patio11

Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

• patio11 13 Dec 2022 15:36 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Michael Motherwell’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  Ooh good questions.

  “Staff” level operators in some state governments: up, in a way which was surprising to me.

  American governors: down markedly, both with regards to specific identifiable examples but also as an institution.

  Public health as a field: they don’t make numbers low enough to quantify my regard for it as a result of the pandemic.

  FDA: Down markedly and continued going down with every additional decision.

  CDC: Somewhere between FDA and public health as a field.

  Pharmacies: down markedly.

  Pharmacists: up markedly; I previously regarded this field as a charming historical anomaly and saw some genuinely heroic behavior (amid a lot of mediocrity) in service of patient health outcomes.

  Doctors: down slightly as a class due to inconsistency on several subjects the field should have been markedly consistent in execution on.

  The people in charge of complex public software projects for a nation other than the US: up markedly, in a way which was extremely surprising to me, because while operational hypercompetence for that nation is basically Tuesday I would not have predicted approximately mid private sector levels of competence in the field of software from the government under almost any circumstances.

  AppAmaGooBookSoft: For reasons I cannot share, down on net with respect to my confidence in their ability to act correctly given their values, up slightly with regards to my perception of their realized ability to positively impact the world. (Note that I am near the extreme right of the curve with regards to my estimate of how good AppAmaGooBookSoft are for the world and I feel it depressing that the extreme right of the curve is not where everyone interest hangs out all the time because this should be extremely uncontroversial.)

• patio11 15 Dec 2022 23:15 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: jtcbrule’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  I was a Japanese salaryman during my formative years. This is the way salarymen talk, and sometimes it is diagnosed by people who do not understand it as e.g. duplicity or unwillingness to say what we mean, when it is more often just a culturally-inflected execution on saying something which is absolutely unambiguous to its target audience but not socially ruinous.

  No Japanese salaryman needs you to spell out the identity of a large automobile manufacturer near Nagoya; literal children know what that must mean. But salarymen understand, and are frequently not merely participants in but active proponents of, a values system in which one must not make trouble for firms with which one was previously affiliated.

  Do I engage salaryman mode intentionally sometimes for tactical reasons? Absolutely. For example:

  For example, while running VaccinateCA, I could easily intuit your opinion on public Health as a field, but I don’t recall you every saying anything explicitly negative during that time.

  Yes, you recall correctly. I would be negatively surprised if there was a single public statement I made anywhere between Day 0 and Day 200 which could be quoted in a news article as a criticism of e.g. the government. Being quoted in the news article as being critical of the government was, I perceived, likely to cost lives at the margin. I bent my professional energies and skill to not accidentally letting that quote slip, and other people were helping achieve the same (from us as an organization and from me specifically).

• patio11 13 Dec 2022 15:26 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: delzac’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  I am extremely skeptical of desert narratives and feel they frequently blind us to actions which are in our locus of control and +EV in terms of impacts which are relevant to our moral calculi, like (as a not entirely random example) starting a crash effort to fix the government’s manifest failure to act effectively during a pandemic with the goal of saving lives.

  I am also extremely skeptical of desert narratives generally, but the above seems like a sufficient reason to reprogram oneself to not weight them highly.

• patio11 13 Dec 2022 15:16 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: myst_05’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  I wouldn’t love the sort of culture this creates with regards to increasing perception of career risk from team constantly and making it almost impossible to construct longer-term plans or vision, as a general statement, but have some non-zero level of regard for the notion of “Sometimes one needs to radically change cultures in a hurry and the transition period for them may not resemble the new steady state.”

  Either way, I think that if pulled off correctly the Twitter transition will be one of the most important experiments done in the history of scaled management. I perceive ‘smart money’ (both literally and metaphorically from the management class) as assigning very low likelihood to success here. I think some smart money has not updated sufficiently on the track record of people confidently predicting Elon Musk will fail.

  I think I am slightly better calibrated than smart money in that regard, and find myself in agreement with smart money anyway.

