As an aside, I was interested that the most Republican (or at any rate least Democratic) department is apparently Transportation. More than Energy or Homeland Security!
Heebie's take: We're supposed to build a bridge to someone who is trying to make hay out of Project 2025 for some convoluted reason?
Sorry, I had tried to explain in the OP, but let me see if I can be clearer.
1) I don't think Noah actually endorses Project 2025; he's just gesturing towards it to make a point (and be an ass).
2) In addition to the obvious, "why are you being such and ass" I think the sketch that he's making of how different forces might balance each other is deeply wrong.
3) I understand the immediate response of, "why be such an ass" and my reaction still gravitates towards "what the fuck?"
4) I would, personally, be interested in fleshing out the substantive response a bit. It relates to things that I'm thinking about, and I feel like I have enough of a sense of the broad strokes argument to know that what Noah is saying is badly wrong, but I'd appreciate building that up a little more.
5) So, I'm asking for some help and assuming that people will also take the opportunity to vent.
6) It's largely tangential but given the overlap of Darb Gnoled as an occasional reader and sharing a podcast with Noah Smith that provides some additional reason to be polite.
* I hope that longtime readers of the blog will appreciate that it's fairly unusual for something to prompt me to curse.
1. I agree with Heebie's take.
2. I'm amused that NickS, generally one of the most even-tempered people around here, throws in a "WHAT THE FUCK?" Yes, this really is that nutty.
3. I agree with Noah's 2023 post and feel like complaining about "the left" there is beating up on a strawman or both-sides-ism. To the extent that Democrats believe the government should be giving grants to nonprofits to do stuff rather than doing that stuff itself, it seems like a bit of 90s-era triangulation rather than a sincere belief anyone proactively preferred in the past 20 years. I've observed (maybe not here, I don't remember, but definitely IRL) that there are only two reasons I'm a contractor rather than a federal government employee: to make me easier to fire (but still not that easy considering what my job is and how long I've been doing it) and so that some private business can skim some profit off this function.
4. I haven't listened to the podcast because I don't do that sort of thing, but just reading the quote in the OP, I see two logical problems with it.
Almost everyone who wants to go into the civil service and is qualified for it is a Dem.
Yes, and the goal of Project 2025 is to reclassify tens of thousands of positions as political appointees, thereby changing the qualifications. And they'd be focusing on leadership positions, of course, where they'd have the most impact. Smith seems to think that Project 2025 would only result in a slight change in the total partisan balance of the federal workforce, but much bigger effects are very plausible.
Unfortunately the Federalist society is the only case we've seen of depolarization within institutions. The judiciary has become a less polarized institution thanks to the Federalist society putting their thumb on the scale.
Saying that it's good how the Federalist Society has depolarized the judiciary (if that's even true, but anyways) is just centrism for its own sake. There are tons of critiques of centrism for its own sake out there and this comment is already long enough, so I'll just link to this one rather than making it any longer.
As an aside, I was interested that the most Republican (or at any rate least Democratic) department is apparently Transportation. More than Energy or Homeland Security!
I noticed that too. Perhaps, going on stereotypes, more engineers than most departments but, compared to Energy, fewer academics?
That's why there's no money for public transit and assholes keep trying for 20 years to blow up more of Pittsburgh to build another freeway.
How would making civil service jobs political appointments *decrease* polarization?
4: makes sense. Energy's main job is building nuclear weapons for the US armed forces, historically a job that attracts left-wingers, indeed some actual Stalinists.
I don't want to traffic in unfounded stereotypes, but it seems to me this isn't just a civil service issue. Everyone who actually works, as opposed to owns or supervises, is a Democrat or at least not a Republican. People who own shit and retired people bitching about the employees.
provides some additional reason to be polite
The polite response is
Feels like Smith makes better arguments when they have to be written down (though I think even he adopts the lens of housing and transit too universally in the blog post, the government does a lot more than that, they're still decent overall points), and in a podcast he returns to his instinct of "if I'm making people mad I must be doing something right" smug contrarianism that I used to see on his Twitter before I muted it (which is back when it was Twitter)
LOL. 3.2 pwned by 2.last.
