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by vlan0 37 days ago
>Systems are designed for humans, if they fail to account for human nature then they're bad systems.

Systems will always be bad. It's why corporations will always be bad. The complexities are too much for humans. You will never account for all variables. Account for one, with that you are exposed to another. This becomes clear to me when you look at government and the systems it tries to use, since forever. Climate change is another great example. Requires coordinated change across the globe. Many many many factors why that will never change. Change in the system of that size is too hard. So is it the system that is bad, or maybe it's just a reflection of limitations within us as a species, today?
1 comments
idle_zealot 36 days ago
A terribly defeatist attitude. The same could be said about, say, death during childbirth. For hundreds of thousands of years people tried methods of midwifery to ease that process and reduce deaths to little effect. People considered that to be women's lot, an immutable fact of human nature. Then we figured out how to reduce deaths during childbirth to a relatively tiny fraction of all-cause mortality, and that level of care became standard, at least in parts of the world. Why would you be so convinced that systems of organization are unsolvable? Where is your hacker's spirit?
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AnthonyMouse 36 days ago
We have a system for improving organizations. Competition.

The actual problem is that our system for preserving competition is insufficiently effective.

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account42 36 days ago
Competition on its own is a very bad system for improving organizations as is selects for the most ruthless and underhanded, not the best for society. Unless you can 100% ensure that companies don't externalize their costs then the company that learns how to will win the competition game.
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AnthonyMouse 35 days ago
> Competition on its own is a very bad system for improving organizations as is selects for the most ruthless and underhanded, not the best for society.

If a company is ruthlessly screwing you but you have 50 other viable alternatives, nothing is forcing you to continue using them, which is a disadvantage for them, not an advantage.

If a company is lying to you, there are already laws against that, and on top of that actual competition means you also get to stop doing business with them.

Which companies screw people the most, the ones with limited competition (Comcast, Microsoft, Boeing) or the ones with lots of competition (Costco, Framework, IKEA)?

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