temporarily centralized (e.g. many people delegating to the same individual) but always with the understanding that everyone is free to reclaim their power by withdrawing it from their delegate on a case by case basis. In Germany a variant of this was promoted by the Pirate Party under the label "liquid democracy" - although they of course heavily focused on a possible technological implementation of it rather than promoting the idea itself first.
I've been thinking about something similar. Before the internet, this sort of system would be extremely impractical, and representative democracy is a pretty obvious choice, given the limitations of the time. But now, with the internet, it's a lot easier to handle this in a fluid way with little friction.
The only downside might be that deep discussions of nuanced topics between the delegates might be useless if most votes ignore the discussion. Compromise might get a lot harder, and nuance and depth might be lost. On the other hand, it might also kill corporate lobbying. It's worth a try, and definitely an improvement over first-past-the-post systems and those where politicians are bought by corporate interests.
The problem with "liquid democracy" is that it's unappealing to those who would have to implement it because it takes away their power (and financial prospects in the form of lobbying). It's the same problem as with trying to replace first-past-the-post voting (i.e. why should the major parties that always get to be in government do something that would give the smaller parties a better chance).
That reminds me of Bruce Schneier's notion of security theater [1]. Implementing ineffective measures that give a feeling of being the right thing on superficial view, in security or elsewhere.
Populism has understood that thoroughly.
> people interested in power will try to game the system
There need to be heavy consequences. You used to be ostracized, at least for some short period of time and in some scenarios, for selfish behaviour. Now, it seems like we approve of and even encourage douchebags because everyone's gotta get theirs.
> Democracy tries to select for people doing the right thing
If this was true, wouldn't democracy improve standard school curriculum so the general public at least has a chance at being able to choose quality leadership, see through the incessant lying/untruthfulness and misinformation of politicians and the media/journalists, have the ability to at least sometimes think of things from an absolute (what is maybe possible, were we to try) rather than relative perspective, etc, instead of being led around by their noses like oblivious if perhaps well meaning schoolchildren by these people?
Yes. And they do. The functioning ones, at least. Corrupt democracies obviously don't, but that's the nature of corruption. But I'm pretty sure the best education systems are generally found in democracies.
Do "democracy", "functioning", "obviously", "don't", "is/am/are", have precise, useful and non-misinformative meanings in this context?
In other important fields (anything involving money for example, or programming), do we sometimes discuss things accurately, and consider things with respect to what is or may be possible, and (actually, objectively) true (basically: pursue optimality)? Might it be at least plausibly beneficial to consider applying that rigour to evaluating and designing our democracy?
You can deconstruct language all you want, but it's not going to change basic facts. You're not going to find quality education in North Korea. You will find it in Finland.
You can state your vague opinions as facts all you want, but it doesn't make them facts.
Imagine if we wrote code the way we talk about political matters, where trying to be correct was considered wrong, worthy of punishment or banishment.
Or for a more apt analogy: imagine if the inaccuracy and untruthfulness in threads like this was tried in a thread about technology right here on HN: do you think that would stand unchallenged, and do you think those challenging untruths would be considered to be doing it wrong?
> You're not going to find quality education in North Korea. You will find it in Finland.
Is Finland the absolute pinnacle of what's possible?
And is there some reason the US cannot replicate across the country the quality offered there?
Perhaps I missed the class where we learned we should not think about such things - rather, whatever intuition pops into our minds is correct, necessarily.
I have no idea what kind of weird language game you're trying to play. If you have a problem with vague opinions, maybe you should be more clear about what you're trying to say there. You make vague claims of wrongness, inaccuracy, untruthfulness, and even punishment or banishment, without making clear what the fuck you're hinting at.
You doubt that democracies tend to have better education than dictatorships? Why? Do you have any basis for that doubt?
If you look at lists of countries with the best education, the top is dominated by democracies, with Finland usually at the top. Lots of dictatorships around the world are not exactly known for their quality education. The only exception to that that I can think of are communist dictatorships: Cuba has apparently pretty good doctors, the old USSR was pretty big on research and engineering, and China is currently investing heavily in engineering.
But their educations tend to focus entirely on STEM fields, and not on fields that might lead people to question the politics of the system; it's vital for the survival of dictatorships to suppress that kind of thinking.
> Is Finland the absolute pinnacle of what's possible?
I don't see why. There's always room for improvement.
> And is there some reason the US cannot replicate across the country the quality offered there?
Americans always claim that their country is too big to replicate the successes of Europe. I think that's bullshit; there's a political drive to keep government programs that help the people underfunded, to keep people stupid and poor, particularly from the Republican party that's increasingly pushing the US towards dictatorship. Because they know critical thinking is not going to help their case.
