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Techies Must Educate Governments
Rub3X writes "Those in the know about technology must spend more time reaching out to governments and helping them understand the Internet's role in society, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Tuesday.
'The average person in government is not of the age of people who are using all this stuff,' Schmidt said at a public symposium here hosted by the National Academies' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. 'There is a generational gap, and it's very, very real.'"
Techies spend thousands of hours educating government in the US. They do it in hearings, they do it as advisors, they do it as assistants. Even PACs try to teach these people how various elements of technology work, albeit often for the wrong reasons. Lack of teaching is not the problem. Nor is the problem lack of information these representatives can access on their own, so they can learn on their own, as any of American's best and brightest citizens — such as many of those here on slashdot — manage each and every day.
Nor is the problem the age of the representative. I'm closing on 60, and I know a great deal about technology. My mother knew more than any representative I am aware of when she died recently, and she was almost 90. I inherited her dual CPU Dell running Red Hat SMP when she died. She wrote some pretty tricky perl scripts; I wish I could have converted her to Python, but alas. I didn't say she was perfect.
In the US, the problem is that the parties keep putting incompetent (and worse) people up for election. Consequently the American people, having no effective way of dealing with the two-party monopoly upon government seats of power, keeps voting these incompetents into congress and the senate.
So the Internet is a series of tubes, you can't say words on television that are common in every schoolyard, and the human body is a matter for shame. And those are the small problems. Worse, we've invaded a country under false pretenses, with no valid reason beyond those already exposed as nonsense, the bill of rights has been forsaken, and the congress and the senate have seen fit to make the entire judicial process one that the executive can control from start to finish.
The tree of liberty is dead. It has been shat upon by millions and millions of sheep, trampled by elephants and donkeys, and finally the pulp was sold by that lady with the blindfold and one tit hanging out for King George to write out "signing statements" upon.
I'd tell you to vote libertarian, but most of you are just going to put another democrat or republican into office anyway. Literally, a crying shame. We have fallen so far.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Techies Must Educate Governments
Sorry, we don't have time. We're too busy destroying our lives playing WOW.
Jesse Ventura and Ross Perot? In both cases they were so far out of the norm that it would have been fun to see what they could do.
Unfortunately, only one got in and I couldn't vote or benefit from his election.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Given the notorious unreliablity of our voting process (broken voting machines, lost ballots boxes, etc) coupled with complete unaccountability (no proof of how my vote was registered, no recipt) why would I think my vote was ever counted in the first place? We refused UN oversight of our elections and you still expect me to believe in the voting process as a way to fix our broken system?
From: http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0706-09.htm "We the undersigned Members of Congress hereby request the Electoral Assistance Division of the United Nations Department of Political Affairs to send election observers to monitor the presidential election in the United States scheduled for November 2, 2004. We are deeply concerned that the right of U.S. citizens to vote in free and fair elections is again in jeopardy"
Sorry, We haven't been a Democracy for quite some time.
We are all just people.
There's also, historically, been a strong anti-intellectual undercurrent in US culture.
Is that why every time I work for a large North American company, each new wave of management that gets installed holds big "rah rah" sessions and rewards those who kiss ass and follow dumb orders the best?
Management desperately needs to figure out that it's not a football game, where team-play and short-term gains trump all. Instead, let's think chess, where wise, well-reasoned moves, made at the appropriate time, produce superior results over the longer term. An intelligent, longer-term strategy, executed consistenty quarter after quarter, accumulates compound results over time like the proverbial downhill-rolling snowball.
During Microsoft's rise, they bought up every brianiac willing to sell his soul. Google's rise shows similar properties - they're now the mecca for boffins of these arts. Brianiacs can win big, if you put enough of them in a room and relegate the football coaches to delivering soda and wiping up the twinkie stains.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
The parent post is overgeneralized of course... to paraphrase is to overgeneralize.
This is a very insightful post. I agree almost 100%... however there are people who are adept at both politics and technology. Someone with both talents may seem scary to either group.
The way I see it - humanity stretches out between two extreems. On the one hand we have emotion and on the other we have logic. There is a knot of people at each end. The population in the middle may be rather sparse. As the author of the parent post correctly points out, for people at either end of the spectrum it can be very difficult to try to understand the other camp.
I would suggest that the political (emotional) side is substantially more heavily weighted than the technical (logical) side of this teeter totter. If we go back through history what we find is a slow progression of technology and science. It was only a few hundred years ago that observers of nature were routinely condeemed. Indeed many were imprisoned. If we consider primative people, what we find typically is a well developed emotional complex. It seems the hallmark of civilization is the development of logic. This is the essence of law for instance... that issues should be decided on fact and logic. Yet in spite of this, we find emotion running the show far too often.
Simply put, the logical individual is still in the minority. As I see it, the world is run primarily by emotion. Even very logical people often misunderstand how much decision making is governed by emotion. Emotional people of course don't consider the question.