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
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Ironically enough when I watched Star Trek as a kid, every time the Prime Directive came up I was strongly anti it.
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Well narratively that’s the point. You get good stories by breaking them. Same as Asimov’s 3 laws. All the stories are about how they break.


