> If I owned a company and the people I hired to manage it were playing games like this
Imagine that you get to hire 5 people to run the company on your behalf, and four other directors each also hire 5 people to further their interests. Some of those other four directors want things that are nearly enough exactly the opposite of what you want, and you can do nothing to expel them, and precious little to change their minds. Also, the best five people who are willing to fill the roles you control are not exactly the ones you would like to hire, but nevertheless, they're the best available and willing. Now what?
> Some of those other four directors want things that are nearly enough exactly the opposite of what you want, and you can do nothing to expel them...
I am the owner of the company, and there's nothing I can do to expel them?
> Also, the best five people who are willing to fill the roles you control are not exactly the ones you would like to hire, but nevertheless, they're the best available and willing. Now what?
Well in the short term, you're screwed. But how plausible is this imaginary scenario? There is literally no one better available, in a country of 300 million people? Are the politicians we have now the best of the best?
Take the choices we have in the next presidential election for example: Donald Trump vs Joe Biden. Are these the best "available and willing" candidates out there? Not one single person in the country more qualified than either of these fellows?
> I am the owner of the company, and there's nothing I can do to expel them?
Not if we're building a metaphor for representative democracy here. If we're doing autocracy / absolutism then expel away!
> Not one single person in the country more qualified than either of these fellows?
Well, it seems like nobody better is able and desires to endure the grueling, ridiculous, perverse eligibility and interview process the hiring committee demands.
A recall election (also called a recall referendum, recall petition or representative recall) is a procedure by which, in certain polities, voters can remove an elected official from office through a direct vote before that official's term has ended. Recalls, which are initiated when sufficient voters sign a petition, have a history dating back to the constitution in ancient Athenian democracy[1] and feature in several current constitutions. In indirect or representative democracy, people's representatives are elected and these representatives rule for a specific period of time. However, where the facility to recall exists, should any representative come to be perceived as not properly discharging their responsibilities, then they can be called back with the written request of specific number or proportion of voters.
If you think about it a bit, you may also realize (or at least consider the possibility) that the variety of democratic implementations that currently exist (and have existed over time) were man-made, as opposed to being an artifact of nature. We can do whatever we want, in this domain - we are literally the masters of our own destiny. Or, we could be at least, but there seems to be significant rhetorical resistance to these ideas, from the strangest sources.
> Well, it seems like nobody better is able and desires to endure the grueling, ridiculous, perverse eligibility and interview process the hiring committee demands.
It may seem that way, but is it actually that way?
Both the Republicans and Democrats fielded numerous candidates - are you suggesting that Trump and Biden are the very best candidates from within those two lots (which implies that the processes by which they were chosen are perfect)?
And the "hiring committee" itself - is this literally the only possible approach that could be taken? Not one single improvement could be made there, or at any other stage within the entire electoral system?
>I am the owner of the company, and there's nothing I can do to expel them?
"I am the owner of this computer, yet I can't know whether it will run a certain problem in finite time?"
"We are the dominant species on this planet, yet we can't change its course towards Alpha Centauri?"
Ownership is more of a negative than positive good---that is, ownership means you own something more than other people, not that you're omnipotent regarding it.
A human can own a computer yet still be unable to get it to do something.
"Never attribute to scarcity what can be attributed to technical debt."
>> My original question: "I am the owner of the company, and there's nothing I can do to expel them?"
I notice that rather than answering my question, you seem to have chosen to instead reply with two other questions, both of which are rather absurd examples of things that are literally not possible, and have little relevance to the question I actually asked.
May I ask why you chose to respond in this way? My (speculative) intuition is that it is a form of rhetoric, that is often used in conversation to persuade third party observers of a certain thing. But to be explicit, this is only my intuition, I am not making a formal accusation of any kind...I am simply curious about what is going on in this conversation.
So, having said all that: is my intuition incorrect? And if so, I would very much appreciate if you could explain what is going on here, as it seems to have become a very common writing technique here and elsewhere, but I am personally unable to understand it at all - to me, it only makes already complex conversations even more confusing.
> Ownership is more of a negative than positive good---that is, ownership means you own something more than other people, not that you're omnipotent regarding it.
> A human can own a computer yet still be unable to get it to do something.
> "Never attribute to scarcity what can be attributed to technical debt."
This seems to suggest that it is not possible for an owner of a company to expel substandard management, at least sometimes, because it requires omnipotence. Is this what you are actually saying, or is my interpretation flawed? If it is flawed, would you be able to restate your beliefs in clear, unambiguous, non-rhetorical terms? And if it is not flawed, could you possibly post at least one example where omnipotence is clearly required to accomplish the task (or something reasonably close to demonstrating that)?
