A decent ish response

Question

A decent ish response <http www oneill io 2020 01 03 slight return >

daf · Answer

That post makes a good point it s not just a question of what can be predicted from the data We used to have an institute ACMD that would inform government policy with scientific facts related to drugs narcotics We soon saw what happened when advisers started to say alcohol was causing more harm than some illegal drugs It could be argued that the truth didn t suit the impression that politicians wanted to create <https en wikipedia org wiki David Nutt>

daf · Answer

I remember attending a panel discussion where civil servant heading the new Universal Credit benefit was answering questions about the UK civil service use of agile software development The guy was extremely tall super photogenic and very well spoken but extremely clueless about technology the Senior Civil Service is a monoculture and reacts very badly to those outside that culture That s the impression I got whatever that guy does it happens in a bubble far far away from technology The impression I got was the technology side of things is some cheap dirty process that we export to the lowest bidder in some other part of the world An Alan Kay Bret Victor vision of computational thinking hasn t been conceived of by dinosaurs of that kind

jarm · Answer

< daf> definitely the elephant in the room is that no one in UK gov listens to evidence

jarm · Answer

Unfortunately if you read the blog post that Cummings links out to he has a very long post about his trip to Dynamicland and conversations with Michael Nielsen etc

jarm · Answer

The irony being that Cummings lacks the self awareness to realise he has zero chance of realising or facilitating any of the visionary possibilities he froths over

daf · Answer

< jarm> Is that why you wrote unfortunately

jarm · Answer

In my opinion by spreading his version of what Victor et al are saying he is setting the field back potentially 5 10 years

jarm · Answer

Most of the people who will encounter that material through him for the first time are doomed to never understand it while being in a position to badly implement it

daf · Answer

I was worried it would suffer from the Xerox Parc effect i e get excited over a compelling demo but only understand and re implement some more superficial part of it

jarm · Answer

Yes exactly that s what I can see happening

jarm · Answer

See also <https twitter com MazzucatoM status 1213063868475412480>

daf · Answer

So do you have to be a chief government henchperson to visit dynamicland or can any member of the great unwashed public go there

jarm · Answer

I have no idea if they re taking visitors right now If you re in Oakland soon it s worth asking around I would imagine

daf · Answer

A few years ago I worked on a very big government project and got into an elevator with the boss of my boss He s a big pompous guy that didn t know me although I was a lead dev and it was fascinating to hear him describe loudly how my project was going He went on to describe the polar opposite of the daily reality my team were facing I imagine that must happen a lot in the civil service

jarm · Answer

I m guessing you kept rather quiet slightly smiling face

daf · Answer

It was very depressing because he was boasting about how he managed to retain the talent that was fucking up our project So worse than screwing our project disaster guy was moving to a new project to seed new fucked upness and the pompous guy up in the stratosphere that never had a thought to actually talk to the guys doing the work was proud of this Even if I wanted to take the risk of putting him straight where would I start Pompous guy showed no sign of wanting to talk to minions not even a lead minion like me