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The article's implicit conceit is that a bureaucracy is just an attempt to abstract away what is in actuality a bunch of distinct self-interested obstructionist

by derefr 2y ago

The article's implicit conceit is that a bureaucracy is just an attempt to abstract away what is in actuality a bunch of distinct self-interested obstructionist fiefdoms — that each do all they can to prevent the organization from 1. doing anything that would pose an existential threat to the fiefdom, 2. starting any project that would be the fiefdom's ultimate responsibility to deliver upon, 3. reorganizing in a way that would cause the the fiefdom's "slack", or continued underperformance (compared to the organization's usually-unrealistic expectations) to be made more legible, 4. doing anything to equalize and redistribute any special advantages that come with the fiefdom's existing responsibilities, ...and so forth. The CIA sabotage manual applies perfectly to the usual sort of bureaucratic organization full of such fiefdoms, as such fiefdoms use exactly these techniques to prevent the projects that would threaten them from moving forward (at anything beyond a glacial pace.)

janalsncm 2y ago
I guess what I’m saying is that the author is conflating bureaucracy with the broken system suggested in a sabotage manual, and that bureaucracy doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, we need agile and efficient bureaucracies. “Founder mode” isn’t scalable, sorry. Figuring out how to organize large groups of people into efficient, stable, and effective organizations is still a massively underdeveloped technology in my opinion. > There's going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company. PG’s post ended before it got interesting. Maybe by design, because if it was any more specific (read: useful) it would be falsifiable. As it stands now, “founder mode” is so open to interpretation that anyone who says it doesn’t work probably just wasn’t doing it right.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > In fact, we need agile and efficient bureaucracies. The best way we know of doing this is to put them in competition with one another and make sure there are at least a dozen. Keep barriers to entry low enough that if the incumbents suck, someone new can eat their lunch. The bureaucracies, of course, want the opposite. A monopoly that allows them to dictate terms and extract rents, or failing that at least a concentrated cartel that can coordinate behind closed doors or through conscious parallelism. Inhibiting that is the way to achieve the desired result. The bureaucracies can't do it internally because a bureaucracy without external competitive pressure has no internal incentive to improve efficiency to counter the intrinsic incentive for bureaucrats to capture and redirect surplus to protect and accumulate power.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  > Figuring out how to organize large groups of people into efficient, stable, and effective organizations is still a massively underdeveloped technology in my opinion I mostly agree with this, but there are a lot of failure modes that are known and should be avoided. e.g. running an incentive structure where success is not rewarded and failure is not punished. This broken structure seems to be the default in bureaucracy. Government bureaucrats won't see a cent if they find a more efficient way to do things. In fact, they will be punished with lower budgets.
- derefr 2y ago
  You're talking about intentionally-created bureaucracies. I don't think very many of these exist! The majority of the time, bureaucracies aren't prescriptive, a structure imposed; but rather, they're descriptive — that is, they're just the abstraction we use to talk about what is actually a bunch of pre-existing special-interest groups, groups that would continue to exist whether or not there were an organizational label to collect them all into. For example, what is a municipal government, but a bureaucracy that evolves out of conflicting special-interest groups, with each top-level city-council seat beholden mostly to some particular special-interest group? The NIMBY gridlock in most cities can be blamed, in some sense, on "bureaucracy" — but only in the sense that there is an explicit NIMBY interest group that holds many council seats through representatives, and which cannot be organizationally engineered out of existence. The NIMBY home-owners make up a large proportion of voters — and so hold power as a voting bloc — and this holds whether they are directly represented by a party that agrees with them, or whether they are just bribing some other party to implicitly do things their way in order to get their votes. And in the case of NIMBYs, "doing things their way" is exactly "doing all that sabotage-manual stuff, to create bureaucratic gridlock, to block any attempt to fix or improve the city that would come at the expense of the asset-value of homes." There's no technology that can "fix" the problem of the majority of an organization being composed of groups with fundamentally opposed ideologies, with groups seeing the other groups in the organization as likely to fundamentally destroy the things they hold dear if allowed, and where the fundamental tool these group see as available to resist what they see as "regressive change", is degradation of the process of change itself, though such organizational-process sabotage. Make the organizational process more efficient, and you just enable the sabotage to happen faster. (It's a bit like accelerating an AI, just translating into it deciding to refuse you faster.) And to be clear, I am not just saying that polities and their democratic proxies are like this; I am saying that most organizations are like this. Most orgs are inherently, definitionally made up of such fundamentally ideologically-opposed factions. Yes, even if you hire them to work in explicit alignment with one-another.

