Randaly comments on What did governments get right? Gotta list them all! - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 18 September 2013 12:59PM

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Comment author: Randaly 18 September 2013 01:51:52PM *  8 points [-]

Successful government engineering/research projects:

  • The Manhattan Project
  • Some subsections of NASA (e.g. programmers)
  • DARPA has lots of examples of successful scientific developments- most obviously, the internet
  • Possibly government spy agencies- almost everything is non-public, but they're known to have had some notable non-classified successes (e.g. RSA)
  • The last generation of USAF aircraft were famously well-designed
  • The US Navy has a perfect record of safety on its nuclear reactors (the USSR had 14 known accidents on a smaller fleet; there were also numerous civilian meltdowns)

It seems like most of these successes are due to either throwing money at a problem until they've hired enough smart people and equipment (Manhattan Project, DARPA, NSA) or to the government imposing higher standards and more discipline on its workers than was the norm elsewhere (NASA programmers, nuclear safety.)

Relevant.

This is just a loose impression, but it seems to me that the government is somewhat more consistent at recovering from notable failures; this is arguably because it's (usually) a monopoly, and has no other choice, whereas companies will often simply abandon a product if it fails sufficiently. Examples include military reform after Vietnam and in the middle of Iraq. I have no idea if this experience leads to it becoming better at recovering from failures.

Comment author: ciphergoth 18 September 2013 01:54:38PM 3 points [-]

It was GCHQ, not the NSA, who invented RSA before RSA did.

Comment author: Randaly 18 September 2013 02:02:32PM 3 points [-]

Fixed; thanks.

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 September 2013 09:59:48PM 0 points [-]

Possibly government spy agencies- almost everything is non-public, but they're known to have had some notable non-classified successes (e.g. RSA)
[...]
The US Navy has a perfect record of safety on its nuclear reactors (the USSR had 14 known accidents on a smaller fleet; there were also numerous civilian meltdowns)

First you acknowledge that there classification and then you say that the lack of public knowledge about US Navy reactor safety issues means that there weren't any?

Comment author: Randaly 20 September 2013 03:01:12AM 2 points [-]
  • NSA stuff is classified because its release would alert others to the US's capabilities; the fact of an accident would not
  • One would expect the USSR to be equally eager to classify their mistakes, and to have greater success; they are believed to have failed utterly
  • Any argument in favor of classifying nuclear accidents would apply equally to the Thresher, Scorpion, Guitarro, San Francisco, and Miami, for which no serious attempt was made at classification
  • Nuclear accidents, judging by the USSR's experience, almost always involve the loss of an entire ship, and many fatalities. It is not possibly for the Navy to just "lose" a ship or a dozen sailors. (No submarine certified under the navy's safety plan, SUBSAFE, has ever been lost, for any reason.) It is even less possible for them to evacuate an aircraft carrier and then rely on tugs to move it to a dock for repair..
Comment author: Protagoras 18 September 2013 04:50:17PM 0 points [-]

The "perfect record of safety" claim for Navy nuclear reactors made me think of Thresher. I guess I can see putting it in a different class from meltdowns and radiation leaks, but it does seem that part of the reason it sank is that the reactor did fail (by going into automatic shutdown at a time when the sub needed the power), and I'm not sure how convinced I am by the government reports that the radiation released from the wreck is insignificant. Of course, they did dramatically upgrade safety procedures after Thresher, which is perhaps another one for your "recovering from notable failures" category.

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