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.
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Ie believe it or not there are situations where this is a feature not a bug. It’s the institutional Terminator gene.
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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.
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Replying to @vgr
This sounds like something taleb might say
If you look hard enough "Avoid ruin" ~= "CYA"
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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.
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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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Then you have made your choices as have those who have chosen the opposite. The result is some sort of meta equilibrium that mirrors biology and conforms to the environment’s pressures. Mix of fast and slow dna.




