I mean, Soviet policy led to fucking up agriculture in a number of other countries because they rejected genetics; they killed one of their top cosmonauts because nobody wanted to listen to the literal hundreds of safety and operational problems the Soyuz rocket had; and caused one of the worst nuclear disasters in modern history because "Soviet engineering does not fail".

But yeah, I think all this just because of what I've been told, and not because I've seen with my own eyes scientific advancements stifled by authoritarian regimes 🙄

[–] novibe@lemmy.ml 7 points 9 months ago

“Authoritarian regimes” 🙄 god shut up nerd

[–] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

To be even handed you could point to science and industry doing exactly the same shit when given a freer hand. Whether it's basically all industrial "accidents" in various and sundry capitalist economies (scare quotes because overriding safety protocols or not doing due dilligence in hiring because money isn't an accident it's social murder), stuff like that super secret American bomb sight being a scam, industrial agriculture everywhere fucking the soil for short term profits, oil spills, the whole climate crisis and burying of it for money etc.

It's sort of difficult to get in the blame game because everything is multifaceted and regardless of whatever theoretical construct presides over everything humans have the same incentives for corruption at lots of levels.

you also need to keep in mind the USSR was huge, completely and utterly fucked up by ww2 after inheriting a Russia completely and utterly fucked by centuries of tyranny and ww1. In a huge empire, rapidly industrialising, that just had millions of people killed and tens of thousands of towns destroyed there are going to be problems. No system is perfect enough to just overrule the material and social damage done during that.

TBH my own take is they did pretty well but centralised management everywhere has a tendency to fuck everything up. Oh to be clear, anything with a single leader is highly centralised. Like tech startups are centralised, most research labs are under the iron grip of a PI and thus centralised (and talk to anyone below tenure on the academic track to learn of the problems there).

[–] voracitude@lemmy.world -1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Most reasoned response by far. And, agreed: I'm not saying capitalism is perfect, or even that it's better than socialism or communism. Capitalism encourages cutting corners which obviously isn't good when it's something like a space mission; capitalism also brought us PFAS chemicals and leaded gasoline and Hummers and Citizens United and on and on - no shortage of evils born of capitalism we can point to.

My only point was that concentrating all research and development under the government is a sure way to slow it down (see cybernetics from one of my other responses here), and history shows it plain as day.