As I contemplate another election in which polls were off by bewildering margins, in exactly the same way as four years ago, I keep thinking that this is just one sign of a nation that can't do much of anything right.
Half the highly-touted social science papers of the past 50 years have failed replication. It seems like we either don't have the necessary tools to do social science right, or else social scientists don't care.
My youngest son recently downloaded an update to his favorite strategy game. I said, "How is it?" He said, "Well, it's interesting, but it crashes every time you click on a fleet." It's an experience so common as to be hardly worth commenting on.
It costs two to five times as much to build a mile of subway here as anywhere else, just one part of a cost nightmare in building any kind of infrastructure.
Our top manufacturer recently decided to murder people with airplane control software. They continue to exist because we need them, and because we think other corporations are just as bad.
We can't educate poor children, even though we spend far more than other nations (Finland, Korea) that do. We can't control drug abuse. Our mentally ill live on the streets, scrounging for survival.
We find ourselves caught between violent crime that, though way down from its peak, is still more dangerous than in most rich nations, and police departments we don't trust. We have more guns than we have people, far more than we have sense.
Pundits wring their hands over populism and our refusal to trust experts, but, honestly, what have experts gotten right lately? If they can't poll an election properly, why should we trust them about things that are far more complex, like the climate or regulating banks?
Yes, we're really good at some things, but many of them are things I and many others wish we weren't so good at: fracking, search engines driven by online advertising, cheap sugary food, hypersonic missiles, toy submarines for billionaires.
We fall for one fad after another: new math, back to basics math, Common Core math. The matrix corporation, the team-based corporation, the virtual corporation, the customer-focused corporation, the solutions-focused corporation. Litany after litany of irrelevance and failure.
I'm not saying, mind you, that things used to be better, although some things surely were. But is this really the best we can do? What is the knowledge we need, or have lost, to put competence at the center of our work?
I think our incentives are askew. We are rewarded for shallow, flashy successes, for "bold initiatives" and achievements that can fill a line item on a monthly brag sheet, for things that sound like "change." The like button and the viral video are metaphors for our whole world: one post that strikes a chord and gets ten million views, no matter how mediocre, no matter how wrong or distorted, matters more than all the careful research or deep thought you could produce in a lifetime. TL/DR to that.
I feel right now a great desire to see some big, public thing done really, really well.
4 comments:
Procopius, History of the Wars 2.26.36 (tr. H.B. Dewing):
For men, as a general thing, bring down upon their own heads the most of the misfortunes which are going to befall them.
It used to be when I expected the new update to my Linux box with "I wonder what new great thing it would bring". At some point though I started to expect updates with "I wonder what will stop work now and how much work I will have to put into it to make it as good as it was". It's not that everything is going worse, but it seems the attitude of the developers often changed into worse.
I often think that the best years I remember were between 2000 to some 2015, when everything kept going better and better for me, my family and my neighbourhood... until it stopped.
As I contemplate another election in which polls were off by bewildering margins, in exactly the same way as four years ago, I keep thinking that this is just one sign of a nation that can't do much of anything right.
...what in the WORLD are you talking about? Polls have been supremely accurate.
Most states we basically "knew" were safe bets for their respective parties, and those all held true, as predicted. And the rest are the battleground states which everyone admitted were going to be tossups that couldn't be accurately predicted, although there have been no major surprises so far.
The long warned-of "red mirage" effect happened more or less exactly as predicted - with election night results showing a lead for Trump, but that lead beginning to shrink as certain states only just beginning to count mail in ballots, because their state law dictate they can't start counting them until election night.
For whatever reasons, liberals are FAR more likely to vote by mail than in person, and so we know that there are many millions of mail-in votes still to be counted which we can safely predict are overwhelmingly for Biden. This is precisely why Trump and the GOP have fought so hard to interfere with mail-in voting at every turn - it's voter suppression, plain and simple.
What "bewildering margins" of inaccuracy have you seen? Because this has played out with very few surprises from where I'm sitting, based on the predictions I read.
"I think our incentives are askew. We are rewarded for shallow, flashy successes, for "bold initiatives" and achievements that can fill a line item on a monthly brag sheet, for things that sound like "change." The like button and the viral video are metaphors for our whole world: one post that strikes a chord and gets ten million views, no matter how mediocre, no matter how wrong or distorted, matters more than all the careful research or deep thought you could produce in a lifetime. TL/DR to that."
I'm... honestly a little surprised to hear you say this. I've said things much like it many times in my prior comments - our supremely Capitalism-oriented mindset and institutions incentivize all sorts of awful, toxic behaviors and ways of thinking.
So much of our decision making process is based overwhelmingly on maximizing profits, even at the cost of what is actually good or vital for society as a whole. Like the stereotypical villains in an old 1970s or 80s film, we're obsessed with "ratings" and profit margins, at the direct expense of people and humanity.
People tried to warn us about this. There are entire genres of fiction dedicated to portraying the grim possibilities of the future before they come to pass, in order to give people time to change course. But most Americans lacked the nuance to understand the biting sarcasm and satire.
People watch a film like RoboCop or Starship Troopers, and instead of being horrified by what they're shown, they like it and admire it and think it's cool and futuristic and what they should be looking forward to down the road. They don't understand the actual messages of the stories - they can only comprehend and appreciate the most superficial aspects.
Instead of seeing RoboCop as a message about the horrible ways unscrupulous individuals will will treat their fellow humans in the name of profits if we let them, all they see is a message about how "cool" robots are, and how all our problems can be "solved" by A Good Guy With A Gun™ shooting his way to "victory".
It's fundamentally the same sort of ignorant lack of comprehension that dominates American Christianity - people read the Bible and don't understand the actual message, clinging instead to laziest and most superficial interpretations. We have many millions of people who claim that Jesus is their lord and saviour, but who don't have the first clue what his message actually was, and who constantly go directly against his teachings without knowing or caring.
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