Conversation

Replying to
To free enterprisists and statists bureaucracy is categorically bad or good by vacuous moral presumption. To get to a substantive good bureaucracy/bad bureaucracy distinction you have to approach the thing itself with genuine curiosity.
1
53
“Bureaucracy Bad” comes across as a childish reaction to personal indignity at not being seen as the special snowflake human you are by a machine. On par with “Slugs Yuck.” Except kids don’t usually go on to “Kill All Slugs” They get that the world needs slugs as much as puppies
4
63
“Bureaucracy Good” people are worse. People who love bureaucracies because they (sometimes) represent commons and protect+employ those who fail market-Darwinism tests generally understand the Tao of Bureaucracy even less than the haters. Social justice is values not explanation.
1
42
Have you tried *actually* seeing like a state? It only goes wrong when bureaucracies develop envy of private enterprise and try to *do* things. The raison d’etre of a bureaucracy is to prevent things from getting undone. Impose a cost on destruction not indulge in construction
3
70
The defining feature of bureaucracy is not that it moves forward very slowly but that it moves backwards not at all. For a bureaucracy retreat is death, not Schumpeterian resurrection Which means things where there is high value to not backsliding should be bureaucratic.
3
58
Ie believe it or not there are situations where this is a feature not a bug. It’s the institutional Terminator gene.
2
21
Yes, I often find myself landing on evil twin conclusions to taleb. To him all bureaucracy is fragilista intellectual-yet-idiot territory. Yet his own theories suggest otherwise. Bureaucracy is the most Lindy thing around. Hardly what you’d expect IYI fragilistas to run.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @vgr
This sounds like something taleb might say If you look hard enough "Avoid ruin" ~= "CYA"
2
47
Tortoise vs hare fable is about bureaucracy vs private enterprise Also Blue Origin vs SpaceX. Notice how the former has had only one failure with New Shepherd, and that had successful high altitude capsule escape. They’re 10x slower but almost never go backwards.
2
31
“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.
2
30
Replying to
Isn't the whole point of the prequel series that the Jedi kinda had it coming because they were an overly moralistic entitled and sclerotic dead player? If you want defenses of bureaucracy, Star Trek seems like better territory.
10
24
Replying to
That was the Sith theory of the situation, and in-universe at least they were the bad guys so presumptively also the wrong guys. The implicit criticism in the Mandalorian is more interesting than in the prequel. They're too abstract and removed from the ground reality.
Replying to and
The two get at different aspects of bureaucracies. Star Wars gets at the AI-like LLMish mystical side of bureaucracies, Star Trek gets at the legible blockchainish side. Prime Directive is some sort of bridge contract.
Quote Tweet
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.
Show this thread
1
3
Show replies