I first read about this guy from a link currently on xkcd to another of his medium posts, titled "So you want to reform democracy" [0] (it has been posted a few times here, but it never got many comments).
I'm personally very interested in using tech to make a better society, spread good ideas and all that. Not necessarily "civic technology" like this, but you get the idea.
To be completely honest, this guy has been going at it for a long time and had some success, but every time I look at something he worked on, I feel the ideas are poor and the execution is poor. I don't mean to dismiss his work at all, but this impression makes me wonder if there's other people working on similar areas and having more success (not necessarily from an economic perspective, obviously).
I feel the focus of his ideas are too broad and flawed at a fundamental level. Truth is fundamental to society, but these ideas seem to focus too much on just giving a lot of info. My experience tells me that people who wants to learn and be critical and find out what's going on will more or less get there anyway, relying on many different sources. And most of people will simply not be interested in that. When I was a kid, I always kinda asked myself something similar: do we need people to be nicer, or do we need them to be more clever and informed? The binary choice was pretty childish. Nowadays I try to focus more on how to get the two aligned. For example, in the case of a programmer like me, instead of unconsciously letting tech make the world even a bigger mess, try to minimize its use unless it can really bring something positive for someone. But it gets really tricky. Getting a bit out of topic, so I'll stop for the moment and see if it sparkles some discussion.
I'm personally very interested in using tech to make a better society, spread good ideas and all that. Not necessarily "civic technology" like this, but you get the idea.
To be completely honest, this guy has been going at it for a long time and had some success, but every time I look at something he worked on, I feel the ideas are poor and the execution is poor. I don't mean to dismiss his work at all, but this impression makes me wonder if there's other people working on similar areas and having more success (not necessarily from an economic perspective, obviously).
I feel the focus of his ideas are too broad and flawed at a fundamental level. Truth is fundamental to society, but these ideas seem to focus too much on just giving a lot of info. My experience tells me that people who wants to learn and be critical and find out what's going on will more or less get there anyway, relying on many different sources. And most of people will simply not be interested in that. When I was a kid, I always kinda asked myself something similar: do we need people to be nicer, or do we need them to be more clever and informed? The binary choice was pretty childish. Nowadays I try to focus more on how to get the two aligned. For example, in the case of a programmer like me, instead of unconsciously letting tech make the world even a bigger mess, try to minimize its use unless it can really bring something positive for someone. But it gets really tricky. Getting a bit out of topic, so I'll stop for the moment and see if it sparkles some discussion.
[0] https://medium.com/civic-tech-thoughts-from-joshdata/so-you-...