Very nice expansion on Sowell's dictum "It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.".
I am an old fart doing computer security work - which I have been doing for decades. We are all going to be wrong some of the time when we are making calls on incomplete information, but if we are wrong too much of the time we are out of work - deservably. It ends up being a surprisingly small community and your reputation is important - people you have worked with or for in the past remember you and your work. That reputation is important. I am well into my 70's and still going.
And sometimes you build your reputation by getting yourself fired. I once told a client about an issue that they clearly did not want to hear about - but it was in my opinion my responsibility to let them know that they had an issue that they needed to manage. My contract was cancelled the same day. My manager at my consulting company congratulated me - if the shit hit the fan, we could not be blamed for it - and assigned me to another project with a different client.
My youngest daughter is a civil engineer - and they work hard to not be wrong. They have legal liability as well as reputation to protect. Both are important.
I was trying to explain the difference between different types of regulatory system the other day to a syndicalist. Believe it or not, the conversation was rather pleasant, and they were open to new information. Rules-based (or checklist) regulations are favoured by bureaucrats because they cost more (and produce more public sector workers in the official fiefdom) and also have little to no accountability, because the individual bureaucrat is always only 'just following the rule'. Regulatory compliance costs are also almost always high.
Principles or outcome-based regulations are loathed by bureaucrats because they produce the opposite system- fewer bureaucrats, routinely exercising their own judgement and responsible for their decisions, enforced at a significantly lower regulatory compliance costs.
Regulatory design and enforcement should be the best paid job in government, because good regulations are incredibly hard to implement. We should sack the 75% of regulators who are least capable of exercising good judgement and shouldering responsibility, and pay the ones who are left four times as much money.
I was watching Rory Sutherland the other day on LBC. He was talking about the lost opportunity costs of a housing and construction regulatory system which makes the simplest action well nigh impossible. The lost opportunity costs are huge.
The Germans have “the right to build”. There has to be a specific rule/law to stop a property owner doing whatever with their property, there can’t be done by official discretion. Their house prices move at basically the rate of inflation. (They decided, post 1945, they were over the tyranny of the petty official.)
A while back I asked an AI to look at advanced economies which had managed to avoid the general tendency for house prices to rise substantially above the rate of inflation in the past 30 years. It highlighted Japan. Apparently they have a fairly unique system for planning and regulations, which consists of 12 different types of zones that are specific about what can and can't be built in the zone. Provided you follow the basic rules you can build what you like.
Their system operates off nuisance levels (e.g., noise, pollution, building height). Low nuisance level buildings are actually allowed in high nuisance areas. Crucially, 11-12 out of the 12 zones allow residential development (including multi-family/apartments even in low-rise zones), making it much easier to add density where demand exists.
House prices have remained stable or even declined since the early 90s. The only exception has been recent upticks in major cities like Tokyo driven by foreign investment and urban demand.
One of my contacts Linked In, an American engineer named Phil Rink, talks about broken feedback loops on a societal level all the time, and I agree with both of you, and I think its the right way to frame it.
When someone or something is insulated against its errors it cannot correct them and chaos ensues. That one of the problems with planned economies vs free markets. We need more free markets in all fields.
Regarding our capacity for self-deception, I came across a nutrition/psychology study that found that everyone's working definition of "moderation" is whatever they're currently doing.
"Everything in moderation" sounds great, and is partly why Americans are so unhealthy.
Ongoing awareness of this sempiternal propensity of human institutions, and the deployment of effective prophylaxis is the single most important mission confronting our times. Congrats 'Renzo for taking it on, and hopefully amplifying it relentlessly. What you, Cummings, and other voices say about the public sector in particular, exactly coincides with my experience, in senior roles in the bureaucracies of four different countries over three decades. The syndrome is impervious though to asymmetric resistance. (I have the scars.)
Excellent follow-up on property episodes - which episodes took a little while for me to get a feeling they are important. Meaning: the property is a concept outside of us humans, an extended phenotype supported by quite a variety of cultural conventions. Yet, as multi-level evolution (or another facet of group selection) postulates, if an extended phenotype is beneficial, it will have a genetic and cognitive adaptation to support it, even if culturally flexibly. Property and thus inequity was (and is) the main thing that makes human progress and flourishing possible.
