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Great quote by an Australian immigration officer: “You give us the papers we want. We give you the papers you want.” Meaning: “Just make the form look the wa

by sivers 15y ago

Great quote by an Australian immigration officer: “You give us the papers we want. We give you the papers you want.” Meaning: “Just make the form look the way you know we want it to look, and we'll give you the resulting documents you want.”

mechanical_fish 15y ago
When making jokes about bureaucracy, or constructing poorly-written fiction about bureaucracy, or - most dangerous of all - attempting to implement a bureaucracy as a computer program, there's a tendency to take the risk of deadlock too seriously. If you get the system into a state of logical contradiction, the theory goes, it will grind to a halt, or possibly explode. But in the human world deadlocks don't happen, at least not for as long as you think. They resolve - sometimes peacefully, sometimes fitfully, but they resolve. The vast majority resolve so quickly that you barely notice they happened, because once a person has tried a particular deadlock-resolution strategy once or twice, and nothing has blown up as a result, they make a habit of that strategy and get really good at it. Eventually the strategy might even get institutionalized; it becomes part of the on-the-job training that everybody gets but that nobody ever talks about or writes down. (And, sometimes, eventually something does blow up. But the proximate cause of that explosion won't look like a deadlock. If you investigate it, however, you may find that the root cause was a deadlock, one that got resolved in an unhappy way. So maybe it's wrong to say that the risk of deadlock is less than it appears; instead, we say that deadlocks are very risky, but the risk is not that the system will halt, but rather that it will grind forward in the wrong way.) There are rules that are on the books that everyone pledges to follow, but that nobody actually follows. There are forms that everyone knows must be filled out a certain way, regardless of the surrounding circumstances. There are signatures that are consistently signed by underlings, but almost never by the person whose name is being signed. There are shortcuts that, if the engineers knew about them, would be cause for suspicion, but they make the job go faster, and the engineers don't know about them, perhaps because whenever they see one in progress they cover their eyes and mutter "oh, wow, I didn't see that", so let me just show you this trick very quietly, and please don't talk too loudly about it. And obviously this can become pathological - I'm heard that, in particularly corrupt societies, bureaucrats can make a living by explicitly and openly manufacturing deadlocks which they will resolve for you for a fee, and everyone understands this and just travels around with a stack of bills - but it's also the essential lubricant that makes bureaucracy work at all. I'm not sure we have any evidence that, say, an enterprise on the scale of a corporation can work without such quintessentially human intervention.

by sivers 15y ago

mechanical_fish 15y ago

When making jokes about bureaucracy, or constructing poorly-written fiction about bureaucracy, or - most dangerous of all - attempting to implement a bureaucracy as a computer program, there's a tendency to take the risk of deadlock too seriously. If you get the system into a state of logical contradiction, the theory goes, it will grind to a halt, or possibly explode. But in the human world deadlocks don't happen, at least not for as long as you think. They resolve - sometimes peacefully, sometimes fitfully, but they resolve. The vast majority resolve so quickly that you barely notice they happened, because once a person has tried a particular deadlock-resolution strategy once or twice, and nothing has blown up as a result, they make a habit of that strategy and get really good at it. Eventually the strategy might even get institutionalized; it becomes part of the on-the-job training that everybody gets but that nobody ever talks about or writes down. (And, sometimes, eventually something does blow up. But the proximate cause of that explosion won't look like a deadlock. If you investigate it, however, you may find that the root cause was a deadlock, one that got resolved in an unhappy way. So maybe it's wrong to say that the risk of deadlock is less than it appears; instead, we say that deadlocks are very risky, but the risk is not that the system will halt, but rather that it will grind forward in the wrong way.) There are rules that are on the books that everyone pledges to follow, but that nobody actually follows. There are forms that everyone knows must be filled out a certain way, regardless of the surrounding circumstances. There are signatures that are consistently signed by underlings, but almost never by the person whose name is being signed. There are shortcuts that, if the engineers knew about them, would be cause for suspicion, but they make the job go faster, and the engineers don't know about them, perhaps because whenever they see one in progress they cover their eyes and mutter "oh, wow, I didn't see that", so let me just show you this trick very quietly, and please don't talk too loudly about it. And obviously this can become pathological - I'm heard that, in particularly corrupt societies, bureaucrats can make a living by explicitly and openly manufacturing deadlocks which they will resolve for you for a fee, and everyone understands this and just travels around with a stack of bills - but it's also the essential lubricant that makes bureaucracy work at all. I'm not sure we have any evidence that, say, an enterprise on the scale of a corporation can work without such quintessentially human intervention.