Nobody Knows What They're Doing (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Nobody Knows What They're Doing (2013)

prospect.org

274 pointsiamjeff129 comments

An obvious counter-argument to this: NSA. If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist. One can only imagine what Ezra Klein would have said to such a person.

"What you're saying is too improbable. No one can carry out complicated plans. All parties and groups are fractious and bumbling."

Turns out organizations like the NSA do actually exist, and they are capable enough to carry out complicated plans in secrecy for many many years. Despite it being a non-partisan government agency staffed by government workers reporting to our elected leaders. One can only wonder what other kinds of scheming and backroom deals are being done by private organizations such as lobbyists, super-PACs and think-tanks.

Documentaries such as _Enemy of the State_ have been describing the NSA for much longer than 10 years.

ba dum tss

Is there evidence the NSA has even ever conducted an enforcement action, never mind a rogue one on US soil?

Enforcement? no. We know they gather intelligence on citizens though and we know they collaborate with other agencies that do enforcement though.

Have you watched Enemy of the State?

I mean not since it came out... but the NSA not strictly having it's own wet-works arm doesn't make it's 90-00's portrayal as a semi-omnipotent foe any less depressingly accurate.

> the NSA not strictly having it's own wet-works arm doesn't make [the movie Enemy of the State's] 90-00's portrayal as a semi-omnipotent foe any less depressingly accurate

I love that movie, but let's not say things we can't take back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EwZQddc3kY

Because they'd advertise that /s

Parallel construction makes this unnecessary. There's no doubt in my mind that the NSA earns their budget.

While I agree with the sentiment in your analysis, the mass spying by the NSA was already well-known even in 2004 which is documented in the novel ("based on insider information") of Dan Brown: digital fortress. I know, it's fiction but it is a data point ..

https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Fortress-Thriller-Dan-Brown/d...

(Edit: this is the 2004 edition, original was published in 1998)

The first real revelations about the NSA were in Andrew Tully's "The Super Spies" (1969). There's been plenty of publicity about NSA since.

The big changes came after the end of the Cold War, and then after 9/11. During the Cold War, NSA was at least 90% focused on the USSR. Everything else was a minor activity. After the downfall of the USSR, NSA downsized, and there were layoffs. After 9/11, there was heavy pressure to detect the next terrorist attack in advance. That's what motivated all the domestic collection.

Looking back, the most unrealistic thing about Digital Fortress was that people actually used email encryption.

Echelon has been known about since 1988:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

I think I first heard about it in 2000.

1987 for me. Oops..

did you hack them in 1987?

Supplier

Difference is that whenever you brought it up, people thought you were nuts.

I prefer Mark Twain's phrase: we are all stupid, just on different subjects.

Here is your NSA bumbling: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/us/nsa-leak-booz-allen-ha...

There were a lot of people saying the NSA, or someone similar, would do exactly what they did. It was the main opposition to the Patriot Act.

People forget so quickly.

You know, here in my country the police started to investigate a car-wash that had more money than it should, then, one thing lead to another, and 7 years later we have as a proven fact that the in the last 40 years of federal government everything happened in conspiracies.

If I had to guess, I'd say they are all around the world, and the author is incredibly naive in believing that conspiratory meetings don't exist just because he wasn't invited to any real one.

What country if i may ask?

That's Brazil.

That's not actually a full counter-argument, since scheming requires two parts: that one person or a small group of people had a long term vision and goal, and that result was actually achieved. Blaming the current state of spying just a nefarious spy organization is pure reductive conspiracy theory speculation.

The truth is more prosaic and also more frustrating: we all collectively, including voters and and politicians, got ourselves into this mess.

That's less a scheme than a market.

Governments can, in fact, create them, if they throw enough of (our) money at the idea.

And people were saying that 10 years ago (and properly-scaled versions of the same quite a bit earlier). James Bamford, for one, has made a career out of the history and activities of the place. People didn't laugh at him; they mainly just ignored it.

>An obvious counter-argument to this: NSA. If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist. One can only imagine what Ezra Klein would have said to such a person.

And even 10 years ago I (and many) would call those people (laughing) naive, and Ezra Klein if not naive, then in bed with those in power.

