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.)

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).

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.

Clearly yes; more people do it today than at any time in history.

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.

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.

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

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