Update to this post. Yet another way to look at/think about the three categories of people Rao thinks define corporate life from Erik Dietrich.
- Pragmatists are line-level employees who find value in life outside of work, mainly because the hope of any meaningful advancement and enjoyment of their profession has been taken from them.
- Idealists believe heartily in the meritocratic company (and organizational superiors) as a benevolent steward of their careers because perspective has been taken from them.
- Opportunists refuse to yield hope or perspective and recognize that the only way to win the corporate game is to play by their own rules. In this realization, they give up ethical certainty and human connection – opportunists play a lonely, sad game to get what they get.
I think of them in terms of what the modern corporate structure has done to them:
- Broken the losers
- Tricked the clueless
- And forced the sociopaths into ethical conundrums.
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I believe you've said it.
If bureaucracies generally do not get shut down, and individuals generally do not lose their jobs, the they can have inconvenient hours at offices in inconvenient locations. They can make lots of rules and forms that make life difficult for the very people that they serve. Even if no bureaucrat maliciously wants to make things difficult for anyone, in the absence of forces that weed out such inconveniences, they will only ever increase in prevalence.
I'll pull from my comment on your original article (written after you published both of these).
Politicians certainly rail against bureaucracies, but off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any bureaucracy that had its budget or its power cut.
Even the places where "defund the police" got some traction, it was generally accounting tricks. In many cases they ended up having funding restored shortly after or funding simply came from other sources.
My point being, it's not at all obvious to me that there are actually repercussions for swollen, mis-managed bureaucracies. But I would very much love to be wrong.
If you model bureaucracies as ROI-maximizers (getting the max reward for least effort) that can never be shut down....that seems to explain everything to me.
a swollen bureaucracy that's mis-managing its money or power is a ripe target for politicians.
Politicians certainly rail against bureaucracies, but off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any bureaucracy that had its budget or its power cut.
Even the places where "defund the police" got some traction, it was generally accounting tricks. In many cases they ended up having funding restored shortly after or funding simply came from other sources.
My point being, it's not at all obvious to me that there are actually repercussions for swollen, mis-managed bureaucracies. But I would very much love to be wrong.
Eliezer has taken some pains to argue that we cannot even talk to the AI:... And he's provided some compelling arguments that this is the case.
Any chance you have links to those arguments? I know that is his argument and I agree with his intuition, but I've never seen anything more fleshed out than that.
The authors of Dictators Handbook would argue that it is rational from the basis of what the leader needs to do to stay the leader.
Good summary here on LW: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N6jeLwEzGpE45ucuS/building-blocks-of-politics-an-overview-of-selectorate
I saw it!
The only reason I haven't read it yet is because I wanted to make sure I had time to read it.
Really appreciate it. I think unwinding how power works will be a huge step forward for rationality.
Along with your black hole example and Jeff's light bending example, Relativity also predicted time dilation and gravitational waves before they were confirmed experimentally.
I worry I will sound like a jerk. I'm not trying to, but why?
What is the advantage of memorizing a grocery list over writing down a list?
Just ordered some of those laces. thanks for the heads up.