Some of the problems are self-inflicted, including due to patches for past iterations of reform against graft, waste, and abuse. It's also very difficult to openly pursue tradeoffs, as nobody wants to be the Optimal Level of Fraud is Non-Zero politician or administrator.
@patio11
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Government RFP Process Favors Bidding Over Software Delivery
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Instead we focus on structural issues in e.g. how the government sends out RFPs and gets bids by the usual suspects, who are perfectly adapted to winning bids and don't put that many points into actually shipping software, because the government buys process not outcomes.
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Government workforce competence and economic outcomes
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Mikey is largely not of POV that workforce competence levels determine outcomes, with the somewhat persuasive argument that the government workforce is so large that it ends up being a sample of general competence levels available in the economy.
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Government Digital Transformation: Dickerson on Healthcare.gov and Digital Service
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This week on Complex Systems I was honored to interview Mikey Dickerson, probably best known as one of the architects of the healthcare dot gov rescue operation. He also founded the US Digital Service. We discussed government software, procurement, and staffing.
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Institutional Responsibility: Churches and Universities Beyond Self-Interest
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… Totally fair, and I can now broaden that to an influential subset of churches, but in fairness I think we understand universities/churches are probably not in the do-nothing-but-do-well-for-selves part of the spectrum.
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Illegal Activities at Scale: Negative Update for AI Development
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(That’s plainly illegal. Illegal things happen all the time, of course, but that particular illegal thing happening at scale would be a negative update for me.)
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Choosing Interesting Conversations: Expertise Meets Professional Curiosity
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Some combination of "Who do I think gets to have the most interesting conversations during their day job?" and "What do I understand well enough to talk to an expert about but not well enough to be an expert in?"
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First Professor Discovers Graduate Students: A Humorous Reflection
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I think I am feeling what the first professor to discover grad students felt.
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Negative Prompting and CoT Countermeasures in AI Models
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(I have used “You are bad at X; please don’t” to some effect this last year but it had not occurred to me to sketch out suggested countermeasures, in part because have spent less time in CoT prompting experiments than I should have.)
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Prompt Engineering Techniques for More Effective AI Model Responses
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(That prompt has some interesting things going on incidentally and annotating it with “this technique might get models to be more effective than simply sending a tweet-sized expression of desired outcome to them” would be a useful thing to have on Internet somewhere.)