[rayiner]

Once you resolve questions of values and fairness, you should be able to leverage data and metrics to achieve outcomes consistent with those values. Say you’re designing a jet engine. You decide what output parameters you care about optimising (maximum thrust versus fuel effiency, for example). You know that you can manipulate certain input parameters to influence those outputs. And you can use data to verify and iterate on your design. But all you can do is change inputs to a very complex system. The unbending rules of the system itself decide how those affect the outputs.

The problem is that most in government simply are not systems thinkers. They are focused on values and fairness, and believe that once you’ve identified those values, you can directly legislate those into outcomes. This thinking leads to spectacular failures (the war on drugs, the war on poverty, tough on crime, etc).

[ProblemFactory]

> The problem is that most in government simply are not systems thinkers.

I don't think the main problem is that "people in the government are stupid". Real life and societies are much more complex than a jet engine. There are thousands of value goals, too many to be able to put numerical targets on each one.

What is the optimal ratio of potholes to unsolved murders?

And when you forget to include any of the value goals in your model, then you get a paperclip AI scenario with terrible effects somewhere else.

[rayiner]

I didn’t say they were stupid. I said they are not systems thinkers. There are lots of very smart people who don’t view the world in terms of cause and effect, cost and benefit, action and reaction. Irrational and harmful, I might say that...