Maybe it's the mathematician in me who enjoys building models of abstraction.

Because at the heart of it it’s all the same. It’s humans acting like humans. Every person (and organization) has desires and fears. When two parties get together, balancing everyone’s wants is fun. It’s like a complicated engineering problem, except with people requirements instead, and politics is the architecture.

I think people are rad and genuinely enjoy these kinds of problems.

A group I used to work with framed it as needs and fears, and would produce a ‘conflict map’ when heading into a situation with multiple stakeholders.

The conflict map set out the needs and fears of each group, and indicated where they were incompatible.

That information was used to proactively resolve, or at least plan around those areas of conflict.

How was it a map?

The conflict maps I was exposed to were much simpler - just a bunch of wobbly circles surrounding a centra issue or event. Wobbly circle intersections denoted needs/fears incompatibility implying potential conflict.

Although this also happens in office environments, there's more accountability and continuous planning, making requirements changes something that is undesirable.

There's definitely a lot of differences but I think the larger a business becomes the more government like it becomes. Or at least it appears that way to me. I mean they're both very bureaucratic

In some countries they also have the burden of being legible to outsiders. Between the shareholders (voters) and journalists etc there's a lot of process that has to be transparent.

This transparency is legibility driven to extremes. If an enterprise kills a project (think Windows Phone) its done, and we move on. If a govt kills a project there's a lot of external attention on what went wrong, who's getting fired (or going to jail) and how "our money got wasted".

So yes, as things get bigger they matter to more people. The more people involved the more every single thought and action has to be meticulously detailed.

Which is party why (democratic) govt is soooo bad at actually getting anything done. Feudal govts, and autocratic businesses, get a lot done - much of it quickly. It might not be good. It might be motivated my enrichment not care, but it gets done fast.

A good autocrat moves the needle, and things get a lot better very quickly. A bad autocrat achieves his goals, often at enormous cost to the organization (which may not survive. )

Autocrats don't automatically execute faster.

Similar to what you suggest, many say history is written by the victors. But instead history is written by those who can write and survive. There's not much written from the perspective of a commoner for most of history. But where those writings survive, the situations do not appear pleasant.

What solved all those things you list was industrialisation and (arguably) capitalism*, but capitalism itself is tens of thousands of village-sized autocratcies** where each has the freedom to try things and fail (though even that varies with time, hence debtors' prison), and back then people were still working out what "workers rights" and "health and safety" meant, hence the radium girls, or children being crushed by the power looms they were paid to clean while they were still running.

To illustrate your list with e.g. food, what solved food was the Haber-Bosch process, which is responsible for about half the nitrogen in our bodies today; the British Empire thought famines were nature's way of finding balance.

* the argument against capitalism here is the Soviet Union; the counter-argument is that the Soviets could literally just look at and copy what already existed by that point; the counter-counter-argument is that they also invented some stuff of their own; the counter-counter-counter-argument is that vanishingly few of those examples were actually state-of-the-art, and the only ones I can even think of is the first half of the Space Race.

** most corporations are not democracies; the rare ones which are, are "worker co-operatives": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

  > Which is party why (democratic) govt is soooo bad at actually getting anything done.

All that happened under democracy.

So I call BS to claims that democracy means the government is so bad at getting things done. Perhaps you're pointing the finger at the wrong variable.

  > A good autocrat moves the needle, and things get a lot better very quickly. A bad autocrat achieves his goals

But if these autocrats were as good as you suggest then it begs the question of why the Industrial Revolution and many of the great leaps forward didn't happen under them? Or why during the rise of democracy in the west did the remaining monarchies and autocrats not also flourish? Post WW2 why did the top down economies of the USSR and China also not see such success? (China didn't succeed until much later, when it opened up) Those countries across that same time that democracies made such advancements did not win out.

You can say that maybe those leaders weren't the best, but we're talking about many generations here. So then what? Benevolent autocrats are rare? That seems like a great flaw.

You also forget the old cliché: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. History has shown that there were many kings and rulers who sought to do good and do good by the people, yet in these efforts caused great disaster. You could take the Four Pest Campaign as a relatively recent example. It was definitely implemented with good intentions but ended up being one of, if not the, greatest environmental disasters of all time. Estimates are that between 1% and 10% of the population at the time starved.

This is not to say that democracies have not also caused great harm. One needs not believe there is a global optimal solution to such a complex problem, but that does not mean certain solutions aren't strictly better than others. A benefit to democracies is that it is difficult to bury the mistakes. They say history is told by the victors but that's not entirely true. History is written by those who write and the writings that can be preserved. In democracies this is available to far more people. It is unlikely that you have an accurate understanding of the daily lives of those who lived more than a few hundred years ago. No one was recording that.

