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“Agile bureaucracy” is the funniest contradiction in terms of you notice “forward only” means do-overs and iteration are BAD. Do or do not, there is no try. — Cabinet Secretary of the Force, Yoda. Yep. The Jedi are a bureaucracy in case you were studiously ignoring that fact.
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Blue Origin motto, Gradatim Ferociter, “step by step, ferociously” is a bureaucratic motto. And before you make with the jokes, remember for 60 years only bureaucracies got to space at all.
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This proposed addition to my theory is under consideration by the appropriate departments. You can review the status of your application at this broken website.
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Replying to @theartlav and @vgr
The threshold of it being too slow is when the process takes longer than the expiration time of the paperwork required. It's not exactly uncommon.
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Not just Republicans though they are a uniquely virulent example. Around the world bureaucracies are coded the same way. The adversary that does it might vary but the result is the same.
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Replying to @vgr
Imo, this entire thread is in tribute to Republican success of reframing and assigning a negative moral value to bureaucracy, thus creating tension between an infantile idea of freedom and a fictional tyrannical process whose only purpose is antifreedom. :/
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Anything you think is a bug that needs fixing is almost certainly a feature that helps the forward-only mission. Opacity, unresponsiveness, inability to ingest non-pro-forms information etc. All features. If you don’t get why you have unexamined speed > survival values
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“Better that n murderers go unpunished than 1 innocent be hanged” principle is restatement of forward only principle. Stark. You’d rather have a bunch of psychos running rampant than punish the innocent. Vigilante states are failed states.
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Replying to @vgr
Ideal example of good bureaucracy would be a watertight judicial process.
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Note that according to Scott himself the best modern form of seeimg like a state was an invention of private corporations (Taylorism) from where it spread to states, including both US and USSR. Waterfall planning came out of corporations too. 5y plans have corporate origins.
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When I use the term “good bureaucracy” I mean it not in a moral sense but in the sense “true to its essential Taoist nature.” Good is merely all that has demonstrable persistence and can be perpetuated without undoing anything else.
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Accretion displaces arbitrary definitions of “Progress” made up by morally self-important types that are always Regress to an opposed breed of moralist. Bureaucracy does an end run around that.
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Replying to
Bureaucratic creativity is not a paradox, merely orthogonally wrong. It's not creativity as in creative destruction but accreativity. In the same way and for the same reason I just taught my computer that "accreativity" is now a word.
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