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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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I’m not trying to troll friends or mint haters. If you have genuine criticism of my theory, please submit it via Form 42, in triplicate. We are an open, responsive bureaucracy in this thread. Appropriate Actions will be taken in response to all feedback
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The essay will also feature blockchains, and given recent experiences of Indian bureaucracy that inspired this thread, also what are known as babus (bureaucrats). We will discuss Blockchain Babus.
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Also ML. The inside of a bureaucracy is actually surprisingly squishy and wibbly-wobbly gooey procedural knowledge, not machine like. A bureaucracy is a large language model wrapped in a blockchain, all human powered.
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I think I need to sub "true" for "good" in my model of the essential tao-of-the-bureau bureaucracy. In the sense that Hermes Conrad on Futurama aspires to be a true bureaucrat.
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I get the distinct sense that most efforts to essentialize India immediately surface significant and obvious exceptions, but it occurs to me that empires have recruited and supported clades of local management talent for long enough that an artificial origin might make sense.
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oh totally... migration also has a selection effect... the dropout entrepreneurs tend to stay in india and build empires there, the good academic types migrate on student visas... selection effect is strong there
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I feel the depth of inherent social hierarchy also neatly slots in the essential hierarchy of bureaucracy in itself. Other civs are hierarchical too, but not many are this deep.
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