Imagine a scenario where a technology is invented, and it is working pretty good, and in some places it is objectively better than other places (it is better on a relative basis), which results in it having the appearance of being very good on an absolute basis.
Now, add in someone suggesting that it could plausibly be much better (for the sake of argument lets say 50% better), and this improvement could be very beneficial to humanity (let's throw in some compounding, self-reinforcing positive feedback loop effects), and this person just so happens (in this thought experiment) to be correct, though it is not possible to know he is correct (perhaps because of the nature and quality of the technology itself). However, for this 50% increase in optimality to actually happen, it just so happens to require substantial (say, 10%) public support, but that support cannot be achieved because of limitations caused by the technology itself.
((It would be nice to be able to branch thought experiments....I think doing one with and without that last attribute would produce interesting results.))
Now, we could swap in various object level technologies into this thought experiment, and see how things appear. My suggestion is that when swapping in education, this resembles the situation we are actually in, but because of the nature of this particular variable, we are not only not able to realize it, we cannot even consider it.
Hopefully this is clearer?
--------------
Or another angle: consider how we are constantly improving so many things, like really working hard at it (that's what I do all day every day where I work), yet: are there (or might there be) some things that we are not working really hard at improving, that an omniscient Oracle could see (and maybe we could as well, if we were able to look, or at least try) contain massive amounts of unseen, low-hanging fruit? And, might education be one of these things? (Or: culture, "democracy", etc?)
Or another angle: do humans in 2024 have any sacred cows?
>> Sacred cow is an idiom, a figurative reference to cattle in religion and mythology. A sacred cow is a figure of speech for something considered immune from question or criticism, especially unreasonably so.[1][better source needed] This idiom is thought to originate in American English, although similar or even identical idioms occur in many other languages.
Background
>> The idiom is based on the popular understanding of the elevated place of cows in Hinduism and appears to have emerged in America in the late 19th century.
>> A literal sacred cow or sacred bull is an actual cow or bull that is treated with sincere respect.
>> One writer has suggested that there is an element of paradox in the concept of respect for a sacred cow, as illustrated in a comment about the novelist V. S. Naipaul: "V. S. Naipaul ... has the ability to distinguish the death of an ordinary ox, which, being of concern to no one, may be put quickly out of its agony, from that of a sacred cow, which must be solicitously guarded so that it can die its agonizing death without any interference."
I think a legitimately relevant reference to things like climate change, nuclear weapons, etc could be made here (with respect to the "so that it can die its agonizing death without any interference"....if we don't smarten up, we may be walking blind into big trouble), but I have to get my ass into work!
A bit. You seem to be talking about a thought experiment involving theoretical societal improvements and an omniscient oracle. I'm talking about real countries and parties and political movements that care about democracy generally being aware that an educated electorate is vital for a well-functioning democracy, while dictators and people looking for a more restrictive and dogmatic society are generally aware that certain ideas and knowledge are a threat to their rules or their ideas about society.
Of course there's a contradiction in there, and one that many people today are struggling with: the ideas that promote that restrictive/dogmatic society could themselves be a threat to an open democratic society. Should we allow those ideas and risk our open democratic society, or should we restrict them and thereby become less open and democratic? What happens if people vote against democracy? Which is essentially the same question as: does freedom and bodily autonomy mean you can sell yourself into slavery? Popper's paradox of tolerance also feels related, although that's easier to resolve.
But anyway, I think it's pretty clear we're talking about completely different issues.
> You seem to be talking about a thought experiment involving theoretical societal improvements and an omniscient oracle.
Yes, the omniscient oracle is a representation of the ability in thought experiments to know via the definition of the thought experiment what is true (virtually, within the thought experiment). This is unlike the object level reality we live in and are discussing, where what is true is only somewhat known (which itself often cannot be known) - for example, in this scenario, it is not known:
- what goes on behind closed doors in political circles
- what the intentions of all political participants are
- to what degree each individual person within our "democracies" are optimal
- to what degree the complex structural design of our "democracies" is optimal, or is as advertised/perceived to be <---- this is, the point of contention
> I'm talking about real countries and parties and political movements....
Let's see:
> ...that...
Wait minute....what is the nature of this "realness", where you can somehow possess knowledge of many thousands of object level actors and activities whom you have never met, and have no way of monitoring?
> ...care about democracy generally being aware that an educated electorate is vital for a well-functioning democracy, while dictators and people looking for a more restrictive and dogmatic society are generally aware that certain ideas and knowledge are a threat to their rules or their ideas about society.
Here you seem to be comparing "democracies" to dictatorships, an easy win, as if somehow the point of contention in the text of the conversation above is that. It is not.
You have not ~disproven or even argued against the speculative question/proposition contained within the thought experiment, but rather dodged it.
> Of course there's a contradiction in there....
That is not the only problem in there.
