Social Learning Links, 4/9/2025
Dan Davies on accountability; Davies on Klein and Thompson; Tove K on how civilization arose; my review of Karp and Zamiska
Unaccountability in bureaucracies is a specifically cybernetic problem, in that it is a failure to transmit and process some important kinds of information – it is much more a flaw of engineering than a moral failing. What is bad about it is a broken feedback link – there is no way for news about the consequences of decisions to be transmitted to the person or system that made them, or at least not in time to be useful or in a form that can be the basis for action.
As I understand his essay, the theory of cybernetics suggests that one can model any failure as an information failure. When a voice-response system puts you through hell, that is because there is a broken feedback loop between the users of the system and its designers. Of course, part of the reason that the feedback loop is broken could be that the designers do not really care that much.
Davies has his own substack. One recent essay concerns the heavily-reviewed book, Abundance.
part of the cost of building something is that it constrains what can be built in the future. So, the greater your uncertainty about the future (perhaps because you don’t have the capacity to think about it any more), the more likely you are to be worried about closing off options.
the history of civilization has been an interplay between collective delusions and people's realistic appreciation of the result of those delusions. Throughout history, the proportion between collective delusions and collective realism have indeed varied. Most notably in ancient Greece and Rome, the proportion of realism was quite high. But for most of history, people have motivated each other through confusing each other with beliefs that muddle the meaning of selfishness and altruism. Christians said that people who act selfishly were not selfish for real, because they would end up in hell and how stupid isn't that? And people acting unselfishly weren't unselfish for real because they were working on going to the best place imaginable.
This brings up the role of the delusional individual in society. She concludes,
Millions of people know more about Donald Trump and are more interested in him than I am. But from the perspective of a casual observer, Donald Trump never appeared to be a sane person. From the moment I first heard about him, I assumed he was a half-crazy person with a dubious grip of reality who people found amusing exactly for that reason.
…It seems as if Trump's lack of realism is his decisive advantage: If Americans can't agree over anything real, they can agree over something unreal instead.
For the believers, he’s not delusional. He’s just playing 4-dimensional chess!
Reviewing a new book by Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, I write,
Part of the book is a meditation on start-up culture. But most of the book reads like something a Professor of Classics might have written circa 1985, in the middle of the Decade of Greed, lamenting the students’ crass materialism and lack of interest in Western Civilization or the higher goals in life.
…The authors complain that too many Silicon Valley companies are looking to make big profits from solving little problems. They would prefer to see more focus on what they see as the important issues, such as national security and health.
substacks referenced above: @
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“For the believers, he’s not delusional. He’s just playing 4-dimensional chess!”
This is a fair and accurate comment.
However, for those with TDS, he is simply an evil, self-interested moron and so everything he does is wrong and must be opposed.
Neither extreme is correct, but if you force me to pick one or the other, I reluctantly choose the former.
Because since I don’t believe he is evil or insane or has an IQ of zero, then something might actually be accomplished.
It's too cute to say that unaccountability in bureacracy is a 'cybernetic' problem, when it has nothing to do with information in the sense of observation, communication, or predictability. It is a completely commonplace experience for bureaucrats to accurately foresee bad results of orders and policy, to become fully aware of the details of those bad results when they become manifest subsequent to implementation, and to comiserate with each other in lamenting the predictable tragedy while at least feeling somewhat vindicated in the accuracy of their models and power of foresight based on intelligence and experience. No 'cybernetic' issue there.
In plain language it is a feedback issue. Not feedback of information but feedback of personal consequences aligned with the outcome, i.e., "skin in the game." If you don't have skin in the result of the public game ("the outcome"), then you still have skin in the results of your various private games, and as men are not angels, for most people those will take priority. And managers can't give subordinates skin in the game when they don't themselves have any, and the links go up the chain to the top layers of our system of government where everyone is trying as hard as possible to avoid having their own skin in the game.
If you fix the problem at the top, you fix the problems all the way down to the bottom. If you aren't willing or able to to fix the top problem, it's absolutely pointless to discuss further, as all other efforts will inevitably prove impotent and futile.