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Eli Tyre

This is a special post for quick takes by Eli Tyre. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

I'm mostly going to use this to crosspost links to my blog for less polished thoughts, Musings and Rough Drafts.

This is a special post for quick takes by Eli Tyre. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

I'm mostly going to use this to crosspost links to my blog for less polished thoughts, Musings and Rough Drafts.

Is there any particular reason why I should assign more credibility to Moral Mazes / Robert Jackall than I would to the work of any other sociologist?

(My prior on sociologists is that they sometimes produce useful frameworks, but generally rely on subjective hard-to-verify and especially theory-laden methodology, and are very often straightforwardly ideologically motivated.)

I imagine that someone else could write a different book, based on the same kind of anthropological research, that highlights different features of the corporate world, to tell the opposite story.

And that's without anyone trying to be deceptive. There's just a fundamental problem of case studies that they don't tell you what's typical, only give you examples.

I can totally imagine that Jackall landed on this narrative somehow, found that it held together and just confirmation biased for the rest of his career. Once his basic thesis was well-known, and associated with his name, it seems hard for something like that NOT to happen.

And this leaves me unsure what to do with the data of Moral Mazes. Should I default assume that Jackall's characterization is a good description of the corporate world? Or should I throw this out as a useless set of examples confirmation biased together? Or something else?

It seems like the question of "is the most of the world dominated by Moral Mazes?" is an extremely important one. But also, its seems to me that it's not operationalized enough to have a meaningful answer. At best, it seems like this is a thing that happens sometimes.

There are multiple dimensions to the credibility question. You probably should increase your credence from prior to reading it/about it that large organizations very often have more severe misalignment than you thought. You probably should recognize that the model of middle-management internal competition has some explanatory power.

You probably should NOT go all the way to believing that the corporate world is homogeneously broken in exactly this way. I don't think he makes that claim, but it's what a lot of readers seem to take. &... (read more)

4Raemon6y

My own take is that moral mazes should be considered in the "interesting hypothesis" stage, and that the next step is to actually figure out how to go be empirical about checking it. I made some cursory attempts at this last year, and then found myself unsure this was even the right question. The core operationalization I wanted was something like: * Does having more layers of management introduce pathologies into an organization? * How much value is generated by organizations scaling up? * Can you reap the benefits of organizations scaling up by instead having them splinter off? (The "middle management == disconnected from reality == bad" hypothesis was the most clear-cut of the moral maze model to me, although I don't think it was the only part of the model) I have some disagreements with Zvi about this. I chatted briefly with habryka about this and I think he said something like "it seems like a more useful question is to look for positive examples of orgs that work well, rather than try and tease out various negative ways orgs could fail to work." I think there are maybe two overarching questions this is all relevant to: 1. How should the rationality / xrisk / EA community handle scale? Should we be worried about introducing middle-management into ourselves? 2. What's up with civilization? Is maziness a major bottleneck on humanity? Should we try to do anything about it? (My default answer here is "there's not much to be done here, simply because the world is full of hard problems and this one doesn't seem very tractable even if the models are straightforwardly true." But, I do think this is a contender for humanity hamming problem)

Eli's shortform feed

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Eli's shortform feed

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