This piece talks about the opposite - convenient error based on another diametrically opposed adaptation: desire for equity (emotion of envy, particularly by meritless), and thus desire to make a system that would follow "the correct process" while implementing bonkers luxury beliefs, allowing productively meritless and/or delusional to benefit by degrading the commons.
Just a couple of relatively tangential thoughts on this great post.
Lorenzo, it's always a dreadful pleasure reading your analysis and shining a light on many things that have been kept out of view.
I'd love to know what you think of DataRepublican’s Substack post ‘Minnesota as a Systems Failure - How NGOs process dissent until reality no longer matters’.
They mention a concept I'd not heard of before called Autopoiesis:
‘Autopoiesis is a term from systems theory.
It means this: a system responds to reality only through the constraints of its own internal organization.’
I have been a subscriber of your posts, but I have to stop here because the political / societal considerations are taking up too much of my time and I need to move on. Many thanks for the insights, I learned a lot. I really appreciate the cross-domain approach of your analysis, which is very rare. The inability of our intellectual class to understand that a culture is an eco-system, and that culture and its specificities support pretty much everything, has been responsible for much of our trouble in the West, sadly ( France, with its universalist hubris, is even worse in that regard). Keep it up :)
Beyond that, and more generally, accounting for human nature, nothing less, is something that should be required from anybody talking in the public space. We are being buried under stupid theories that have no relation whatsoever with the reality of human experience. Again, in that regards, your posts have been quite enlightning.
Actually quite a few are on YouTube, but it is all so much in flux. I recommend the Conflicted podcast and Aimen Deen’s commentary if you are interested.
Very nice expansion on Sowell's dictum "It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.".
I am an old fart doing computer security work - which I have been doing for decades. We are all going to be wrong some of the time when we are making calls on incomplete information, but if we are wrong too much of the time we are out of work - deservably. It ends up being a surprisingly small community and your reputation is important - people you have worked with or for in the past remember you and your work. That reputation is important. I am well into my 70's and still going.
And sometimes you build your reputation by getting yourself fired. I once told a client about an issue that they clearly did not want to hear about - but it was in my opinion my responsibility to let them know that they had an issue that they needed to manage. My contract was cancelled the same day. My manager at my consulting company congratulated me - if the shit hit the fan, we could not be blamed for it - and assigned me to another project with a different client.
My youngest daughter is a civil engineer - and they work hard to not be wrong. They have legal liability as well as reputation to protect. Both are important.
There is a huge difference between reputation for reality-tested capacity and performative reputation.
I was trying to explain the difference between different types of regulatory system the other day to a syndicalist. Believe it or not, the conversation was rather pleasant, and they were open to new information. Rules-based (or checklist) regulations are favoured by bureaucrats because they cost more (and produce more public sector workers in the official fiefdom) and also have little to no accountability, because the individual bureaucrat is always only 'just following the rule'. Regulatory compliance costs are also almost always high.
Principles or outcome-based regulations are loathed by bureaucrats because they produce the opposite system- fewer bureaucrats, routinely exercising their own judgement and responsible for their decisions, enforced at a significantly lower regulatory compliance costs.
Regulatory design and enforcement should be the best paid job in government, because good regulations are incredibly hard to implement. We should sack the 75% of regulators who are least capable of exercising good judgement and shouldering responsibility, and pay the ones who are left four times as much money.
I was watching Rory Sutherland the other day on LBC. He was talking about the lost opportunity costs of a housing and construction regulatory system which makes the simplest action well nigh impossible. The lost opportunity costs are huge.
Yes.
The Germans have “the right to build”. There has to be a specific rule/law to stop a property owner doing whatever with their property, there can’t be done by official discretion. Their house prices move at basically the rate of inflation. (They decided, post 1945, they were over the tyranny of the petty official.)