by derefr 2y ago

janalsncm 2y ago

I guess what I’m saying is that the author is conflating bureaucracy with the broken system suggested in a sabotage manual, and that bureaucracy doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, we need agile and efficient bureaucracies. “Founder mode” isn’t scalable, sorry. Figuring out how to organize large groups of people into efficient, stable, and effective organizations is still a massively underdeveloped technology in my opinion. > There's going to have to be some amount of delegation. Where the borders of autonomy end up, and how sharp they are, will probably vary from company to company. PG’s post ended before it got interesting. Maybe by design, because if it was any more specific (read: useful) it would be falsifiable. As it stands now, “founder mode” is so open to interpretation that anyone who says it doesn’t work probably just wasn’t doing it right.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> In fact, we need agile and efficient bureaucracies. The best way we know of doing this is to put them in competition with one another and make sure there are at least a dozen. Keep barriers to entry low enough that if the incumbents suck, someone new can eat their lunch. The bureaucracies, of course, want the opposite. A monopoly that allows them to dictate terms and extract rents, or failing that at least a concentrated cartel that can coordinate behind closed doors or through conscious parallelism. Inhibiting that is the way to achieve the desired result. The bureaucracies can't do it internally because a bureaucracy without external competitive pressure has no internal incentive to improve efficiency to counter the intrinsic incentive for bureaucrats to capture and redirect surplus to protect and accumulate power.
fallingknife 2y ago
> Figuring out how to organize large groups of people into efficient, stable, and effective organizations is still a massively underdeveloped technology in my opinion I mostly agree with this, but there are a lot of failure modes that are known and should be avoided. e.g. running an incentive structure where success is not rewarded and failure is not punished. This broken structure seems to be the default in bureaucracy. Government bureaucrats won't see a cent if they find a more efficient way to do things. In fact, they will be punished with lower budgets.
derefr 2y ago
You're talking about intentionally-created bureaucracies. I don't think very many of these exist! The majority of the time, bureaucracies aren't prescriptive, a structure imposed; but rather, they're descriptive — that is, they're just the abstraction we use to talk about what is actually a bunch of pre-existing special-interest groups, groups that would continue to exist whether or not there were an organizational label to collect them all into. For example, what is a municipal government, but a bureaucracy that evolves out of conflicting special-interest groups, with each top-level city-council seat beholden mostly to some particular special-interest group? The NIMBY gridlock in most cities can be blamed, in some sense, on "bureaucracy" — but only in the sense that there is an explicit NIMBY interest group that holds many council seats through representatives, and which cannot be organizationally engineered out of existence. The NIMBY home-owners make up a large proportion of voters — and so hold power as a voting bloc — and this holds whether they are directly represented by a party that agrees with them, or whether they are just bribing some other party to implicitly do things their way in order to get their votes. And in the case of NIMBYs, "doing things their way" is exactly "doing all that sabotage-manual stuff, to create bureaucratic gridlock, to block any attempt to fix or improve the city that would come at the expense of the asset-value of homes." There's no technology that can "fix" the problem of the majority of an organization being composed of groups with fundamentally opposed ideologies, with groups seeing the other groups in the organization as likely to fundamentally destroy the things they hold dear if allowed, and where the fundamental tool these group see as available to resist what they see as "regressive change", is degradation of the process of change itself, though such organizational-process sabotage. Make the organizational process more efficient, and you just enable the sabotage to happen faster. (It's a bit like accelerating an AI, just translating into it deciding to refuse you faster.) And to be clear, I am not just saying that polities and their democratic proxies are like this; I am saying that most organizations are like this. Most orgs are inherently, definitionally made up of such fundamentally ideologically-opposed factions. Yes, even if you hire them to work in explicit alignment with one-another.