• patio11 10 Dec 2022 21:58 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: jasoncrawford’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  From seeing parts of the official effort that vastly outperformed the median entry in the official effort, some ideas:

  Continued experimentation with approaches like the U.S. Digital Service which attempt to create pockets of high-functioning competence and make them available at-need to people in the rest of the system who desire to consume e.g. engineering competence but cannot avail themselves of it locally due to institutional constraints. Stop trying to boil the ocean; start embracing boiling a pot of drinking water and then creating a factory to do that at scale.

  This would have been against my beliefs for most of my life, but I think I am in favor of less people in strategic decisionmaking and more accountability for them versus having strategic decision being delegated to hundreds of thousands of people across tens of thousands of orgs, none of them feeling responsible for the final outcome. It may be a true statement that no individual anywhere thinks that they were ultimately responsible for vaccine administration policy or accountable for vaccination rates or other metrics of interest. That… is an insane result.

  I think people outside the government need to become radically more familiar with how it operates, not as described in civics class but how it actually functions in the real world. The details of e.g. org charts, reporting lines, incentives, etc matter an awful lot, and to the extent those details are unknown outside of local communities of practice, they are unlikely to reflect our true values. (Or, in some cases, any values at all.) I think many mechanisms for transparency in government (public records laws, FOIA, etc) are positive, but it seems like we have a great deal of low-hanging fruit.

  Is there a compelling reason why the state doesn’t publish an org chart, for example? I can imagine many; for one, I doubt the state actually is capable of publishing an org chart. That seems like a capability that we should demand from it as a condition of giving it unique authority to do certain things.

• patio11 15 Dec 2022 23:33 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Matthew Benjamin’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  I think that there is a nuanced discourse to be made about tech and power, but a comment field is likely not the place to do it.

  I will note that tech has no small amount of power, that traditional power centers are not uniformly thrilled about that, and that tech’s response to that has not been to stop doing the things that make tech powerful, like e.g. building things people find useful, getting them to use those things, and exercising responsible discretion as to decisions made about how those things should interface with broader society.

  So why is it that tech-optimists put their efforts into the private space, rather than in public office? Why do you? Is it because you’ve been so disappointed in the status quo? Do you think any efforts would be futile? Are you suspicious of states?

  Speaking only for myself, for most of my life, I did not want power and (mostly) do not want power. There was a brief period during which the prevailing allocation of power between duly constituted authorities and myself was actively killing people, and during that period my duty was clear. My most preferred world vis the public sector for the rest of my life is I occasionally send them paperwork and money and they process that paperwork efficiently. There are other potential future worlds; I predict I would enjoy them much less.

• patio11 13 Dec 2022 15:58 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Adit Daga’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  “Keep up a high velocity of shipping good product” seems like a vacuous answer to this question but it’s a really important answer to this question.

• patio11 13 Dec 2022 15:57 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: mlipman13’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  I am slightly constrained with respect to talking about the economics of credit card processing in particular, but can I make the observation “A lot of people want financial services to be almost free in sticker cost (at least for people they care about), and all of society wants financial services to be very useful, and almost nothing which is useful in society rounds to free.”

  And if I can make an analogy to software, many people wanted software to be basically free and we decided to make it basically free to consumers in return for locking them into fantastically lucrative ecosystems while keeping it very expensive for businesses. (And I think the model for software as “high fixed cost near zero marginal costs” would also need some very important asteriskes because it is factually not the case that Google can, on Tuesday, decide to simply let all the engineers go.)

  There are various equilibria which could exist in regards to any particular set of financial services, and in fact we do see (different!) equilibria present in different places. In the place you live in, you see one particular equilibrium, and have a theory as to why you are there, which it is socially difficult for me to comment on.

• patio11 13 Dec 2022 15:47 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Pradyumna’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  I don’t particularly think OSS is a necessary component of that model, but we’ve seen similar things with some level of efficacy in both the UK and Japan, which suggests to me that a very similar thing would achieve some level of impact in the US. The US Digital Service and similar have a portfolio approach; it will be interesting to see if they move in the direction of producing self-serve tools. (I do not perceive that as being a large portion of their portfolio as of today but am not an expert w/​r/​t their portfolio.)

• patio11 13 Dec 2022 15:45 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: myst_05’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  I do not perceive this as being particularly rare?

