99. Bureaucracy is Good, Actually 🔗

Bureaucracy at its best is the art of ensuring work never flows backwards in a system where nobody can see very far, by overengineering the output at every stage. It’s the essence of good fat.

You bundle in everything the rest of the work chain could possibly want so it doesn’t come back to your desk. This is no mean achievement. Complex systems want to develop feedback loops and keeping them feedforward without knowing exactly what the forward path needs is hard

So you solve by over-communicating. Ask for everything pass on everything. There is a world of sophistication in the idea of a “supporting document.”

Dunno how I missed good bureaucracy as the epitome of fat thinking in my writing on the topic. Gonna finally read the Wilson bureaucracy book and become a Deep State stan. Windmills of the Gods.

People think all bureaucracy is bad because they fetishize the lean/private sector that solves for speed and growth over survivability. But solving for survivability is legit. You take 1 step instead of 10 but you survive 9/10 of futures instead of 1/10

It will be fun to troll my startup buddies who are all firmly in TINAT mode: There Is No Alternative to Thiel. Sad failure of imagination to not ask whether an institutional form 2000 years old might not actually know a thing or two.

Much as it sometimes annoys me like it does everyone, I can see the beauty of it. Covid theater, banking ooga booga, taxes… there’s a larger meaning to it all. Slow and steady forward motion (that lacks the hubris to call itself “progress”) regardless of imperfect information

The US has an outlier attitude towards bureaucracy: uncompromising hostility as a founding premise. Yet despite that, one of the greatest bureaucracies in history evolved here. By contrast private enterprise is a fragile flower. Collapses at first sign of environmental hostility

To free enterprisists and statists bureaucracy is categorically bad or good by vacuous moral presumption. To get to a substantive good bureaucracy/bad bureaucracy distinction you have to approach the thing itself with genuine curiosity.

“Bureaucracy Bad” comes across as a childish reaction to personal indignity at not being seen as the special snowflake human you are by a machine. On par with “Slugs Yuck.” Except kids don’t usually go on to “Kill All Slugs”

They get that the world needs slugs as much as puppies

“Bureaucracy Good” people are worse. People who love bureaucracies because they (sometimes) represent commons and protect+employ those who fail market-Darwinism tests generally understand the Tao of Bureaucracy even less than the haters. Social justice is values not explanation.

Have you tried actually seeing like a state? It only goes wrong when bureaucracies develop envy of private enterprise and try to do things. The raison d’etre of a bureaucracy is to prevent things from getting undone. Impose a cost on destruction not indulge in construction

The defining feature of bureaucracy is not that it moves forward very slowly but that it moves backwards not at all. For a bureaucracy retreat is death, not Schumpeterian resurrection Which means things where there is high value to not backsliding should be bureaucratic.

Ie believe it or not there are situations where this is a feature not a bug. It’s the institutional Terminator gene.

Yes, I often find myself landing on evil twin conclusions to taleb. To him all bureaucracy is fragilista intellectual-yet-idiot territory. Yet his own theories suggest otherwise. Bureaucracy is the most Lindy thing around. Hardly what you’d expect IYI fragilistas to run. tweet^[1]

Tortoise vs hare fable is about bureaucracy vs private enterprise

Also Blue Origin vs SpaceX. Notice how the former has had only one failure with New Shepherd, and that had successful high altitude capsule escape. They’re 10x slower but almost never go backwards.

“Agile bureaucracy” is the funniest contradiction in terms of you notice “forward only” means do-overs and iteration are BAD.

Do or do not, there is no try. — Cabinet Secretary of the Force, Yoda.

Yep. The Jedi are a bureaucracy in case you were studiously ignoring that fact.

Blue Origin motto, Gradatim Ferociter, “step by step, ferociously” is a bureaucratic motto. And before you make with the jokes, remember for 60 years only bureaucracies got to space at all.

This proposed addition to my theory is under consideration by the appropriate departments. You can review the status of your application at this broken website. tweet^[2]

Not just Republicans though they are a uniquely virulent example. Around the world bureaucracies are coded the same way. The adversary that does it might vary but the result is the same. tweet^[3]

Anything you think is a bug that needs fixing is almost certainly a feature that helps the forward-only mission. Opacity, unresponsiveness, inability to ingest non-pro-forms information etc. All features. If you don’t get why you have unexamined speed > survival values

“Better that n murderers go unpunished than 1 innocent be hanged” principle is restatement of forward only principle. Stark. You’d rather have a bunch of psychos running rampant than punish the innocent. Vigilante states are failed states. tweet^[4]

Note that according to Scott himself the best modern form of seeimg like a state was an invention of private corporations (Taylorism) from where it spread to states, including both US and USSR. Waterfall planning came out of corporations too. 5y plans have corporate origins.

When I use the term “good bureaucracy” I mean it not in a moral sense but in the sense “true to its essential Taoist nature.” Good is merely all that has demonstrable persistence and can be perpetuated without undoing anything else.

Accretion displaces arbitrary definitions of “Progress” made up by morally self-important types that are always Regress to an opposed breed of moralist. Bureaucracy does an end run around that.

Tired: Progress studies
Wired: Accretion studies

I’m not trying to troll friends or mint haters. If you have genuine criticism of my theory, please submit it via Form 42, in triplicate. We are an open, responsive bureaucracy in this thread. Appropriate Actions will be taken in response to all feedback

I thought of the perfect title for the essay I think I should write about this: Windmills of the Mods

The essay will also feature blockchains, and given recent experiences of Indian bureaucracy that inspired this thread, also what are known as babus (bureaucrats). We will discuss Blockchain Babus.

There is definitely some sort of natural Indian bureaucrat gene. At the risk of culturally essentializing My People, the "Indian CEO" stage of a tech company is also the "bureaucratization" stage. Consolidate and entrench.

Also ML. The inside of a bureaucracy is actually surprisingly squishy and wibbly-wobbly gooey procedural knowledge, not machine like. A bureaucracy is a large language model wrapped in a blockchain, all human powered.

touche tweet^[5]

I think I need to sub "true" for "good" in my model of the essential tao-of-the-bureau bureaucracy. In the sense that Hermes Conrad on Futurama aspires to be a true bureaucrat.

Good example. "First do no harm" is also a "don't backslide" isomorph of sorts tweet^[6]

Very niche joke 😂 tweet^[7]