Removing something critical and seeing what happens is a methodology used by Musk in all his companies: remove LIDAR from self driving car, remove flame trench from spaceship launch pad, etc. Results may vary.

"Results may vary" is not an acceptable methodology for the US Government, when millions of lives are potentially at stake.

Ed: among the ways millions of lives could be lost: losing control of our nuclear arsenal or nuclear materials due to haphazardly firing people responsible for maintaining them. Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inconvenient data. Starvation and disease from ceasing aid around the world. There's also the wars likely to result from the collapse of trust in the US as a security partner, but I suppose it's not correct to blame that on DOGE per se, even if it's an extension of the same principle.

Sometimes people (e.g. US voters) will only learn by running into a wall. How all exactly will turn out is hard to tell and frankly maybe we better don't know. I'm tending to the conclusion there's no way around the movement of the big picture, the shifting of geo-political order in the world.

Certainly, global trust in the US is already gone. That's locked in for the foreseeable future.

This seems circular, since your opinion, views, thoughts, etc., are what the opposing factions are rejecting ( or de-legitimizing) in the first place.

People disagree with my opinion, therefore it's circular? Interesting logic.

Did you read the remainder of the comment?

It seems pretty clear to me at least why it would lead to circular arguments.

At this point, I've presented a handful of fairly straightforward hypotheses about cause and effect. They could be wrong, but it's on you to show that they're actually self-referential. There is no amount or kind of other people's opinions that will make them so.

Your opinions do not automatically turn into credible “hypotheses”…?

There is no such mechanism.

If there was then the vast majority of political debates on HN wouldn’t even exist.

Who said a hypothesis is automatically credible? Not me.

If they’re not credible… then why would any one care…?

Readers are just going to assume it’s random noise, or at least indistinguishable from noise, from a rando on the internet.

That's equally true of all internet comments. None of us here on HN have or are claiming automatic credibility. We just make arguments that make sense to us. Feel free to close the tab if you don't find any value in this activity.

So then what makes your opinions “hypotheses”?

Sufficient chimpanzees with keyboards, or an LLM, can also type out every comment you’ve ever written, including the last few.

I clearly don’t think your opinions match the definition found in merriam webster… or else I wouldn’t have asked.

You don't think his comment is "an assumption put forward for the purposes of discussion"? That seems a fairly low and generic bar for a comment to reach...

I don’t think the parent meant that interpretation, as that would also apply to the output of sufficient chimpanzees bashing keyboard and LLMs too…

Which would be practically meaningless without some attached non-zero credibility.

I mean, we're all chimpanzees bashing keyboards around here, at least till proven otherwise

Yeah, hence why I asked… otherwise anyone on HN, including me, could say their opinions are hypotheses too, to be taken just as seriously as the parent’s.

You still don't know what a hypothesis is, after I linked the dictionary definition.

This is still indistinguishable from meaningless noise, since your opinion can’t ever outweigh anyone else’s opinions…

Truthfully, I hold those ideas a little more confidently than purely "for the purposes of discussion", but I suspect you at least understand that the real-world usage of "hypothesis" is quite broad.

I'm kind of tickled at the idea that a "hypothesis" is some hyper-specific thing with trappings of "credibility", and that anything less would be an insult, like we're not all just a bunch of nerds arguing on the internet. It's also kind of sad, though. This is why computer people need liberal arts education.

Still seems closer to noise/LLM ravings than substance.

Are you ever going to directly answer the previous few questions?

I did, comprehensively, but you're apparently not smart enough to understand.

Are those who downvoted enough to grey your comment out… not “smart enough” either?

My friend is a doctor. Her profession uses sections of the NIH and CDC websites on a daily basis. They are the references for drug interactions with medical conditions. These sections are just gone.

Trump’s “cost saving” measures are already actively harming medical treatment in the USA.

I'm sure the NIH isn't the only entity with access to pharmacology information...

I doubt adding paywalls and more 3rd parties will help reverse the trend of rising healthcare costs. But also, just why? Why not keep this information that our tax dollars have already paid for in the public domain? I thought we were supposed to care about efficiency and that information wanted to be free.

> Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inconvenient data.

That’s possible, however, it’s possible it’ll give a chance to remove autocrats who have suppressed the scientific method in favor of their prevailing opinions or preferences.

