Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by BobTheCoder 3521 days ago
> What makes you believe this? Many people, myself included (and I write software), think software people would not be so great at this, because society isn't code. Social and emotional intelligence are critical.

I think there are in general 3 areas of information that are useful when contributing to the development of a societal system. Those being:

* Research (History / modern economic research)

* The Cutting Edge (Technology / modern business, project and team management / open source model)

* Domain Knowledge (Specific and detailed knowledge of a particular domain)

Software people have 2 of the 3. Plus they can collaborate easily using the open source model. I think wikipedia is proof that great things can be done without requiring "experts" with a great collaboration model.

I also think that a lot of economics is not relevant if you are going for a "no free enterprise" based system.

> "We are great at being objective and not being caught up in the zealotry that is coupled with the classical systems of capitalism, communism etc."

> With all due respect, are you kidding?

No one is perfect and we aren't free from bias. However, a big part of our jobs is choosing between options eg. technologies. We strive to diminish our egos and bias to make good choices. I think this attribute is very useful for the topic of societal systems which tends to be extremely polarizing (eg. https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism/).