[FRIAM] The+Jim+Rutt+Show

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Well, as I've tried to say in other forms, bureaucracy is a good thing. Aaronson says it nicely here:

"But I’d say we’re fortunate that these observations didn’t dissuade the Wright brothers, or Bardeen and Brattain and Shockley, or the American revolutionaries! In each case, even if an engineering problem has the character of balancing a pencil on its tip, a solution might be so self-evidently desirable that it really does make sense just to work on it more and more and more until the pencil stands. Even then the pencil probably won’t stand forever, but after it falls we can do a careful postmortem, and try again to rebalance the pencil for an even longer time."

By over-simplifying engineering feats as "benefits of non-zero-sum gains", you're committing the "cognitive parsimony" that I brought up on Friday. Sure, it's natural to look at some person executing some task and say "what a sh¡tshow" or "such talent". But either one of those ignores the lifetime of *sweat* that person put into getting good at the task. It's simply lazy to complain about bureaucracy. If you think it's badly done, dig in and make it better ... or sit off by the side, in your armchair, complain and think magically about how you might want everything to be simple. Yarvin is a perfect example of the latter. And his "stupidity quotient" is a very tight, concentrated form of it. Idealism run amok.

That he ranks Yarvin with people like Eric Smith or Simon DeDeo seems to argue that Rutt, himself, is not very useful, at least not to me. But my time is not precious. So I'll shuffle him into the deck for awhile. Hopefully, my mind will change.

On 1/18/21 9:16 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> Thanks for the dope-slap.  Sorry. My bad.  Mind you,  I am still troubled by Libertarians, because, having lived so long in academia, I have seen the baroque incrustations that develop in academic bureaucracies. Bureaucracies are like beautiful and elaborate coral reefs that, hidden under the surface of placid water, can be such a peril to navigation.   On the other hand, I don't doubt the enormous benefits of the non-zero-sum gains that can be captured by cooperation on a large scale.  

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