I appreciated 3.2; I thought, "somebody gets me."
I hardly feel I have to justify saying Democratic partisan thinking is not a core problem in government agencies. I actually think there's too much neutrality: I don't think more position should be political appointments, but the non-politicals should still be able to say "Yes, it's our goal to achieve X, and our efforts will bend in that direction," regardless of how "political" X sounds, and accept top-down direction on what X is, recognizing they still have a statutory mission that may clash. Occasionally they do that, but more often it resembles work-to-rule.
I'm thinking of the state-level housing agency, where many managers and employees continue work to old assumptions about not riling NIMBYs when they review city plans, even though both state law and gubernatorial direction have shifted to agree "More housing is the paramount goal", or Caltrans, which remains the More Highways Department by institutional culture even as they promulgate better all-modes-of-transportation policies on paper only.
I high school classmate of mine runs the state housing agency for a state where the governor brags about shooting dogs.
I hardly feel I have to justify saying Democratic partisan thinking is not a core problem in government agencies. I actually think there's too much neutrality: I don't think more position should be political appointments, but the non-politicals should still be able to say "Yes, it's our goal to achieve X, and our efforts will bend in that direction," regardless of how "political" X sounds, and accept top-down direction on what X is, recognizing they still have a statutory mission that may clash. Occasionally they do that, but more often it resembles work-to-rule.
You, my good sir, are in the target audience for Recoding America; she's really good about describing both the pressures that can lead good, committed people do doing what looks like work-to-rule and also showing how that can be changed with effort.
More broadly, if I were to sketch out a serious response to Noah it would be (approximately).
Noah is correct that (a) there is a real problem with government struggling to do projects in-house OR contract out in a way that is goal-driven rather than requirements-driven. He's also correct that, if we say strong ideological polarization in the civil service that could be a sign of a problem.
I think he's very, very wrong about.
1: What he imagines the reasons for government tying itself in knots.
2: The degree of ideological polarization
3: The way to solve either of the two problems that he's misidentified above.
I would be tempted to just say that he has both the problem and solution wrong BUT, I do want to try to convince more people that they should read Recoding America, and it would be good to be able to quickly sketch out some version of, "here's why this book will improve your ability to understand what's going on."
16.1: In a strange course of events, Pahlka was my babysitter long, long ago.
16.1: In a strange course of events, Pahlka was my babysitter long, long ago.
Wow. That is a remarkable coincidence.
I bought the book on Kindle just now. Also asked a friend who's held Pahlka-esque top jobs at state and local level if she has opinions.
I will admit that the view presented in the book is somewhat idealized. She pushes hard on, "good, competent people, working to implied or explicit standards that make things difficult." I'm sure that's not the only factor at work, but she's fairly convincing that it's a much larger piece of the puzzle than you might initially think.
Then you have a bunch of people in the civil service who are willing to say, "what we really need to do is cut down expenditures. What we really need to do is spend less and eliminate boondoggles"That boy needs therapy. The idea that somehow what you'd get is greater efficiency, by bringing "conservatives" into government? Hahahahahahaha ..... Hasn't he heard of the Iron Law of Institutions ? And they'd want to do -different things-, not do "better with less."
Crrrrrikey, the stupid, it hurts.
And that's even before we get to the part about how "conservatives" these days are no such thing, they're reactionaries who want to hurt people.
The polite response is
I should add -- in addition to my request for substantive discussion that I posted so that other people could share my boggling over the post.
On some level the originally quoted comments seem as wrong as the infamous David Graeber passage.
I do think we should have different standards for published work vs speaking off-the-cuff, but part of my reaction is, "are you listening to what you're saying? Does you actually think this is correct?"
