Sorry for the slow response. In order to prevent evil, we form giant entities and grant them the power to regulate society. These entities then turn evil, and fail to regulate themselves. Since they’re huge and powerful, we cannot stop them, either. More of the problem (more regulation, more people, more power to some agency) will necessarily fail at making things better.
I’m conceding because the status quo is terrible, and because I don’t think it can be made not-terrible. I give up on fixing it, and propose a re-design which prioritizes local (or at least local-first) solutions.
I do not think that this problem is in the domain of the WHO. In software engineering, each module does one job, and it has one responsibility. It’s considered bad design to have “god-classes” which are tied to too many things. We could keep working with spaghetti code, and trying to improve it, but I think it’s better to realize that the entire approach is bad in a way which is mathematically impossible to solve for good.
Individuals should keep themselves and others safe. Failing that, the local population should help eachother out. Failing that, the local power should do something, failing that, the state itself should be ordering a quarantine. If the WHO needs to step in, and use force at that, several things have already gone entirely wrong: If invidiuals don’t keep themselves safe, that’s a failure of education, or too much regulation preventing local solutions (similar to how it’s illegal to feed the homeless in many places). If the local population fails at helping one another out, that’s a lack of community and perhaps also a result of too many rules and a tendency to rely on authorities for problems that one could solve themselves. Etc.
In your next example, I think the problem might be cross-module failures. If a problem is a responsibility of more than one person, it often goes unfixed. Perhaps a single person does not have the authority to fix it (that is, they’d have to step outside of their usual scope of work and take responsibility for the consequences), or a single person cannot fix it without the help of others, leading to coordination issues.
This problem is less common when people have an investment in the thing at hand, and when they dare to actually act. But the modern world punishes agency, you’re rarely rewarded for competence, and you’re easily punished for not delegating the task to an authority (e.g. in Switzerland and a bunch of other countries, if you’re renting, you’re not allowed to install a dishwasher by yourself. You need to call a “professional”). These asymmetrical incentives force people to be passive, incompetent, reliant on authorities, and ignorant of the world around them. The solution is to allow people local freedom to fix local problems, and rewarding them if they succeed.
I’d like to see a world where anyone can do anything they want, as long as they’re the most competent person available for fixing that problem at that time, and in which they’re given freedom according to their level of competence. The company is like a program coded by somebody incompetent, nested inside a larger structure (society) which also has poorly thought out incentives (that is, it punishes good design principles)
I think it’s neither supported that this specific problem can’t be solved without a radical restructuring of society, nor particularly relevant to either my meta-level or object-level points. Bowing out for now.
Sorry for the slow response. In order to prevent evil, we form giant entities and grant them the power to regulate society. These entities then turn evil, and fail to regulate themselves. Since they’re huge and powerful, we cannot stop them, either. More of the problem (more regulation, more people, more power to some agency) will necessarily fail at making things better.
I’m conceding because the status quo is terrible, and because I don’t think it can be made not-terrible. I give up on fixing it, and propose a re-design which prioritizes local (or at least local-first) solutions.
I do not think that this problem is in the domain of the WHO. In software engineering, each module does one job, and it has one responsibility. It’s considered bad design to have “god-classes” which are tied to too many things. We could keep working with spaghetti code, and trying to improve it, but I think it’s better to realize that the entire approach is bad in a way which is mathematically impossible to solve for good.
Individuals should keep themselves and others safe. Failing that, the local population should help eachother out. Failing that, the local power should do something, failing that, the state itself should be ordering a quarantine. If the WHO needs to step in, and use force at that, several things have already gone entirely wrong: If invidiuals don’t keep themselves safe, that’s a failure of education, or too much regulation preventing local solutions (similar to how it’s illegal to feed the homeless in many places). If the local population fails at helping one another out, that’s a lack of community and perhaps also a result of too many rules and a tendency to rely on authorities for problems that one could solve themselves. Etc.
In your next example, I think the problem might be cross-module failures. If a problem is a responsibility of more than one person, it often goes unfixed. Perhaps a single person does not have the authority to fix it (that is, they’d have to step outside of their usual scope of work and take responsibility for the consequences), or a single person cannot fix it without the help of others, leading to coordination issues.
This problem is less common when people have an investment in the thing at hand, and when they dare to actually act. But the modern world punishes agency, you’re rarely rewarded for competence, and you’re easily punished for not delegating the task to an authority (e.g. in Switzerland and a bunch of other countries, if you’re renting, you’re not allowed to install a dishwasher by yourself. You need to call a “professional”). These asymmetrical incentives force people to be passive, incompetent, reliant on authorities, and ignorant of the world around them. The solution is to allow people local freedom to fix local problems, and rewarding them if they succeed.
I’d like to see a world where anyone can do anything they want, as long as they’re the most competent person available for fixing that problem at that time, and in which they’re given freedom according to their level of competence. The company is like a program coded by somebody incompetent, nested inside a larger structure (society) which also has poorly thought out incentives (that is, it punishes good design principles)
I think it’s neither supported that this specific problem can’t be solved without a radical restructuring of society, nor particularly relevant to either my meta-level or object-level points. Bowing out for now.