For someone from a place that experienced actual history (wars, civil wars, dictatorships, all kinds of governments and ups and downs, etc.), and has a working knowledge of US history (from Hoover and McCarthy to Project Nightingale and Watergate and so) it's obvious that this agencies not only do that today, but have been doing it, to the extend possible, for ages.

And that people that look too much into those things are also put "out of the way", or are intimidated, blackmailed, etc. And some are just discredited in an organized paid-for way (with 'useful idiots' in the media joining in to also help discredit them for free, e.g. Gary Webb).

It's not that different that in all kinds of places. No country has powerful agencies and government, or trillion dollar interests without also having those things.

I think both you and the grandfather comment are focusing on the wrong part. To quote the quote from the article:

>This is the most pervasive of of all Washington legends: that politicians in Washington are ceaselessly, ruthlessly, effectively scheming. That everything that happens fits into somebody's plan. It doesn't.

You are both focusing on the first part, which the author doesn't really refute. What the author refutes, and what is meant by the "it" in the last sentence is the idea that things happen according to that scheme. This line of thinking isn't meant to counter the idea of the NSA mass spying. It is meant to counter the idea that politicians are playing "4d chess" and every one of their moves are part of a larger scheme. It is arguing that maybe Trump's legally indefensible executive orders were just written by a inexperienced staff aren't trial balloons for an eventual dismantling of The Republic.

>You are both focusing on the first part, which the author doesn't really refute. What the author refutes, and what is meant by the "it" in the last sentence is the idea that things happen according to that scheme.

I agree that there's a lot of BS schemes, unfocused schemes, wishful thinking schemes, and power players with no clear idea of what they're doing.

But I wanted to point out that it's not just it, and that it can also be laser focused on some things (if only at the operational level).

> conspiracy theorist

the irony being that by definition a theory about a clandestine plan by a group is a conspiracy .... theory ....

NSA are the worst conspiracy theorists. They have it so bad they try to surveil the entire world.

I think many people knew what was happening (Cypherpunks and EFF even before 2000) and the scale was pretty publicly clear when the massive tapping of ATT was revealed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

The ultimate threat to the privacy and security of US Citizens living in Country is that our Surveillance State can't keep its own secrets. I don't think it is unreasonable to believe that the China and Russia don't need to spy on the US government, it's citizens, or businesses, because we pay for the NSA to do it for them.

Don't develop any tool that you don't want used against you!

What the NSA is probably capable of has been know about for 30+ years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_of_Secrets

People just didn't care that much. The threat of nuclear annihilation made it all seem different.

I'm not convinced that the NSA counts as a counterexample. From my very limited knowledge, it appears that the NSA's programs are known an approved by a reasonably large swath of government. I think the response of the article would be that, rather than being the result of scheming by a small group of people, the NSA programs arise from a combination of initial government consensus and subsequent expansion of powers. For example, Obama could have stopped programs like PRISM when he became president, but chose to continue them.

The point I got from the article isn't so much that secret and far-reaching programs can't exist. It's that these programs do not come into being based on the will of a small group of people, but rather based on a complex bureaucratic process in which many parties partake.

NSA's existence and its activities aboard were well-known. What wasn't well-known was that NSA was spying on American citizens, not just a few suspicious ones but ALL of them. That revelation hit most people like a ton of bricks.

>> That revelation hit most people like a ton of bricks.

That seems a bit naive considering how fast technology improves.

Another pet peeve of mine: how can people possibly not be more worried about the kind of data collection happening at the tech behemoths? I can imagine about a 100 different ways they can by themselves, or by collusion with other powerful companies, completely suppress and eliminate serious competition. (And if all else fails, of course eventually buy them off plus their principles - such as what happened with WhatsApp).

Nominally at least, organizations such as the NSA will probably have a few people who are conflicted about stated purpose of the organization vs actual behavior (e.g. Snowden). There are no such checks and balances for corporate entities, except for this notion of competition, which is now acknowledged to be ineffective in the winner take all high tech ecosystem. The absence of any input from employees in these forums around, for e.g. Windows 10's heavy handed updates, or Facebook's extraordinary chutzpah in attempting to triangulate every piece of information they can to a person in their database, is quite telling.

Think of the FB experiment which was trying to manipulate people's emotions. Why aren't Mark Z and co being investigated for crime? [1] No legal precedents? - perhaps it is time to create some. At the very least, it will expose their data collection practices to the world and make similar companies more wary of taking people for granted.