Every economics PhD is a Renfield seeking a Transylvanian nobleman to serve.
21: I think that this is right -- the issue is that any group hired to work in the Federal Government won't say "my job isn't important; please cut my pay or decrease my relevance". If you import conservatives - even fiscal conservatives-- to actually work in an agency, you'll find that they consider their work important and worthy of more interest, staffing, etc. They will probably retain a reflexive "but sure, social services are waste" around their friends, but engineers will discuss how important structurally sound bridges are, etc.
At most, conservatives in agencies will grumble about new "less relevant" priorities that are introduced as time goes on... that's one type of "bloat" that might be resisted. (But that "bloat" usually reflects current priorities - like embedded carbon analysis for housing. It's not something that we looked at 10 years ago, but it's becoming more important as governments try to meet, or even understand, their climate targets.)
The job of prioritizing what gets funding has to come from a higher level - a political one - either in the department picking among priorities, or above the department, deciding how to allocate limited tax revenue for greatest impact.
If you identify the problem as "polarization" instead of "bad-faith actors," this is where you end up.
Smith's insight -- and he's entirely correct -- is that MAGA Republicans are dedicated to national unity and promote a viable program for ending polarization. You want national unity? Vladimir Putin got more than 87% of the vote in his last election.
Darb (PBUH) is a very self-aware individual and a smart commentator, but he has always been a sucker for the Neoliberal Fallacy, which is the belief that liberals and conservatives share common priorities, such as economic growth and the reduction of poverty, and can therefore reach an accommodation on the methods for reaching those goals.
23 made me laugh out loud.
So I was not familiar with Noah Smith beyond seeing and remembering his substack's name until a couple days ago, when I followed a link at random but didn't bother to read anything else there. Is it mostly just freakonomics-style contrarianism?
To some extent the answer here is to look at other countries that have apolitical and effective government bureaucracies and see what they do. The tricky thing though is that although it's easy to find countries where the bureaucracy is less politicized, it's harder to find ones that are more effective across the board. To take some examples, the USPS and the US military and the FBI are pretty effective compared to peer countries.
At any rate, the main problem here is that post-Trump conservatism is actively anti-competency. Hiring smart conservatives always means grifters and scammers or really hard core racist/sexists, because otherwise smart people don't become conservative. And this is a problem that conservatism has to solve for itself, we can't actually do anything about it as outsiders. Yes it's bad for there to be as much job-based polarization as there is, it's killing our public universities right now that the Republican Party hates all faculty, but there's not much we can do about it since it's conservative's problem. (In science there are a reasonable number of conservatives, but since they're all immigrants the Republicans don't feel represented by them.)
But you let one guy fly a drone then climb a roof a couple hundred yards from a presidential candidate and that's all you hear about.
The other thing is Republicans mostly don't have jobs, they're retired.
I think it would be great if there were other paths to the civil service, like some kind of fellowship training for people with Bachelors or even highschool.
Non-profits which often lack
Career tracks are often more flexible in hiring. I don't want havks in the civil service, but it would be great if the government provided on-the job training for people who want a career in government.
*I'm just really tired of how many jobs require Masters degrees and lots of debt. I think the civil service, could provide valuable services, and also serve as a way for workers to achieve middle class stability.
The rise of HR and insanely detailed job ads with onerous education requirements is a scourge. The early stages of hiring have been taken away from people who know anything about the job and replaced by people who don't know anything about the job and are just "must have a bachelor's (preferably a masters) in [insert name of job]" even if that's not a real major.
Nonprofits don't usually pay for shit, except at the very top.