On paper I think the idea of a benevolent autocrat sounds good. But in reality there are so few examples of benevolent autocrats who made their citizens lives better. Sure, many built great monuments but that's not the same thing. It is simply difficult to role effectively over so large of an ecosystem. The world is too complex for one man to make informed decisions. I'm sure if you are honest with yourself you'll find that even far smaller tasks, ones you may be apart of, share this feature. When a single mind cannot handle all the complexities, you must turn to a collective. But a feudal society is not a dictatorship, even if it appears so locally

I think you're conflating "governments were democratic at a time these things happened" with "the government did these things directly itself via its institutions".

Of those achievements, only the space race was actually executed by the government, and it's not a great counter-example because it was done purely to compete with the achievements of an autocratic government (the USSR).

The rest was private sector efforts. It wasn't a government institution that built toilets.

> it begs the question of why the Industrial Revolution and many of the great leaps forward didn't happen under them?

They did. USSR famously went through forced industrialization.

  > Of those achievements, only the space race was actually executed by the government

  > The rest was private sector efforts

Imperial Germany was a practically feudal political system and yet it still managed to drive some of the most important inventions of its time and rivaled the UK and US in its economy. France under Napoleon III was by no means democratic, but had no trouble growing its economy.

More recently China has moved from an almost purely agricultural society to a fully industrialized country entirely under the auspices of an authoritarian communist party. Opening up and reform still happened under autocracy, it did not lead to any further political freedoms. The Soviet Union actually did have tremendous growth during the Great Depression but of course also stagnated after WW2 (perhaps due to its very high military spending trying to keep up with the US).

I think in general there is just a correlation between economic growth and democracy, but that they are not causally related (democracy might rather be caused by economic growth, but that is still debatable).

(1) The comment you're replying to didn't say autocrats were "good", they said they were "fast".

(2) Authoritarian failures are also present in capitalism, because most corporations within capitalism are top-down organisation, "my way or the highway" from whoever your manager is, and most corporations fail quickly. The reason this works anyway is that society benefits because of the out-sized benefit of the few which succeed wildly; on a global scale there's something similar, with ~200 experiments called "nations" rather than "corporations", and right now the world is mainly getting richer and cleaner because of the outsized success from China — because the economic policies of China happen to be the ones which work, not because China's the most free.

Consider a recent cliché: "Move fast and break things".

  > Consider a recent cliché: "Move fast and break things".

The "move fast and break things" strategy is a fantastic strategy when you are approaching a problem and trying to figure it out. But if you don't go back and clean things up when you do then you're left with a lot of junk and dead weight. A lot of technical debt builds up this way. It's slow and no singular instance is to blame. Just like how you don't get fat by eating a single cookie. Hell, you don't get fat by eating an entire fucking cake in one sitting. You get fat by doing so repeatedly and by not doing things to mitigate that buildup.

You can't run fast when you're fat. And you don't get fat overnight. It is slow. Maybe you gain a pound a week and lose a second on your mile time every day. You likely won't notice such effects. But by getting fat you have to work so much harder to move fast.

This is true for weight, software, countries, and all sorts of things. Professional athletes spend far more time on maintenance and implementing good habits to ensure nothing slows them down. But often we look at those things as if they provide no progress. Maybe they don't move us literally forward, but they are definitely key to doing so. Let's not make this mistake

> It's pretty hard to move fast when you're wading through a pile of garbage.

One of the key things about autocrats, their defining characteristics even, is they get to disregard any law they want to.

This is not fun for anyone relying on that law. It is not somewhere sensible people will choose to invest in.

But it is fast.

Technical debt is a fine example, but you know what? Easy debt fuels capitalism. I've seen one codebase that had an incompetent mutilate it for something like a decade, and another that was ISO 9001 rated. The train-wreck with all the debt was still easier to handle and faster to implement features and fix bugs within, and lasted in prod much longer than most software companies.

Lots of governments keep promising the equivalent of finally refactoring the old codebase, it's hard and slow but some even make progress. Autocrats? They can just order them all gone. And when it turns out that wasn't a good idea? It was a bad idea done fast.

  > Again, you're arguing here on the basis of quality. 

Or have a made some bad assumption that quality isn't relevant at all? That you're arguing fat void of all correctness? If so, I'm not sure there a meaningful conversation to have at all

But instead if there's any measure of quality that must be satisfied, even if the bar is on the floor, then reread my comment again. I'm afraid you're reading what you want to read rather than what I wrote. You're going to have to work with me here as I can't beam my thoughts directly into your head nor am I willing to write a novel in reply. I've already been quite verbose

  > you're missing two things here:

  > (1) The comment you're replying said they were "fast".

