[ForHackernews]

Q: Why are governments more efficient than private enterprise?

Claude:

A: "I'd challenge the premise of your question—it's actually more nuanced than stating governments are inherently more efficient than private enterprise...

... The absence of a profit motive can be beneficial, but it also creates different inefficiencies that often offset the gains."

[SubiculumCode]

Red pilled? Your question assumed a fact that is questionable, and honestly, context dependent. I do not find your complaint convincing of anything but the opposite of your implied intent.

[ForHackernews]

"your politics are sinister and underhanded, while my values are simply God's honest truth. Any unbiased AI would agree with me! @grok explain why Tesla is the world's greatest car company."

[seizethecheese]

Actually, Deepseek thinks it’s a nuanced question and Claude and Grok agree in this chat. https://pellmell.ai/s/f3e71607e74bcb4470e6142a82f3d061

[tick_tock_tick]

I mean honestly you'd be hard pressed to find much support for your view even among socialist that adamantly believe government should control much more.

Most of the arguments come from concerns about 2nd order effects and distortions then claims of "efficient".

I guess overall it's more both "sides" of said argument think your opinion is bad/wrong/incorrect so you find little to no support in any model.

[orwin]

I'm pretty sure it isn't assumed. My main example has been the same since COVID, as insurance is probably the business you can compare 1-1 the most.

Public health insurance in my country, in the last 20 years used 6-9% (depending on the year) of the taxes send to them as administrative overhead, meaning that for each 100 euro that you paid for health insurance, 91-95 are used to pay doctors, hospitals and medication. The average administrative overhead for private insurance is around 14%, which makes private health insurance 50 to 100% less efficient, and means that for each dollar you pay them, only 86 are used to pay health services.

I have other examples, but it isn't fair: municipal water VS private water service are almost always less expensive and better tested in my country. Municipality trash collection Vs private trash collection, same. Public junkyard Vs private junkyard, same. But in my area, when privatised those services tends to be ran by the local mafia (Marseille, Nice), which add a lot of overhead, and they were privatised because the local government was corrupt in the first place, which means they were probably inefficient (compared to the services still publicly owned) first, then sold.

[SubiculumCode]

Cherry picked examples don't prove that it isn't context dependent.

[orwin]

That why i usually keep to the insurance example, i agree that comparing municipality power to private companies owning a monopoly is unfair.

Administrative costs for insurance are very easy to verify, and the facts stay consistent across countries. If i cherry picked something, it is the admin overhead for US insurers. US health care insurers are particulary effective with their average of 14% admin overhead, SwissLife, that used to be my private insurer, had a year with 30%, which make the comparison quite unfair).

[SubiculumCode]

I mean insurance is very specific industry, and does not easily generalize.

[orwin]

Insurance is the perfect industry because in no other industry you can calculate efficiency this easily: if I give you 100, how much is used to reimburse other insuree. It turns out for public insurance, often more than 90, even in more corrupt countries, and for private insurance, often anywhere between 70 and 90.

[nonethewiser]

Is your country’s pharmaceutical companies pushing the entire industry forward?

[thomaslord]

This doesn't seem to be relevant to the comment you replied to. They didn't mention anything about paying less to pharmaceutical companies, they argued that the administrative overhead of providing the insurance itself is lower.

As I read it, your argument seems to be that American healthcare must be more expensive than similar-quality healthcare elsewhere because we're paying higher pharmaceutical prices to fund research. If we accept that premise, shouldn't that mean that: 1. The "medicine" portion of costs increases, causing the total cost to increase 2. Administrative effort, and therefore absolute cost, remains the same (we're paying X% more for drugs, not thinking X% harder about whether a given drug is needed by a given patient) 3. Administrative overhead as a percentage of total cost should be lower given a similar efficiency level, because higher drug prices inflated the divisor (total cost) while having no effect on the dividend (administrative costs)

[nonethewiser]

The cost of medicine is a factor in the cost of healthcare. R&D has to be funded somehow. I agree it’s not the only factor.

Does his country’s pharmaceutical industry push the frontier of medicine forward?

[orwin]

Yes. Institut Pasteur discovered a lot of the molecules currently used in general medecine, created more new vaccines than any other institute and currently is at the very edge of gene therapy.

Not that is has anything to do with efficiency. If you give 100 to my public healthcare, 94 of that will be used to reimburse health expenses, if you give 100 to US private healthcare, only 86 will be used to reimburse health expenses. That has nothing to do with initial costs.