A while back I asked an AI to look at advanced economies which had managed to avoid the general tendency for house prices to rise substantially above the rate of inflation in the past 30 years. It highlighted Japan. Apparently they have a fairly unique system for planning and regulations, which consists of 12 different types of zones that are specific about what can and can't be built in the zone. Provided you follow the basic rules you can build what you like.
Their system operates off nuisance levels (e.g., noise, pollution, building height). Low nuisance level buildings are actually allowed in high nuisance areas. Crucially, 11-12 out of the 12 zones allow residential development (including multi-family/apartments even in low-rise zones), making it much easier to add density where demand exists.
House prices have remained stable or even declined since the early 90s. The only exception has been recent upticks in major cities like Tokyo driven by foreign investment and urban demand.
One of my contacts Linked In, an American engineer named Phil Rink, talks about broken feedback loops on a societal level all the time, and I agree with both of you, and I think its the right way to frame it.
When someone or something is insulated against its errors it cannot correct them and chaos ensues. That one of the problems with planned economies vs free markets. We need more free markets in all fields.
Regarding our capacity for self-deception, I came across a nutrition/psychology study that found that everyone's working definition of "moderation" is whatever they're currently doing.
"Everything in moderation" sounds great, and is partly why Americans are so unhealthy.
Ongoing awareness of this sempiternal propensity of human institutions, and the deployment of effective prophylaxis is the single most important mission confronting our times. Congrats 'Renzo for taking it on, and hopefully amplifying it relentlessly. What you, Cummings, and other voices say about the public sector in particular, exactly coincides with my experience, in senior roles in the bureaucracies of four different countries over three decades. The syndrome is impervious though to asymmetric resistance. (I have the scars.)
Brilliant
Excellent follow-up on property episodes - which episodes took a little while for me to get a feeling they are important. Meaning: the property is a concept outside of us humans, an extended phenotype supported by quite a variety of cultural conventions. Yet, as multi-level evolution (or another facet of group selection) postulates, if an extended phenotype is beneficial, it will have a genetic and cognitive adaptation to support it, even if culturally flexibly. Property and thus inequity was (and is) the main thing that makes human progress and flourishing possible.
This piece talks about the opposite - convenient error based on another diametrically opposed adaptation: desire for equity (emotion of envy, particularly by meritless), and thus desire to make a system that would follow "the correct process" while implementing bonkers luxury beliefs, allowing productively meritless and/or delusional to benefit by degrading the commons.
Just a couple of relatively tangential thoughts on this great post.
Lorenzo, it's always a dreadful pleasure reading your analysis and shining a light on many things that have been kept out of view.
I'd love to know what you think of DataRepublican’s Substack post ‘Minnesota as a Systems Failure - How NGOs process dissent until reality no longer matters’.
They mention a concept I'd not heard of before called Autopoiesis:
‘Autopoiesis is a term from systems theory.
It means this: a system responds to reality only through the constraints of its own internal organization.’
Not quite how I would put things but thought-provoking. I have added a link in the post.
It is not a cheerful business, drilling down into the dysfunction.
I have been a subscriber of your posts, but I have to stop here because the political / societal considerations are taking up too much of my time and I need to move on. Many thanks for the insights, I learned a lot. I really appreciate the cross-domain approach of your analysis, which is very rare. The inability of our intellectual class to understand that a culture is an eco-system, and that culture and its specificities support pretty much everything, has been responsible for much of our trouble in the West, sadly ( France, with its universalist hubris, is even worse in that regard). Keep it up :)
Beyond that, and more generally, accounting for human nature, nothing less, is something that should be required from anybody talking in the public space. We are being buried under stupid theories that have no relation whatsoever with the reality of human experience. Again, in that regards, your posts have been quite enlightning.
Thanks again.
Why is nobody on the right talking about Iran? What`s going on?
Actually quite a few are on YouTube, but it is all so much in flux. I recommend the Conflicted podcast and Aimen Deen’s commentary if you are interested.
FOX talks about it nonstop, and they say that left/mainstream media is not covering it well. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/c/FoxNews/videos