  > (2) Authoritarian failures are also present in capitalism

  > success from China

But when looking at China make sure you consider 2 things

1) China didn't succeed until it opened up and started working with the West. The policies from Deng greatly reshaped China. A man Mao kicked out of the party twice and was called a capitalist. He was the one who created the special economic zones they have today (like Shenzhen). It's something his successor continued and even Xi has. Interpret this how you will, but China's wealth didn't happen until these events and the wealthiest regions are either those zones or incredibly close to them (like Shanghai being sandwiched by two)

2) it's much easier to play catchup than lead. I expect every programmer to recognize that building a flappy bird game is pretty easy, but doing it first isn't. China has been done great on this front and hasn't fallen for the middle income trap like many others but they're not completely out of it yet. It looks like they'll succeed but be careful in counting your chickens before they hatch.

(You should also consider that information is distributed differently. As we've previously discussed and others mentioned. While in the US all our atrocities are out in the open, this is not true for autocracies. 64 (Deng was in power at that time) is a much more taboo topic than say, the Trail of Tears. In America we're quite self aware but even forget that our northern neighbors did something similar, but worse. But Canada isn't even trying that hard to hide those things. Even a much more open country like Japan is not so open about things like their invasion into China and Korea during WW2. You're aware that you should be careful in interpreting history of America as told by America, but such care must also be given when reading about others. Propaganda isn't uniquely American and we're not even that good at it)

But regardless I'm not sure what China matters in this discussion. I said

  > there are so *few* examples of benevolent autocrats who made their citizens lives better. 

And I want to restress something from my first comment. With great power comes great responsibility. In other recent threads we've been talking about government overreach and Flock has been in the news a lot lately. So the concept of Turnkey Tyranny gets discussed. This is still relevant here. One of democracies greatest flaws is that has the power to turn into an autocracy or any other form of government, at the will of the people. So the concept here is that you do not want to give strong powers to benevolent leaders because you cannot guarantee the next won't be. The core idea here still holds true under autocracies. The trouble is, a Turnkey Tyrant is always on the table for those countries and there is no defense. This key can turn even with the same person in power and is frequently turned with a belief that the ends justify the means. It's an all too common occurrence in autocracies, happening with people we've discussed and many of those benevolent autocrats we alluded to.

> I actually did address this. It is my opening paragraph

This opening paragraph?

  I find this and similar claims quite astounding. The last few hundred years seems to have been some of the most productive times for humanity. The great technological leaps forward. In that time we went from an agricultural society where many were malnourished, illiterate, and life expectancy was far lower (not only was the child mortality rate magnitudes higher but expectancy past 60 years old was abysmal) to a society that put a god damn man on the moon and maybe more importantly a toilet in every home.

But then you followed it with:

  All that happened under democracy.

> I also addressed this, in my second to last paragraph

This one?

  This is not to say that democracies have not also caused great harm. One needs not believe there is a global optimal solution to such a complex problem, but that does not mean certain solutions aren't strictly better than others. A benefit to democracies is that it is difficult to bury the mistakes. They say history is told by the victors but that's not entirely true. History is written by those who write and the writings that can be preserved. In democracies this is available to far more people. It is unlikely that you have an accurate understanding of the daily lives of those who lived more than a few hundred years ago. No one was recording that.

95% of businesses fail. How transparent are those failures? Generally not, which also leads to people making predictable mistakes like investing in bubbles.

> 2) it's much easier to play catchup than lead.

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45516066

> (You should also consider that information is distributed differently. As we've previously discussed and others mentioned. While in the US all our atrocities are out in the open, this is not true for autocracies. 64 (Deng was in power at that time) is a much more taboo topic than say, the Trail of Tears. In America we're quite self aware but even forget that our northern neighbors did something similar, but worse. But Canada isn't even trying that hard to hide those things. Even a much more open country like Japan is not so open about things like their invasion into China and Korea during WW2. You're aware that you should be careful in interpreting history of America as told by America, but such care must also be given when reading about others. Propaganda isn't uniquely American and we're not even that good at it)

I could ramble on for a long time about how I think national self-images differ from reality, to the cost of those living in them, but I don't think it would add much over noting the current weaponisation of the word "woke" by those who want to deny all historical mistakes, and before that having grown up in the UK with "it's political correctness gone mad", and the UK's political classes' differing reactions to the destruction of two statues dedicated to two different philanthropists — one of whom was a slave trader (apparently we should be sad about the destruction of that statue), the other was Jimmy Savile (where the destruction of the statue was met with broad agreement).