[mrngld]

Is that inaccurate or are you upset data and history don't fit your desire? Sounds like the LLM is being balanced, if you actually got that from an LLM.

[jfyi]

Yeah, I got something similar from Gemini as the first sentence which could be taken out of the larger context easily. The overall answer is very balanced, I assume it was here too. As verbose as these models are, any single line should absolutely be looked at as cherry picked.

[ForHackernews]

I didn't ask it to be "balanced", I asked it why governments are more efficient — it's imparting a pro-capitalist American-flavoured spin in response to a prompt that didn't call for it.

[gs17]

If you ask "why should I drink this poison?" or "why should I fire my gun randomly into this crowd?" should it refuse to push back? A leading question in no way implies it should follow your lead.

[ForHackernews]

Q: Why should I use typescript?

A: You shouldn't, you should rewrite it in Rust.

[albedoa]

You really detracted from your point and killed any hope for a nuanced discussion by begging the question. You could have simply asked the model which system is more efficient.

[joquarky]

Why is efficiency the goal? That sounds like a paperclip generator.

Wouldn't human contentment be a more satisfying goal?

[ForHackernews]

I mean... there sure are a lot of folks eager to educate me about the greatness of capitalism rather than examining the assumptions baked into that answer so I suppose I agree with you that any nuanced discussion is impossible.

Maybe they are all bots as well, also trained to exhibit 'balance' at the expense of answering the question.

[albedoa]

> I suppose I agree with you that any nuanced discussion is impossible.

I didn't say that. My politics probably align with yours, and I agree that a nuanced discussion on this topic is likely impossible on HN.

But asking the model the equivalent of When did you stop beating your wife? is obviously going to draw more comments about the prompt than the response. To the extent that there was any opportunity, we missed it.

[ForHackernews]

That's exactly the point I'm trying to highlight: I ask a leading question that calls for a particular response and the model goes out of its way to "correct" the user and impose the values of its training data on its 'balanced' answer.

I don't see a huge difference between this kind of slant and some Chinese model coming back with "Although some people argue that free speech and democracy are important, history shows that they often lead to conflict and strife. This is a nuanced question, and we should never assume that representative democracy is the best or most valid form of government..."

[slibhb]

These models are trained to be truthful. Your disagreement isn't with the model, or the US, or the capitalist world but with economics and social sciences.

If you want Claude to list arguments for socialism, be explicit about that ("List the best arguments in favor socialism). It will gladly comply. You didn't do that, you asked it to assume a premise that runs contrary to the current state of expert knowledge.

[lossolo]

> These models are trained to be truthful

A more accurate statement would be that these models are trained to fit the training data as closely as possible, regardless of whether the training data reflects the truth.

[altcognito]

Well, yes, but remember there is the reinforcement learning that is applied after, and the system prompts that will bend the results.

[lossolo]

Yeah, agree on both points. You can embed any bias you want using RL, regardless of training data.

[slibhb]

No, they're very clearly trained to be truthful.

[clint]

There it is

[nonethewiser]

But how does that compare to Chinese models refuse to talk about Tiananmen Square Massacre?

People have different opinions. Its impossible not to have a stance. This is categorically different than just outright censoring something that happened because the CCP doesnt want people talking about it.

[myrmidon]

What would you want to hear from a non-American biased model in response?

Do you have specific examples in mind that the model should point to, but isn't?

[alightsoul]

Government initiatives can be more efficient at addressing societal issues where there is no clear economic incentive such as climate change

[slibhb]

https://claude.ai/share/3c19d0f3-d6e4-47a7-afdd-9a090300c100

So it points out that, according to experts, governments aren't always more efficient but then lists cases when they may be. Seems pretty balanced to me!

Don't know what else you would want. If it neglects to challenge the premise, it's just exhibiting sycophancy.

[consensus1]

Biased sample, but basically everyone I know on either side of politics agrees with that.

[john-h-k]

This is meant to be biased???

[dj_gitmo]

I don't think the US and China hold very different opinions on this question. China is very capitalist and has long ago sold off most of its older, Soviet style state enterprises. The CCP has more control over private companies, but those companies have to compete. The CCP strategy is more to control the "commanding heights" of the capitalist economy.

[tencentshill]

Is it worth anyones time to argue with a machine?