This is what the critics fail to understand: this all should be documented because it's public work. There should be no "secret sauce" in the bureaucracy nor should the process be so abstract and complex that the hidden details are the most pertinent ones.
Government should not involve arcane wizardry nor should imputed mastery of it be held as an excuse to prevent it's modification to meet the will of the voters.
Removing something critical and seeing what happens is a methodology used by Musk in all his companies: remove LIDAR from self driving car, remove flame trench from spaceship launch pad, etc. Results may vary.
"Results may vary" is not an acceptable methodology for the US Government, when millions of lives are potentially at stake.
Ed: among the ways millions of lives could be lost: losing control of our nuclear arsenal or nuclear materials due to haphazardly firing people responsible for maintaining them. Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inconvenient data. Starvation and disease from ceasing aid around the world. There's also the wars likely to result from the collapse of trust in the US as a security partner, but I suppose it's not correct to blame that on DOGE per se, even if it's an extension of the same principle.
> Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inconvenient data.
That’s possible, however, it’s possible it’ll give a chance to remove autocrats who have suppressed the scientific method in favor of their prevailing opinions or preferences.
There will be a painful period but it could rejuvenate the systems.
But consider, what if we rejuvenated our health infrastructure in a way that isn't blazingly incompetent? Suppose you learned enough about the systems currently being smashed to specifically fire the "autocrats" and leave the competent people? Are you seeing where the importance of detail comes in?
At this point, I've presented a handful of fairly straightforward hypotheses about cause and effect. They could be wrong, but it's on you to show that they're actually self-referential. There is no amount or kind of other people's opinions that will make them so.
Sometimes people (e.g. US voters) will only learn by running into a wall. How all exactly will turn out is hard to tell and frankly maybe we better don't know. I'm tending to the conclusion there's no way around the movement of the big picture, the shifting of geo-political order in the world.
On reading the article before the comments, I literally was remembering Musk's initial descriptions of The Boring Company and how they were wildly forgetting or glossing over key details that would mean the difference between exciting leap forward to terrifying death trap.
I find your comment to be the same idea, but on something folks have foisted upon them and are forced to experience.
Reality being more complicated than a model is precisely their point:
The vision of a technocratic bureaucracy isn’t workable given the complexity of life — so we need to distribute decisions to be made in context. We’re paying huge sums for a technocratic system that can’t account for the actual needs and which leads to suboptimal outcomes.
Dismantling the regulatory state and attendant bureaucracy creates room for better, localized, contextual systems to flourish.
> Dismantling the regulatory state and attendant bureaucracy creates room for better, localized, contextual systems to flourish.
And I guess it doesn't matter how many people will be hurt during the churn...
But regardless, DOGE's goal isn't to make government better, it's to make government broken and cheap, so it will be easier to funnel money to Musk's (and other Trump cronies') companies instead.
Can we please not DOGEify every comment thread? I know that it's on a lot of minds all the time, but we have a whole spot on the front page effectively reserved for DOGE 24/7, and I'd like to see literally anything else in the other 29 slots.
Agreed. People are unhealthily obsessed with DOGE here. And on top of that, basically every DOGE thread turns into a flame war. It's extremely deleterious for the site to have everything collapse into DOGE talk.
Thiel was part of ycombinator for a time, current head of yc worked for Palantir and has been working on DOGE-related Curtis Yarvin type stuff, so it is likely to come up here a lot.
I agree its quite annoying. But it only comes up because of the massive change it will cause across the whole country and it's important to remain prepared for implications.
A large percentage of HN's population doesn't live in the US, and many of those of us who do have other ways of keeping track of what's going on. Threads about DOGE on HN are not useful, they're almost always just flame wars. Those who feel enlightened by them can join the daily thread that inevitably pops up and leave the rest of us to talk about other things.
Don't think you are being naive, no apologies are needed. Still that whole situation puzzles me a lot. USA chooses. Clear outcomem, no surprises. Pro life, pro guns, anti immigrants, anti different, anti regulation. USA complains. What info am i missing...?
They don’t care about ‘saving money’, they’re just messing about to see if they can. To move the goalpost of what is acceptable. To goosestep the United States back into a Russia-aligned nation that lets rich people pluck the poors bald like chickens.
Government should not involve arcane wizardry nor should imputed mastery of it be held as an excuse to prevent it's modification to meet the will of the voters.