There will be a painful period but it could rejuvenate the systems.

But consider, what if we rejuvenated our health infrastructure in a way that isn't blazingly incompetent? Suppose you learned enough about the systems currently being smashed to specifically fire the "autocrats" and leave the competent people? Are you seeing where the importance of detail comes in?

Never ask ol' Chesterfield about his fence.

Ahem, "blow some my way"! For fence-related matters Chesterton is the person to ask.

Can we please not DOGEify every comment thread? I know that it's on a lot of minds all the time, but we have a whole spot on the front page effectively reserved for DOGE 24/7, and I'd like to see literally anything else in the other 29 slots.

I agree its quite annoying. But it only comes up because of the massive change it will cause across the whole country and it's important to remain prepared for implications.

A large percentage of HN's population doesn't live in the US, and many of those of us who do have other ways of keeping track of what's going on. Threads about DOGE on HN are not useful, they're almost always just flame wars. Those who feel enlightened by them can join the daily thread that inevitably pops up and leave the rest of us to talk about other things.

In fact there are much worse things going on in the world than the hollowing of US' institutions. Let's just root for those people in need.

I apologize for my naïevty: I guess I live in a bubble

Don't think you are being naive, no apologies are needed. Still that whole situation puzzles me a lot. USA chooses. Clear outcomem, no surprises. Pro life, pro guns, anti immigrants, anti different, anti regulation. USA complains. What info am i missing...?

Agreed. People are unhealthily obsessed with DOGE here. And on top of that, basically every DOGE thread turns into a flame war. It's extremely deleterious for the site to have everything collapse into DOGE talk.

If my countries institutions were being dismantled by chuds via dubious and unprecedented means I’d be pretty obsessed.

Thiel was part of ycombinator for a time, current head of yc worked for Palantir and has been working on DOGE-related Curtis Yarvin type stuff, so it is likely to come up here a lot.

It's timely, current, and surprisingly related. I see no issue here. See my sister comment as to why.

second system syndrome

They don’t care.

They don’t care about ‘saving money’, they’re just messing about to see if they can. To move the goalpost of what is acceptable. To goosestep the United States back into a Russia-aligned nation that lets rich people pluck the poors bald like chickens.

The cruelty is the point.

> To move the goalpost of what is acceptable

Not just that. They’re gish galloping the courts and the news.

So many things, some dumb, some dangerous, some contradictory.

The goal is to make it impossible to o keep track of what’s going on.

you don't have to ask people for their intentions, you just have to watch what they do. look at how many government organisations that were investigating the Musk empire got Dodged: https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2025.02....

They awarded him billions of dollars worth of corporate handouts - I don't think he was the enemy of the Biden administration.

On reading the article before the comments, I literally was remembering Musk's initial descriptions of The Boring Company and how they were wildly forgetting or glossing over key details that would mean the difference between exciting leap forward to terrifying death trap.

I find your comment to be the same idea, but on something folks have foisted upon them and are forced to experience.

Ignoring details has been very lucrative for Musk.

Remember when he said self driving is coming next year… every year… since 2017

Indeed, Musk is the first and only man to ever do that.

Far from it!

But he is by far the most successful one.

At the very least the loudest successful one.

This is what the critics fail to understand: this all should be documented because it's public work. There should be no "secret sauce" in the bureaucracy nor should the process be so abstract and complex that the hidden details are the most pertinent ones.

Government should not involve arcane wizardry nor should imputed mastery of it be held as an excuse to prevent it's modification to meet the will of the voters.

It also should not be so complicated that it's impossible to audit.

Reality being more complicated than a model is precisely their point:

The vision of a technocratic bureaucracy isn’t workable given the complexity of life — so we need to distribute decisions to be made in context. We’re paying huge sums for a technocratic system that can’t account for the actual needs and which leads to suboptimal outcomes.

Dismantling the regulatory state and attendant bureaucracy creates room for better, localized, contextual systems to flourish.

> Dismantling the regulatory state and attendant bureaucracy creates room for better, localized, contextual systems to flourish.

And I guess it doesn't matter how many people will be hurt during the churn...

But regardless, DOGE's goal isn't to make government better, it's to make government broken and cheap, so it will be easier to funnel money to Musk's (and other Trump cronies') companies instead.