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Karen L.'s avatar

I love this! It's frustrating that we are using 20th century tools to solve 21st century problems. I worked for 10 years in government and now I've worked for many years as a green tech-entrepreneur. It became clear to me over time that these broad brush political solutions don't work all that well.

I recently had a friend stop talking to me, because I suggested that environmental legislation that sounds great, may not have the intended affect. It's like trying to treat cancer with early style chemotherapy, which bombs the body with poison and hopes to kill the cancer before the whole person. We need to move towards a precision gene therapy approach, to tackle environmental and other issues. When you solve a very specific problem, you might find better solutions to general problems.

The style of politics now works for a system that's in a maintenance phase. Think of a CEO managing a well established corporation. A little move here or there, some diplomatic words.. will work. But when you need a major re-jiggering to solve problems, you need a much more entrepreneurial approach that's far more hands on.

The government needs to be acting more like scientists/entrepreneurs, which means picking a specific problem to solve, doing a systematic analysis, experimenting, measuring and iterating. I'm a huge FDR fan girl and this experimental style was his main approach to ameliorating the depression.

I'm not sure whether our current political system selects politicians who can't think in this kind of analytical way, don't feel like they have political cover to do this, who need education in entrepreneur/scientist thinking, or whether the political process itself makes it impossible to come up with sane solutions.

Sorry for rant, I'm just passionate about this subject.

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Alex's avatar

"To engage these issues in good faith, protagonists on both sides of the debate will need to follow their arguments through to their logical conclusions rather than refusing to accept any inference that contradicts their ideological priors."

Such an eloquently put truth for our polarized age... Applies not only to this issue, but all those others that often get bogged down in identity/culture war debate. Thanks for the great read Ted and Alex.

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