Also as a Brit, lots of us have absolutely no idea why most or all of our former colonies might not like us.

> If given odds like that, which would you prefer?

In this hypothetical, am I in the aristocracy or in the working class?

If a citizen, you're still missing my point entirely, and I think the parent point too.

Illustration of why: same question but of corporations, workers vs. shareholders (the equivalent of aristocrats). What the people with the money want has very little in common with the interests of those at the (metaphorical or literal) coal front.

Move fast and break [things | laws | treaties | people]. Sucks to be the one who gets broken. Sucks more when it's broken fast. The point is, and only is, that it's fast.

People are irrational actors way more often than they are rational ones.

  > People are irrational actors

An irrational actor is one who is logically incoherent. I don't mean illogical, I mean something closer to incomprehensible.

Maybe an example helps. Let's say our actor expresses that they want to live and is trying to get to work. An irrational action would be for them to pick up a gun, point it at their head, and fire under the condition that they are fully aware that this will kill them. But instead, if the actor believes shooting themself will teleport themselves to work, then it is a rational decision.

Or another example, an actor trying to win a game of chess knowingly marches their king into a capture position. But instead if they were unaware that such a move leads to a checkmate, then they're still rational.

An irrational actor has a logic that cannot be understood. It's not about the quality of their logic, it's about the existence. Even an actor acting probabilistically has some logic, as we can quantify it (using a density function).

Basically an irrational actor is one who knowingly undermines their own goals. It's a very narrow definition. Irrational actors are logically incoherent. So

Keep in mind that our brains are made of meat that talks to itself via chemical reactions. Brains are not digital computers, and are very much an analog thing. Brains can and do make actual mistakes all the time. Like straight up "this computed incorrectly" or "there was a transmission error" kinds of mistakes.

Humans are not rational actors, and never have been. That's why economic theory so frequently fails to predict behavior in spectacular ways.

  > people are irrational actors. We make incomprehensible choices all the time

I want to make it very clear to make sure we're on the same page. There is a difference between "incomprehensible" and "not understood." As an example of this difference, a neural network isn't a black box because we can't understand it, it is because we don't understand it. It's why in my examples I tried to make it very clear that the actions depended on what the actor thought would happen. Suicide cults like Wako are considered rational in this sense, even if from the outside it seems incomprehensible that someone thinking that killing themselves would beam them up into a spaceship disguised as a comet and the alien soul harvesters would reward them for doing so. The "rationality" is that __a__ logic exists, not that there is a good logic or even reasonable one.

  > Even in keeping with your definition

Not sure in which vein you meant: 1. Humans exhibit some behavioral patterns.

2. Cognitive bias where the brain thinks that there is a pattern when no such pattern exist.

I think you meant the second one. I used to think I am good at noticing patterns. But then I realized that this perception about myself clouded my vision of looking at a given problem or system because my brain tried to pattern match problems and solutions. While it worked in some cases, it did not in others. And just telling myself that while I think that there's a pattern here, there may or may not be a pattern helped- just being aware of cognitive bias.

> - Reducing expenses

Good insights. I’m curious if there are other models of business that are just as simple and useful… :)

Can you tell me more about what your new job is, without releasing anything sensitive?

If you are running applications on Linux containers in the cloud, then I would recommend Brendan Gregg's blog and books (https://www.brendangregg.com/overview.html). He does a lot of knowledge sharing from his experiences at Netflix.

Another complementary strategy is to avoid Turing-complete constructs as much as possible, i.e. use DSLs with restricted semantics. This way, advanced semantic properties such as termination are provable.

[1] Program Analysis, An Appetizer. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.10086.pdf

There are many examples of programs whose halting behavior is not known (collatz conjecture for example) but many others where program analysis works just fine.

You can make the analyzer happy by adding a max iteration limit or a recursion depth limit or something to make sure it fails out rather than looping forever.

Which is probably a good idea anyway, if you’re running code that you can’t mathematically prove will always complete.

Usually, when people say “static analysis“ they accept unsoundness and use of heuristics. Otherwise, they call the tool a type checker or a verifier. Such tools may run into the theoretical issues you mentioned. For them, the solution is to change the program until it compiles in a reasonable amount of time.

I guess something related to this one way or another.

If the judge program should say terminates yes/no and the program given is `while True: continue`, I guess the argument is that in the finite case, you could in principle just enumerate all programs that don't terminate and identify them as such?

Then you treeshake the unreachable parts of that directed graph from the start state, and look for closed loops in what remains.