26: His writing is pretty wide ranging. I particularly liked his series analyzing the development success story of nations, focusing on the varied strategies that each implemented and has improved their citizen's wealth and income. Some interesting ones:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-us-must-not-ignore-indonesia
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-ireland-got-so-rich
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/herecomesindia
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-polandmalaysia-model
I also appreciate the occasional breaks, where he steps back and looks at breakthroughs and reasons to be optimistic:
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/five-things-to-be-optimistic-about
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/decade-of-the-battery-334
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/drawing-pictures-of-cities
Specific and onerous education requirements for jobs are bad for hiring, but they're ruining education. If all education provides is a checkbox then it just becomes an elaborate joke where no one actually cares whether students have learned anything. You just pretend to teach people so they can check some box to get a job that doesn't actually matter for the job.
27: The average European pension system also envies the efficiency, effectiveness, and universality of the US SSA.
Although I've never followed his blog, this I thought was the most dipshit post I ever ran across. At the end he's metaphorically pressing his cheeks like Urkel and going "Gosh, I wonder why this Modi guy is so controversial!"
Generally I think us bureaucrats individually are pretty great, especially at the federal level. US problems usually are about too many layers of government, and disfunctionality around treating certain government contracts as jobs programs (buy American provisions, disfunctionality around certain aspects of unions, etc.).
34: Totally, that's why I'm daying gov should provide more services. Like what if there was guaranteed subsidies for day care which included a public option.
34: Totally, that's why I'm daying gov should provide more services. Like what if there was guaranteed subsidies for day care which included a public option.
As Nick correctly identifies in the OP, it's hard to formulate a good-faith response to Noah here because the underlying premises of his argument are so spectacularly wrong.
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Now that we're over 40 comments, and multiple commenters here teach math, I'm going OT to ask: what would be good resources for reviewing/teaching oneself Calculus in preparation for taking Linear Algebra and Differential Equations? I'm looking less for lectures/videos and more for practice actually doing problems, ideally where I'd be able to tell if I'm right or not.
The context is a bit odd: I took math all the way up to Linear Algebra/Differential Equations - basically, the year following college Calculus as the curriculum was back then - when I was in college, but that was decades ago. When I do math now, I'm pretty slow at just reading and writing the notation, much less the actual doing of problems, and I want to get comfortable with it again. With the ultimate goal of passing a recent course in LA/DE with an actual transcript that can be used to satisfy pre-reqs for grad-level courses in CS and/or math.
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There is no such thing as "differential equations." You can't have something different and equal.
Unless you think Plessy v. Ferguson is going to go the way of Roe.
According to OPM's most recent Fedscope data, Transportation has about 55k employees. Of that, 45k are in FAA. I didn't dig further, but I would expect that a plurality, if not a majority, of FAA employees are air traffic controllers.
43: equalential equations occasion equanimity
45: There are only 11,500 fully certified ATCs. Plurality perhaps, but not near majority.
You down with ATC.
Yeah, you fly free.
Correction, fully certified or certified sufficiently to work independently.
I would think that no matter how certified you are, an air traffic controller would have to work well with others.
Real patriots know the FAA is the Deep State.
Life is becoming a Simpsons episode, and not one of the episodes from the good seasons.
42: I think the thing people usually suggest is Khan Academy, which I'm pretty sure goes up through calculus. Also, fun sounding long term plan!
42: I have no first hand experience, but Kahn Academy and MIT open courses are the two recs I see bandied about most.
Actually, I take that back. When I want to have my students watch videos, I use the Bowling Green youtube channel. It's very gentle and a good pace for my students, who are weak in math. So I have firsthand experience with that.
I've had two bosses who went to Bowling Green.
Am I misremembering which school it is? I can't find the bowling green math youtube channel.
I'll check whenever I'm back on my computer.
Did you look a bit south of Toledo?
I found Khan Academy lectures not great for trying to review algebra/pre-calculus quickly last summer and I ended up reading through most of a textbook instead. But that was just to pass a basic placement test, and now I want to actually "learn" things. Maybe I'll give them another chance.
Maybe the Bowling Green massacre was a mass deletion of youtube videos and that's why no one's found a record of it.