And I suppose I should also point out that the underlying issue of my analogy is whether the current political process in the Unites States of America could be improved, at all.
Do you think it is not possible to make any improvements at all, however small? If it isn't too much trouble, I think an initial discrete "Yes" or "No" answer would help in maximizing communication effectiveness, and after that you can include any rhetorical narrative that you believe adds to that initial answer.
Enter, O practitioner of conversational charity, and be welcomed.
Yes, I think it is possible to make improvements.*
>and have little relevance to the question I actually asked.
My point was that they are relevant, in the sense that inability doesn't necessarily imply malice.
My analogy is "off" in that it is not literal, hard barriers, as with Earth->Alpha Centauri---but then, so was yours, in the sense that the owner of a company is a single individual and doesn't have collective action problems, whereas an electorate has nothing but. But I'd contend that my analogy is more useful/relevant to the specific issue of "owner potency" than the company owner analogy--which was the point.
So no, this was not a display for third parties (not completely, anyway---who doesn't like upvotes?), but an honest attempt to communicate that yes, it is really hard, probably actually impossible, and certainly not easy or simple if approached naively, which the "company owner" analogy seems to do.
>This seems to suggest that it is not possible for an owner of a company to expel substandard management, at least sometimes, because it requires omnipotence.
No! A company owner can of course expel management any time they like. My point is that a country is not like a company, and more specifically, an electorate is not like an individual.
That last point is very important, and the crux of my argument. There are many many differences between working for a single owner, or even a board, vs an electorate:
- a company owner, as an individual, is less likely to make contradictory, impossible demands. For electorates impossible and contradictory demands are the rule rather than the exception.
- a company owner is concerned with a more responsive machine (the company) than an electorate (a country), and so is more likely to have a working feedback loop---which means if they do make impossible demands, they are more likely to connect the (bad) consequences to the demands.
- a company owner is able (at least in theory) to believably make commitments. If a company owner said, "What specifically is the problem stopping you from XYZ, I will fire you if you don't tell me, I will promote you if you do," there is a set of circumstances in which subordinates could believe and rely on that. Electorates, in contrast, are completely unreliable and cannot make believable promises. Individuals might---you might write your congressman and promise you'll vote for him if he does XYZ---but what does he care, you're one vote, he gets letters every week saying the equivalent, but for different things.
So I am perhaps not answering the question as written---is it possible for a company owner to expel bad management. Yes, it absolutely is. However, analogizing that to nation-state governance is a model with some very important flaws, the bulk of them relating to coordination/communication problems that electorates face. Just as adding more engineers to a project makes it later, adding more voters to a discussion of an issue (particularly complex issues) makes the electorate dumber and less reasonable.
There's also the issue that, and maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, what you're really talking about isn't "putting the right people in office." Because that begs the question: right for what? Say you replaced politicians with computers who would do exactly what they were told. Well, we can guess how that would turn out, because we have computers---having a perfect servant like that tends to spotlight the weaknesses in the programmer's thinking. How does one run a nation-state? Remember, we don't give the electorate power over this because we think they actually know how to do it. Rather we do it as a circuit breaker/safety measure to keep a functioning feedback loop in place---to put a lower bound on how bad things can get.
I have various suggestions on how things could be improved---they mostly don't matter because I am just one voice among 300 million, and there are lots of people with brains that function perfectly well. The shortage is not one of political philosophy! I tend to think the place where I can actually have impact is by building community with my neighbors, raising my family, and (I unironically believe this) writing good software.
* Though even the definition of "improvements" is up for grabs. Is a commit that improves runtime by 50% but also increases memory usage by the same amount an improvement? Governance is full of similar tradeoffs, and reasonable people can and do disagree on them.
> Enter, O practitioner of conversational charity, and be welcomed.
Hey, if you don't have fun in life, what's the point? :)
> My point was that they are relevant, in the sense that inability doesn't necessarily imply malice.
Valid perspective that I overlooked.
> My analogy is "off" in that it is not literal, hard barriers, as with Earth->Alpha Centauri---but then, so was yours, in the sense that the owner of a company is a single individual and doesn't have collective action problems, whereas an electorate has nothing but. But I'd contend that my analogy is more useful/relevant to the specific issue of "owner potency" than the company owner analogy--which was the point.
Completely agree. I do indeed realize there is a collective action problem (I happen to think that this is the #2 problem), but my point or strategy in using this very simplified approach, however flawed my performance was, was to try to "counter" the perception (to the degree that it exists) that:
>> In a republic where deal-making has to happen, if you ran on W, X, Y, and Z, you might have to compromise on Z to get W, X, and a watered-down version of Y.
