"The unrecognised simplicities of effective action #2: 'Systems engineering’ and 'systems management' - ideas from the Apollo programme  for a 'systems politics'", Cummings 2017

gwern

And neither will be USA under Trump, France under Le Pen, Hungary under Orbán, etc. This is all just wishful thinking for contrarians.

I can easily imagine that under Trump various prestige projects will be organized this way.

Till now it's just that it's "we will put a wall between the US and Mexico" instead of "we will put a man on the moon". Both cost two digits of billions.

"Run some projects the same sort of way as Apollo was run" is not, to my mind, a very worthy goal. What (perhaps) made it valuable to run the Apollo project that way was that the result was to get humans safely to the surface of the moon, developing technology along the way. The process (even if an excellent process) was valuable only for the sake of the actual outcome.

Deploying similar techniques to achieve the building of a big wall between the USA and Mexico is comparably valuable only if having a big wall between the USA and Mexico is as valuable a goal as getting people to the moon and back. Opinions on that could vary, of course.

0Viliam9y

Kinda my point. I too can "easily imagine" things -- privileging a hypothesis and describing it vividly achieves exactly that. Before reading this article, was "Trump as a competent NASA director" a hypothesis in your mind? Did this article provide evidence in favor of it? For me, the answers are "No" and "No". But after reading the article, it became much easier to imagine things like that.

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"The unrecognised simplicities of effective action #2: 'Systems engineering’ and 'systems management' - ideas from the Apollo programme for a 'systems politics'", Cummings 2017

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"The unrecognised simplicities of effective action #2: 'Systems engineering’ and 'systems management' - ideas from the Apollo programme for a 'systems politics'", Cummings 2017

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