Or maybe it's a case where educational videos got taken down because the school didn't meet accessibility requirements w/r/t captions or transcripts. I know that's happened with at least one university (Berkeley?).
It is every American's right as a sovereign citizen to just sort of fly airplanes wherever.
It was Berkeley and my unit wrote the scripts that took everything down. (They weren't deleted, just restricted to logged-in university accounts.) After initially feeling quite grumpy about it I've come to accept that it was the right thing to do. I wouldn't be at all surprised if lots of other universities decided to preemptively take down their own public video content in advance of the DOJ getting involved.
Bowling Green is the Berkeley of Ohio.
Probably. I've never been to Berkeley though.
The campus is on a hillside so I'd think most of the lawns would be difficult to bowl on.
Automatic captions have improved a *lot* in the meantime, no?
This must be one of the best use case for all this AI nonsense, right? When you're just trying to figure out which of two parsing looks like a real sentence? Though of course that'll bring up the price.
65: Hillsides not a thing at Bowling Green. May be the flattest campus in the whole US.
From what I know about some universities, though none that have been named in this thread, there's a question about the level of legal risk involved in relying on uncorrected/unreviewed captions generated via one or another machine-learning tool. If you-re going to review the captions, you need to pay people, another thing universities are reluctant to do.
I thought that's because automatic captions sucked and so didn't make things accessible. I would have thought that if they genuinely improved to the point of actual accessibility then there'd be no issue? But I don't know the legal details
Imagine captions that make shit up occasionally. How much made-up shit is too much? What kind of made-up shit is beyond the pale even if it's infrequent? What if the service inserts words during period of silence or instrumental music?
What if you get captions like some I saw on a streaming service where there were crude anatomical phrases that had nothing to do with the dialogue in ways that were hilarious but kind of disturbing?
How much made-up shit is too much?
Vance fucking the couch is exactly the right amount of made-up shit.
I figured it out - it's Grand Valley State U, not Bowling Green, that has the extensive YouTube library.
Here's their playlist: https://www.youtube.com/@GVSUmath/playlists
I'm looking less for lectures/videos and more for practice actually doing problems, ideally where I'd be able to tell if I'm right or not.
Now that I'm off my phone, I'm reading more carefully and noticed this bit.
MyOpenMath is an open source homework platform that has some self-study courses, but it doesn't look like it goes up to Calculus. (https://www.myopenmath.com/info/selfstudy.php)
OH!! This guy is great: Paul's Online Notes at Lamar University. Go to the lefthand drop down menu to jump to any course. Tons and tons of problems, with solutions written out.
Why didn't I just lead with that? Paul's Online Notes is my best rec.
You could ask the same question about people. Hiring an incompetent company made of people who did a bad job wouldn't be accessible, but a good one would. It's not about the process they use but about the quality of their work product.
76,77: Thank you! That looks great.
I'm like NickS. Takes like this make me reevaluate. Is economics okay?
Automatic captioning has improved hugely in the 7-8 years since the course videos were taken out of the public realm. Back then the option was considered and vendors were approached but the success rate was too low, especially for courses with technical vocabulary or speakers with strongly accented English.
I think if the university were given the same option today, weighing the risks of 1) bad press due to taking the videos down versus 2) the legal liability of occasionally wrong AI captioning, the risk of 2) has decreased enough that it would take that path. But of course that's no longer the option it's facing; the videos are down, there's no incentive to put them back up and no administrator will sign off on the nonzero risk of doing so.
Why isn't there a Dean of Unnecessary Risks? I bet the fraternities would like one.
48: William Langewiesche's admittedly dated essay on New York ATC does make a decent case they're actually a species of rapper.
1) disproportionately from the outer boroughs of NYC
2) constantly with a mic in one hand, defined by their patter
3) very proud of their ability to perform rhetorically under pressure and drama
4) tend to create drama and pressure if there isn't any
5) often involved in internecine beefs that escalate far beyond anything an outsider would consider reasonable or even sane
6) less important to the show than they think
Especially as he wrote it in the late 1990s.