  But the problem is systemic, the specific issues are individually generally low-salience or they would have long-since been fixed, and a lot of the things necessary for true change run up against entrenched concentrated interests like e.g. government employee unions, the contracting apparatus, etc.

  Our polity does not consider “EINS will be issued within an hour because obviously we are a high-functioning society seriously what the actual #*(#(%#” to be a reason to vote for a candidate at the margin and so our political system does not prioritize making that happen by default.

• patio11 13 Dec 2022 15:24 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: myst_05’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  I do not perceive we are within 10 years of that happening (defined as “instant ~free money movement between banked people in US, JP, Australia, UK, Canada, and all present members of EU”) and my estimate is increasing over time rather than decreasing, which is counterintuitive.

  The reason here is that the first companies to do it would necessarily be tech companies with global reach, and not the traditionally-understood financial sector. There are many governments which, for reasons which sound excellent to them, would prefer a) clipping the wings of large tech companies doing business globally and b) increasing the height of the firewall between BigTech and the financial system.

  I also think the salience of this particular measure is lower for institutions than it is for individual humans who are routinely exposed to exactly this need, because the types of life situations which expose you to exactly this need are anticorrelated with having power over institutions.

• patio11 16 Dec 2022 1:10 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: sketerpot’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  I upvoted this but would also like to explicitly endorse it, as it saves me from redundantly typing a worse version of the same answer.

• patio11 15 Dec 2022 23:23 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: MoreOfAQuestionThanAComment’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  This would depend markedly on who I was talking to and what I needed out of them. Certain audiences counsel being much more explicit about e.g. one’s level of ambition and where one believes oneself to be on a spectrum of ability/​drive/​horsepower/​etc.

  Then there is the comms strategy bit of it, where “I have many weird hobbies, like sometimes running the U.S.’s shadow vaccine location data information provider” is both a self-deprecating joke and also a brief and loaded statement about recent realized results suggestive of my efficacy in doing hard things.

• patio11 13 Dec 2022 15:42 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: lodonespaw’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  I use exclusively water soluble resins.

  There exists a type of resin called Ekimate in Japan which is much less smelly/​irritating than most resin formulations, costs ~3X as much, and which represents itself as being pourable down the drain in a matter which suggests to me that lawyers/​etc have reviewed the claim and think it is within appropriate bounds for marketing material made by chemical manufacturing companies. I do not pour it down the drain. If I had a high tolerance for running wonderful small businesses with inventory, I would try to get their exclusive license to distribute in the US and make it a thing; it’s an obviously better (though premium) product than any other resin formulation I’ve seen.

  My liquid waste gets cured outside in sun for several days while evaporating to reduce volume then wiped up with towels and discarded in standard (burnable) trash; my solid waste gets cured out of an abundance of caution then discarded in standard (burnable) trash. I have immaterial use of IPA which is not discardable in trash but which also evaporates easily, and simply let it evaporate outside after I am done with it (after cleaning/​reuse cycles).

• patio11 10 Dec 2022 21:45 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Trevor McKendrick’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  “Open Tokyo engineering offices and give them material responsibility for products that ship globally” might be one of them. There are many, many reasons that companies don’t do that, and the biggest one is that it is hard and exposes the company to an internal language barrier, but all are solvable issues. (Also the market price of engineering in Tokyo is far less than the market price of engineering in many countries that U.S. startups happily put engineering offices.)

• patio11 15 Dec 2022 23:19 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: MoreOfAQuestionThanAComment’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  I’m trying to devote approximately an hour a day as forecast, but the specific timing is a bit tough this week.

• patio11 15 Dec 2022 23:06 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: spiffytech’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  I have the perception that this is a pretty major undercurrent of the oral history.

• patio11 15 Dec 2022 23:05 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: ferrm’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  sigh DNS issues, I swear. (It is designed to redirect to vaccines.gov, which seems to be the best thing for patients and therefore what we should do.)

• patio11 15 Dec 2022 22:50 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: MoreOfAQuestionThanAComment’s comment on: Pa­trick McKen­zie AMA

  See the VaccinateCA piece, but there are many institutions which were not optimizing for “The US should attempt to maximize the number of lives saved during the pandemic” and we should be scandalized by that.