[1] http://www.ibtimes.com/facebook-experiment-raises-legal-ques...

Those of us in the tech industry had a good idea of what was possible or even plausible given unlimited budgets and will power. We wrote it off that even though it was plausible, it wasn't probable because we'd like to think the best of our democratically elected governments that espouse freedom, freedom of speech and human rights at every turn.

Even we, who knew what was possible chose not to entertain the probability of it actually happening. Who was naive?

It's becoming harder and harder to write off conspiracy theories as nonsense, especially with the amount of hard evidence to the contrary.

I've switched to DuckDuckGo and Firefox and am mostly happy with that decision. I still use Gmail, YouTube, and Google Docs, though. Do you have recommendations for good free or cheap alternatives to those? Also, we really need an OSS smartphone operating system that really works... Any suggestion on Android vs some alternative?

email: I am a happy user of https://posteo.de; it costs one euro per month

phone: I am waiting for https://neo900.org

The point I was trying to make isn't that the NSA doesn't have secret programs (like spying on American citizens), it's that these programs didn't come about through the scheming of a few people. Maybe it did, but I think it is more likely that the organization organically pushed the limits of what it thought it could get away with (and I think the article would agree).

If I was reading about rerouting/cloning installments and secret rooms in nodes and datacenters across the US on news sites and blogposts all the way back in 2007, then there is not a shred of doubt in my mind that dozens, potentially hundreds, of mid-level and top-level government employees were aware as well. Which means the top brass were completely informed.

I doubt that Obama specifically knew about what the NSA was doing, both for his own plausible deniability and so that the NSA could protect itself against political turmoil.

There are two mechanisms by which conspiracies were described to be impossible in the past. Hanlon's razor, and the impossibility of shared secrets.

Hanlon's razor has been going obsolete since the industrial revolution. The probability of you interacting with someone is correlated with their influence. Influence is correlated with net-worth, which is correlated with competence, and anti-correlated with benevolence. Furthermore, competence is not a conserved quantity. You can now hire people to extend your competence by paying them to write algorithms, copying a piece of their competence and giving it to you.

It turns out that it's neither as hard nor as necessary to keep shared secrets as it was originally thought. Encryption, Need to know protocols, and the extension of our competence and influence with computers and networking has reduced the number of people who are required to know the full secret to very nearly one, despite wide distribution of the contents.

And while inference is still possible on the secret fragments, it is very difficult to communicate that inference to other people in a way which they find believable. This is partly because of the non-uniqueness of inferences, which should be irrelevant, since this is how all science works. The other part is that people are largely not equipped to understand those inferences. That sounds like a polite way of calling them stupid, but it's really just that even, extremely detailed schemes with nigh unobservable effects can be distributed on a global scale, with extraordinary benefit to the perpetrator. It's computationally infeasible to have any proportion of the population be aware of society to this level of detail.

As a glimmer of hope, something that we are capable of, however, is determining the trustworthiness of people. We don't seem to elect leaders based on their trustworthiness anymore, but it would not require a fundamental shift in human competency or nature to move to that system. It would require a more complete understanding of what trust means, though.

You're confusing politics with operational excellence.

If NSA leadership sets out to do a thing and has the money it's a project execution problem. Nobody gets their own agenda. They're on the payroll.

I haven't done much policy work but if it's anything like non-profit work I'm sure it's infuriating. Nobody is on the payroll (except maybe a few oversubscribed staffers) and they can and will do whatever the hell they want, or nothing, that happens a lot too.

Or NRA - the ultimate single interest group

NSA is part of the bureaucracy, not the political machinery. Despite the common patter, well funded government agencies are incredibly powerful engines to deliver whatever services they are empowered to do. This is true at the state and local level as well.

Private organizations do all sorts of scheming, but they usually lean on the government to do heavy research, and like anything else, in most cases their conclusions are directly correlated to whatever the guy who writes the checks thinks.

I don't think that a counter-argument. If we rephrase it as: no entity thus far has a good grasp on the current state of the world at any given moment and furthermore, no one or group can really predict the effect of their actions on the world state, to speak of predicting the future more generally, it becomes clearer that neither the NSA nor think tanks are specially advantaged. The more correlated the world becomes (the more quickly information propagates) the harder this becomes to do.

