Yes, I admit I’m sensitive about this personally. I think shaming people for not being good enough causes a lot of toxic side-effects. I know sometimes the right thing to do *is* to try harder, but there are ways to encourage effort that install less malware, I think.
Conversation
Good exhortatory content makes doing a hard thing look necessary, exciting, and *doable by you*. Skip the last part and you just demotivate people.
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I suspect almost all the failures can be attributed to funding cuts over the years rather than incompetence. It is highly disingenuous of small government types to undermine state and international agency funding and then attribute failures to incompetence.
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I mean of course shit us going to fail if you cut it to the bone over a decade or more. Even actual incompetence can be blamed on funding cuts, you get the talent you lay for.
I assume you’ve seen this classic riposte to this general line of argument? davidbrin.com/nonfiction/idi
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I’m generally a market-based solutions guy myself, but it truly pisses me off to see holier-than-thou private enterprise shills acting like their world is peopled by an entirely superior species. It’s the same species.
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To be clear, I’m with you on this. I’m pushing against the narrative “install a businessman as COVID19 czar because businessmen are Good”. I don’t think businessmen are categorically better people than public servants.
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I oppose government deontologically. I think if you oppose it pragmatically (“these guys are just incompetent, fire them and put in our guys”) you’ll just recreate the same problems as before.
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Yes, that much is clear. Most rationalist-background thinkers seem to land there though I think you've diverged quite a bit from that in the last few years.
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