Noteworthy: accurately and comprehensively discerning the ideas contained within language (thought experiments, etc), with proper usage and references to object level vs abstract representations of reality (which can easily be mistaken for the thing itself, people being what they are) is a fairly sophisticated skill...one that needs to be learned, and that can easily not be noticed to be lacking, particularly during the discussion of "culture war" topics like this one.
Here you are referring to "democracy" the abstract concept, but there is another existence of democracy: the object level entity that manages our affairs (and all the other things that the individual actors do within it: some known, some unknown, some hallucinated), and like any object level entity, it is only as good as it is. And, our ability to know what that is, is limited, a factual phenomenon which many people's knowledge of is also limited. And, this state of affairs is directly downstream from our education system.
> But anyway, I think it's pretty clear we're talking about completely different issues.
Yes, and it may not be possible to be otherwise, which I would say is strong evidence for my very point: the quality of our educational system is suspiciously (to me) low, on an absolute scale, and that it is very interesting that many if not most people do not have the ability to question, as they could easily do with most other things (how fast a car can go, how efficient an algorithm is, whether an ideology opposed to one's preferred ideology (ie: dictatorships) is flawed, etc), the very organizations that exert control over the world they live in more than any other.
I really struggle to understand how this can be so universally uninteresting, and I truly wonder if it is purely organic.
Only if all the political parties benefit from people being able to make good judgements. If you have a party that benefits from an uninformed or misinformed public then it's significantly easier to lead them around through fear and lies than it is to govern well. Once they gain power they can reduce education spending, meaning they have more people they can direct more easily. Meaning they can get more power, and repeat the cycle.
If this is true in a two party system, would it not be logical to expect that the party that does not want to exploit an ignorant population would be directing significant attention and resources to educate the public while they hold power (and engaging in non-stop rhetoric on the matter at all times), which if all goes well could gain the support of the educated, permanently?
I sometimes wonder if people have somehow been conditioned to not think about this topic with the seriousness it deserves. I wonder, if we were to search through various academic literature about the nature of humans, might we find some theories about how it may be possible to pull something like this off?
Most democratic countires have capitalist style manufacturing industries so I'm not sure that holds. Non capitalist attemots to make planes haven't gone that well.
Though you can regulate capitalism better. Encourage founders to run the things rather than buy out guys, have better trade unions and so on.
> Democracy tends towards the former, but capitalism tends towards the latter.
How did you arrive at this conclusion? The earliest versions of democracy used sortition for selection and thus couldn't account for doing the right thing. And of course we all know about the "tyranny of the majority" so I wonder why you believe democracy is somehow biased to selecting "people who care about doing the right thing".
Democracy represents the will of the people, who, in general tend to care about morality and doing the right thing (although of course they can be misled and manipulated). Capitalism tends towards maximising profit, which often comes at the cost of doing the right thing.
> I wonder why you believe democracy is somehow biased to selecting "people who care about doing the right thing".
Because people are. Why would something be considered "the right thing" if there weren't people believing it?
I realise that Trump campaigning explicitly on doing the wrong thing and still being popular, would seem to contradict this, but he's an outlier, and apparently many of his supporters still somehow believe that whatever he's doing is somehow right. Of course they've been misled and manipulated, but that's the big vulnerability of democracy (although it's also possible in every other system).
> Democracy represents the will of the people, who, in general tend to care about morality and doing the right thing
This isn't a given. History has lots of examples where a majority of people do not care about morality or doing the right thing, and in fact use their voting power to elect similar-minded leaders. Your post even contains a perfect example, but he is not an outlier.
There is capitalism proper and there is absurdly leveraged subsidized speculative financial managerial capitalism.
There is always nuance on the real world. Things can’t be explained anymore in the terms of XIX century Marxism. If Marx were alive today probably he would completely rewrite Das Kapital.
In this situation I don’t think you can attribute it to capitalism because Boeing is a defacto monopoly. Capitalism should lead to competition. Competition should lead to alternatives when one of the market participants has quality control issues.
Unfortunately, "should" is doing some heavy lifting here...In reality, the constant requirement for MORE profit makes it so that every aspect of business or production, including quality control, is a slider conflicted with profit, and sacrificed until it needs to be corrected, as little as possible.
Quality control is only conflicted with profit when profit isn't dependent on quality. Boeing has clearly taken a huge financial hit over this, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to say that they were too obsessed with profit.
You could argue that they were too lazily profit motivated, that they were moving sliders to reduce costs without considering consequences. But capitalism doesn't incentivize laziness and it did not reward them for it here.
But doesn't that either disprove capitalism as an realistic working system or make an argument that the state have an obligation to protect the market by destroying large corporations before they become dominant.