Of course they're not going to kill each other....
...just you.
85: That is a lovely deep cut, and I am here for it. Just need a crossover with Toon.
86: was that the one that was turned into "Pushing Tin"? (Odd 90s romcom with an abnormally stellar cast; John Cusack, Cate Blanchett, Angelina Jolie, Billy Thornton)
That is a lovely deep cut, and I am here for it. Just need a crossover with Toon.
Thank you. Yes, it seems like a setting that needs unrealistic physics.
Here's another deep cut. I figured out, a couple months ago, that the first time I heard of google was the September 5th 1998 Daily Illuminator
September 5, 1998: Agog Over Google
A friend of mine recently told me about a cool new search engine: Google. When I first started using Google a few months ago, it had its problems, but since then it's matured, and its search results are now the most targeted of any search engine I've yet tried.
SJ and I recently put it to the test with a little vanity surfing - we searched for "Steve Jackson" (who is pretty widely mentioned on the web). Google's results? The SJ Games homepage was returned as the FIRST result, and SJ's own personal homepage in the top 10. We were impressed.
So despite the silly name, Google is a really great search engine; it beats out the big-name commercial engines by a mile. And plus, there's no annoying ads to slow you down. (At least, not yet...) Give Google a try!
I remember reading a pop-science article on the Google algorithm sometime in the 90s, before it was released, and thinking that it sounded remarkably similar to an automated version of how I looked for things online manually, so it should work well. I did not translate this belief into buying stock early.
In the very latest 90s, some librarian in Ohio told me about google like it was a secret hack. I hadn't heard of it before. I was not buying tech stocks at all because a guy in the next office over was doing an early version of FIRE and putting all of his savings into technology stocks. I left that job before the crash, so I don't know how he took the loss.
It really was a game changer. In my first job in 2000 I had five search engines bookmarked (in whatever antediluvian browser I was using) because they were all crap in different ways.
In my second job in about 2002 I was offered research training - how to look up important information in a reference book in your local library. Need to check the name and parish of a Church of England clergyman? Ask for Crockford's!
I think that must have been about the last year that particular training was offered.
We also had a physical photo archive...
re: 94
I wonder how much search is going to balkanise, again, as they become consumed by advertising, poor quality AI summaries, and paid-for (or SEO driven) placement within results? Google is still my usual starting point, but I'll often find myself specifically going elsewhere, e.g. to search the Arxiv, or Wikipedia, or a specific institution's catalogue.
When I was still at the naieldoB, it was amazing how much I relied on the incredible knowledge of specific people. If I wanted to find out about the provenance of some manuscript, or when it was last photographed, or some idiosyncrasy of the codicological properties of some work, there were paper reference books I could look them up in, but I could also just walk down the corridor and talk to the people who wrote the books.
I wonder how much that is still a thing as those people are nearing retirement?
Re balkanisation, I strongly believe that Lovefilm, circa 2010, was superior to any streaming service you could imagine. It had essentially any film or TV series you might want to watch, and would send them to you promptly. If they didn't have it you could ask them to buy it and they often did, and let you know.
I didn't need to subscribe to Paramount By Post and Mailflix and Amazon DVD Hire and DisneyPost and whatever other bastard equivalents there might have been. I had one subscription, it was cheap, and it had everything. Then it went away and we got the current balkanised service instead.
I still remember Google's motto back in the day. "Don't be evil until you're so woven into the web of society that it is impossible for people to stop us."
42: Maybe try starting with Calculus of One Variable by Hirst and if that's too basic try Vector Calculus by Matthews. Both books provide solutions to exercises. Neither one is a great textbook for a course, but if you've seen the material before and are looking for exercises, they might be what you're looking for.
98: Thank you! Looks like I can view both of those titles via a library too.