The Eye of Sauron turned its gaze upon the Fellowship, and still didn’t know that they’d actually try to destroy the ring instead of use it.
Less abstractly, I agree with you in principle, and I understand that many examples of the phenomena you referenced do exist. But there are also a large number of examples of government turning its eye on a thing, and with the best of intentions completely butchering whatever they wanted to do about it by completely failing to address the critical dynamics of the issue. And then not acknowledging or fixing the mistake, often for many decades. Some US examples, top of mind:
Banning supersonic flight so it doesn’t matter if we solve sonic booms and thereby ensuring no one bothers doing further research.
Setting minimum standards for modular/mobile homes in 1976 and in the process making bizarre rules that led people see it as low-class, preventing what had been the fastest growing and most cost effective new housing segment from moving up to higher quality and larger size structures and also making many of them ineligible for traditional mortgages.
Almost everything about the Jones Act.
Almost everything about the NRC.
A large fraction of everything about the post-1960s FDA.
A substantial fraction of all zoning rules that increase costs, prevent the housing stock from meeting residents’ needs, keep people from installing the best available materials/products/technologies to make their homes efficient/sustainable/comfortable, and don’t actually contribute to safety or even community aesthetics and property values.
Guys, governments totally solve these. It just takes veeery long. But what do you expect? The thought processes of individual humans already take years (just think how long it takes for new technologies to be adopted) and that depite thoughts having a duration of 100ms. The duration of a single thought of a government is maybe a day. It is a wonder that governments can learn during a lifetime at all.
Yes, this is exactly what I do expect. There are many problems for which this is a sufficient or even good approach. There are other problems for which it is not. And there are lessons that (most?) governments seem incapable of learning (often for understandable or predictable reasons) even after centuries or millennia. This is why I specified that I don’t think we can straightforwardly say the government does or does not know a complicated thing. Does the government know how to fight a war? Does it know how to build a city? How to negotiate and enact a treaty? I don’t think that kind of question has a binary yes or no answer. I’d probably round to “no” if I had to choose, in the sense that I don’t trust any particular currently existing government to reliably possess and execute that capability.
I don’t know if I’ve ever commented this on LW, but elsewhere I’ve been known to jokingly-but-a-little-seriously say that once we solve mortality (in the versions of the future where humans are still in charge) we might want to require presidents to be at least a few centuries or a millennium old, because it’s not actually possible for a baseline human to learn and consolidate all the necessary skills to be reliably good at the job in a single human lifetime.
The Eye of Sauron turned its gaze upon the Fellowship, and still didn’t know that they’d actually try to destroy the ring instead of use it.
Less abstractly, I agree with you in principle, and I understand that many examples of the phenomena you referenced do exist. But there are also a large number of examples of government turning its eye on a thing, and with the best of intentions completely butchering whatever they wanted to do about it by completely failing to address the critical dynamics of the issue. And then not acknowledging or fixing the mistake, often for many decades. Some US examples, top of mind:
Banning supersonic flight so it doesn’t matter if we solve sonic booms and thereby ensuring no one bothers doing further research.
Setting minimum standards for modular/mobile homes in 1976 and in the process making bizarre rules that led people see it as low-class, preventing what had been the fastest growing and most cost effective new housing segment from moving up to higher quality and larger size structures and also making many of them ineligible for traditional mortgages.
Almost everything about the Jones Act.
Almost everything about the NRC.
A large fraction of everything about the post-1960s FDA.
A substantial fraction of all zoning rules that increase costs, prevent the housing stock from meeting residents’ needs, keep people from installing the best available materials/products/technologies to make their homes efficient/sustainable/comfortable, and don’t actually contribute to safety or even community aesthetics and property values.
Guys, governments totally solve these. It just takes veeery long. But what do you expect? The thought processes of individual humans already take years (just think how long it takes for new technologies to be adopted) and that depite thoughts having a duration of 100ms. The duration of a single thought of a government is maybe a day. It is a wonder that governments can learn during a lifetime at all.
Yes, this is exactly what I do expect. There are many problems for which this is a sufficient or even good approach. There are other problems for which it is not. And there are lessons that (most?) governments seem incapable of learning (often for understandable or predictable reasons) even after centuries or millennia. This is why I specified that I don’t think we can straightforwardly say the government does or does not know a complicated thing. Does the government know how to fight a war? Does it know how to build a city? How to negotiate and enact a treaty? I don’t think that kind of question has a binary yes or no answer. I’d probably round to “no” if I had to choose, in the sense that I don’t trust any particular currently existing government to reliably possess and execute that capability.
I don’t know if I’ve ever commented this on LW, but elsewhere I’ve been known to jokingly-but-a-little-seriously say that once we solve mortality (in the versions of the future where humans are still in charge) we might want to require presidents to be at least a few centuries or a millennium old, because it’s not actually possible for a baseline human to learn and consolidate all the necessary skills to be reliably good at the job in a single human lifetime.