Being the aforementioned older brother, I thought I'd add my 5, ahem, kopecks to Ivan's post)
Just for the record, I have no recollection of us having this particular debate, or me conjuring up this particular thought experiment – but I’d trust Ivan’s memory over mine on just about anything that happened in the family over the last 15 years. Old age, too many time zone shifts, not enough mindfulness habits… they all take their toll😊
However, I would still stand by the argument that I (may have) made then. I’d just add couple of points that came to mind as I was reading Ivan’s article:
- No matter how Byzantine (in the original sense of the word) the system of rules and laws is, humans somehow always create some new situations for which there is no satisfactory rule or law. A strict bureaucratic system tends to become paralyzed in these situations. Its best bet is to escalate and escalate - until someone with authority (the Boss?) or the guts (the Hero?) steps in to make a call. I would argue that this paralysis / escalation process comes at such a high cost to society, that simply getting rid of it is probably a good enough argument for flexibility.
- We are tempted to focus on the evil flexible bureaucrat cases which do create terrible consequences. I was on the receiving end of such a case at least once; I know that the rules and the laws of the system were ignored to punish me personally. It was really, really bad. But I do believe that we tend to ignore the myriad small, good things that flexible bureaucrats do for us humans when they have a chance. These are not heroic deeds nor atrocities, hence they do not make great stories - but I would argue that the sum of these small “favors” far outweighs the negative outliers.
I'm confident the rough thought experiment (and even the detail about offering the inspector's daughter piano lessons) came from you but I definitely expanded and embellished it :)
love the idea of being against efficiency (while not being for wasteful inefficiency). 2 reasons:
1. non-efficiency affords discretion (as you point out)
2. non-efficiency in the form of totipotent slack allows for (more) responsiveness to unpredictable changes in environmental demands over time (i wrote about it here: https://vaughntan.org/efficiencytrap)
I've been thinking on something that's kinda-sorta similar once in a while. If you google about which country has more freedom, it gives you a lot of things like "UNN's Democracy and Civil Rights Index". The trouble is, those numbers don't really give you an indication about what would you actually be free or able to do - just a number that tells you how "democratic" a country's ideology is. So, I thought, what we need is an "actual freedom" index (and even tried to compile one with AI's help, which worked well enough for the first prototype).
Being the aforementioned older brother, I thought I'd add my 5, ahem, kopecks to Ivan's post)
Just for the record, I have no recollection of us having this particular debate, or me conjuring up this particular thought experiment – but I’d trust Ivan’s memory over mine on just about anything that happened in the family over the last 15 years. Old age, too many time zone shifts, not enough mindfulness habits… they all take their toll😊
However, I would still stand by the argument that I (may have) made then. I’d just add couple of points that came to mind as I was reading Ivan’s article:
- No matter how Byzantine (in the original sense of the word) the system of rules and laws is, humans somehow always create some new situations for which there is no satisfactory rule or law. A strict bureaucratic system tends to become paralyzed in these situations. Its best bet is to escalate and escalate - until someone with authority (the Boss?) or the guts (the Hero?) steps in to make a call. I would argue that this paralysis / escalation process comes at such a high cost to society, that simply getting rid of it is probably a good enough argument for flexibility.
- We are tempted to focus on the evil flexible bureaucrat cases which do create terrible consequences. I was on the receiving end of such a case at least once; I know that the rules and the laws of the system were ignored to punish me personally. It was really, really bad. But I do believe that we tend to ignore the myriad small, good things that flexible bureaucrats do for us humans when they have a chance. These are not heroic deeds nor atrocities, hence they do not make great stories - but I would argue that the sum of these small “favors” far outweighs the negative outliers.
I'm confident the rough thought experiment (and even the detail about offering the inspector's daughter piano lessons) came from you but I definitely expanded and embellished it :)
love the idea of being against efficiency (while not being for wasteful inefficiency). 2 reasons:
1. non-efficiency affords discretion (as you point out)
2. non-efficiency in the form of totipotent slack allows for (more) responsiveness to unpredictable changes in environmental demands over time (i wrote about it here: https://vaughntan.org/efficiencytrap)
I've been thinking on something that's kinda-sorta similar once in a while. If you google about which country has more freedom, it gives you a lot of things like "UNN's Democracy and Civil Rights Index". The trouble is, those numbers don't really give you an indication about what would you actually be free or able to do - just a number that tells you how "democratic" a country's ideology is. So, I thought, what we need is an "actual freedom" index (and even tried to compile one with AI's help, which worked well enough for the first prototype).
ooh is the list webbed somewhere? Or can you copy it into a comment here?
https://yossarian775609.substack.com/p/real-freedom-index - I've Substacked my first attempt.