You see this a lot in politics, where opposition to a policy is taken as evidence of opposition to the purported goals of a policy. The policy itself becomes an unquestioned, automatic value.
Was that a real anecdote about the shoes? That's pretty funny. I'd like a pair of them. It would make a nice gift to government officials.
The shoe example seems more of a case of the problems of enforcing top down goals, and the inherent conflicts between individuals enacting collective goals. The shoe goal was probably never any particular person's goal in the first place.
Today's post, Lost Purposes was originally published on 25 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
It is possible for the various steps in a complex plan to become valued in and of themselves, rather than as steps to achieve some desired goal. It is especially easy if the plan is being executed by a complex organization, where each group or individual in the organization is only evaluated by whether or not they carry out their assigned step. When this process is carried to its extreme, we get Soviet shoe factories manufacturing tiny shoes to increase their production quotas, and the No Child Left Behind Act.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Hidden Complexity of Wishes, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.