...is "just how it is", &/or "cannot be improved upon", or "is being done in mostly a well-intentioned manner", etc.
We have absolutely no idea how true any of these (and the hundreds of other plausible excuses) beliefs are. Which brings us to my supplementary point:
>> and if I asked them for insight into what, specifically, is happening behind the scenes, and they told me "it is literally not possible for us to provide you with that information" (and wouldn't say why it is not possible), I would be immediately launching a side project with the intent to replace the whole lot of them.
Is it not true that the American public, even if they were interested, has extremely little insight into what is really going on in the political system? Oh sure, there are plenty of "facts", reports, newspaper articles, and various other forms of messaging they can avail themselves of, but how accurate and comprehensive are these things with respect to what is actually going on? My intuition suggests: "not very".
> A company owner can of course expel management any time they like. My point is that a country is not like a company, and more specifically, an electorate is not like an individual. That last point is very important, and the crux of my argument. There are many many differences between working for a single owner, or even a board, vs an electorate....
All of the points and constraints you raise are completely valid, and very hard problems! But think of it this way: you came up with these (and could surely come up with many, many more) after perhaps a few minutes of back of the napkin systems analysis, something you can do because you presumably have many years of system-agnostic experience in doing so. My question is: has a serious and thorough analysis been performed on this system complex system, in recent history, by people who are deeply familiar with the wide spectrum of powerful new capabilities mankind has at its fingertips, in the form of software, AI, and the networked nature of the vast majority of the population (let's leave aside the current(!) intelligence level of this population, which is another system that deserves some analysis). Based on unbiased observations (say, an alien with no priors) of casual forum conversations, one might easily think so. But is it actually true? Exactly(!) how optimized is our current implementation of democracy? Has anyone even taken a proper look at it? Is there any evidence whatsoever that this task has been performed in an honest, substantial manner, by a bi-partisan group of unbiased, arms length, highly skilled people? My intuition suggests: "No, this has not been done."
> Just as adding more engineers to a project makes it later, adding more voters to a discussion of an issue (particularly complex issues) makes the electorate dumber and less reasonable.
Right! But this project is distinctly different than all others: it has no written in stone due date. Theoretically, we have infinite time! Although in practice, it's completely possible that we may even have less than a decade, considering the multiple legitimate "existential" crises we have on deck - but this is no reason to not do anything! On the contrary, we should be sorting out the completely ridiculous & petty arguments we have on this very site, and then proceed to put our collective minds to work on solving the actual fucking problem(s) that present themselves for this country, and the entire world...should we not?
But what do we actually do with our minds? Have the same old arguments year after year, mostly in the same form as prior years, and of a quality not all that dissimilar to that which you would find on /r/politics. Which then raises an even more important question, perhaps the most important question: why do we behave like this?
Is our behaviour part of the problem? And to be clear, I'm not talking only about "those people" (you know the ones), I'm talking about everyone.
> There's also the issue that, and maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, what you're really talking about isn't "putting the right people in office." Because that begs the question: right for what? Say you replaced politicians with computers who would do exactly what they were told. Well, we can guess how that would turn out, because we have computers---having a perfect servant like that tends to spotlight the weaknesses in the programmer's thinking. How does one run a nation-state? Remember, we don't give the electorate power over this because we think they actually know how to do it. Rather we do it as a circuit breaker/safety measure to keep a functioning feedback loop in place---to put a lower bound on how bad things can get.
This is all just proper systems analysis - problems and constraints that must be accommodated. We do the analysis, and then we decide upon an initial approach, and then we adjust as needed, like literally every other competently executed project on the planet. And you never stop, because you are working within a dynamic, infinitely complex system.
> I have various suggestions on how things could be improved---they mostly don't matter because I am just one voice among 300 million
That yours is but one voice among 300 million is only one problem. Let's say you stumbled upon a genuinely brilliant idea - what would you do then? Write a letter to your political representative, sending that idea into the very system we're currently discussing?
I think the problem that mother nature has dealt us may fall under this category:
> “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos
For the sake of argument, let's assume that's the case. What then shall we do about it? It seems to me our ancestors found themselves in a rather similar predicament...what did they do?
Imagine that you get to hire 5 people to run the company on your behalf, and four other directors each also hire 5 people to further their interests. Some of those other four directors want things that are nearly enough exactly the opposite of what you want, and you can do nothing to expel them, and precious little to change their minds. Also, the best five people who are willing to fill the roles you control are not exactly the ones you would like to hire, but nevertheless, they're the best available and willing. Now what?