A lot of the traditional critiques of capitalism have been that it will inevitable degrade back into mercantilism if the capitalist are not challenged by an democratic state and functional trade unions, but alowed to merge into large powerfull entities like google, Boeing, microsoft and Facebook.
1. If another player(s) are able to start and freely operate as a competitor then talented engineers will have more options for employment and each entity will have to compete on both price AND quality in order to win business. This requires continued investments.
2. If the original player is able to use regulatory frameworks, lobbying and other tactics to enforce a monopoly, then the state has a duty to break them up to ensure competition.
Option 1 is more free market where the problem solves itself. Option 2 involves use of the government to both create and resolve the problem.
I don’t personally take issue with either because the solution is still competition. Whether Lockheed, SpaceX, a Boeing breakup or some company we haven’t heard of gives it to us isn’t a big concern. We just need competition.
We all know that the Boeing mess will end up with everyone involved in creating the mess walking away richer as the state goes in an cover whatever bill to keep boeing from collapsing as the alternative will be for non-american companies to take over the entire commercial airoplane manufacturing sector.
The problem with the just more competition argument is that it never actually works once a market reach a broken state it never self correct as too many people is going to be affected for that to be allowed to happen, which is exactly how mercantilism keeps creeping back, as the nation state behind it falls into the trap that protecting whats working is preferable to allowing the chaos of creative destruction to take down an entire sector of the nations economy.
It can work as long as we're willing to let companies fail. Typically, a huge company shouldn't fail quickly, it should slowly downsize as it loses revenues to a competitor while it has time to react.
The government stepping in to just hand out money will preserve the broken status quo because the failure incentive has been removed.
Potential sudden failures due to outside factors like the collapse of the banking system are certainly different situations though.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
If you want to change the company from within then you are almost certainly dedicated to the goals of the organization and they are falling short, but it is loyalty to the organization itself that gets you clout. So in order to change the company, you first have to do the thing that you want to change, like cutting corners to meet a deadline. Only after you've kissed the ring will you be given power. This means that unless you are able to perform a revolution or coup within the company (maybe by unionizing), you will always be subordinate to its rotting fish head. If you want to change the company, the best way you can do that is by joining a competitor with better leadership and out-competing or being that leadership at a competitor.
Being a subordinate to people you don't respect is going to demoralize you, demotivate you, disempower you, and make you lose respect for yourself until you cannot function as a person.
If you want to make a change, your only option is to get into a position of power, be subject to the same corruptive forces as the incumbent, and choose to be responsible instead of selfish, which is fundamentally an act of self sacrifice. His discussion of the video is way more thought provoking than the original video itself, IMHO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILvD7zVN2jo
Attempting to do so is almost always a fools errand. Unless you have an outsized voice for your position then you will never actually turn a company around and attempting to do so will only add to your burden and worsen your situation.
It depends on your position and on the company. There are situations where you can have impact, in which case you should definitely use that. There have been plenty of cases where employees did seriously change corporate policies, but that's usually either in small companies or in companies where employees band together. And often the only impact you can have is to quit and take your skills to a more responsible company.
I've found (in <200~ employee companies) well structured exit interviews to be the best way to change a company from within. What better way to express your disapproval than by severing ties?
I mean, you kinda glossed over 1/3 of the issue... how do you quit “the entire world”? I think the person asking for advice wanted a real answer for “how can one deal with this difficulty”, especially because in the work situation, a new job won’t necessarily make any difference in terms of the internal struggles.
The short answer: you can’t, but you can change which parts of the world you actively engage with.
As someone on a long journey that seems highly relevant to this thread, getting help via therapy is one of the most important things I’ve done for myself.
A job that has sufficient problems and insane levels of stress can make the rest of the world look…different. Quitting my job gave me the mental capacity to find and see aspects of the world around me that are not worth quitting.
It has given me the space to recenter my life on things that support me, and to regain some optimism about what I can do with my life more broadly.
Quitting a toxic environment is an important first step. There are good places left. Good people to work for. Different ways to live life.
Choosing suicide is often related to a deep belief that there are no options left. This is often a result of compromised thinking based on intensely difficult situations/experiences that make it extremely hard to see beyond the current situation. I’ve had periods of dark thinking that I’ve since learned how to manage, and one of the most important things for me was getting a broader perspective on what was happening (and thus possible) outside of my own sphere.
You don't need to quit entire world, just the part that is toxic to you and poisons your life. You owe it to yourself and your family much much more than those sweet dollars that will kill ya (and nobody will see them anyway) or make you an old sour toxic fart.
If you are obsessed about quality, don't work at QA at big MBA-run corporations, just don't, thats a place for career-chasing folks. Find a place that appreciates and values your, or change your job altogether.
I know it sounds harsh but just look at this topic where it can and very often leads to (as long as the story checks, and nobody here actually knows).
How did you overcome this?