What the spying and surveillance does is to allow Just In Time flagging at best, spying on a specific target, or as an investigative tool once an event has already occurred. But to use the information to predict what might occur (which is important for effective scheming) has not proven to be possible. Knowing which is signal amongst the noise is extremely difficult. If https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project is to be believed, access to classified information does not make one anymore capable than someone with an intuitive grasp of base rates, properly updates to new information and an Internet connection.

No. It is a counter argument.

When the US can destroy Uranium centrifuges in Iran [1] with a virus that got distributed through several 0 days in thumbdrives, that is extreme coordination that means the organization has extreme power. The type of power that, if it got into the wrong hands, could hack and undermine faith in the stock market (or banks).

When the NIST proposes an encryption algorithm, but it turns out there's reason to believe [2] that they designed an algorithm with a complicated mathematical backdoor, that is coordinated.

When Jason Bourne came out we thought it was a dystopian thriller. Turned out to be a playbook.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

Ten years ago was 2007 and plenty of people were aware of the NSA. There was a movie from the 90's with WILL SMITH that featured NSA overreach.

...fictionally.

Snowden's revelations made those fictions a reality.

Exactly. If you would have said that this fiction was reality, people would have laugh at you. Actually some people still do. And a lot of people don't care anyway. We are kind of screwed when the majority of the public won't even react in fact of a gigantic threat. It's really hard to believe we still have that much freedom given that such little care is given to it.

James Bamford's been writing non-fiction accounts for decades.

Which movie are you referring to?

Enemy of the state

Many people will have watched this movie, taken it as an action thriller set in a world that while hinted at wasn't expected to be real. It's quite an eye opener in hindsight that this is indeed real... Bourne Identity, another one that seems too far fetched to have any truth to it... given what's come to light in the last 5 years, truth and fantasy/fiction in this arena has become blurred enough to be scary.

> An obvious counter-argument to this: NSA. If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist.

The NSA has been well known for decades; while it was initially secret (its name and existence, not just its work), its existence has been public knowledge for a long time, and its massive, widespread, and frequenrlt-politically-abused surveillance was revealed in the Church Committee hearings in 1975, and was the key impetus behind the restrictions on domestic surveillance adopted at that time in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (restrictions that were weakened by amendments in the war on terror exactly and publicly so that the NSA could engage freely in widespread, massive surveillance to identify and track auspecred terrorists and their associates several steps removed.)

Anyone who was paying even a little bit of attention 10 years ago — or even forty years ago — was well aware of the NSA and it's widespread surveillance.

Now, if you said this about "10 years ago" in 1977 instead of 2017, you'd have a good point.

> Anyone who was paying even a little bit of attention 10 years ago — or even forty years ago — was well aware of the NSA and it's widespread surveillance.

It was even a joke in the Simpson's Movie (2007).

The knowledge was not widespread, but people in the field certainly had suspicions and started getting an idea in the late 1980s, at the very latest. The EU conducted an investigation in 2000 and certainly knew what was going on pretty well when the final report [1] was presented in mid 2001. Probably not in too much detail but they certainly had an idea of the [possible] scale.

[1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...

If you didn't live in the DelMarVa area, and stuck your head in a hole, maybe. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fortress Written in I think 1998.

Agree with DoD or not, to be unaware of NSA in the 2000's, that speaks more of ignorance.

http://www.aaroads.com/guide.php?page=s0032wamd

Page updated 2009. A road sign.

The Simpsons creators may have just be living in a bubble.

Philip K Dick warned us from the very beginning.

There was suspicion that they were doing that kind of thing. There wasn't proof.

Not true. Body of Secrets, published 2001: https://www.amazon.com/Body-Secrets-Ultra-Secret-National-Se...

Puzzle Palace, published 1982: https://www.amazon.com/Puzzle-Palace-National-Intelligence-O...

This guy made a career out of documenting the inner workings of the NSA and what they get up to. It wasn't common knowledge, but it's been known what they get up to, and proof thereof, for decades.

Room 641A was uncovered 11 years ago.

The movie "Enemy of the state" was released 19 years ago this year.

Also ECHELON was publicised already 10 years before that.

It's more accurate to say that 10 years ago you personally were not interested in these things, and thus were not aware.

I used to hang out with an ex-nsa contractor in a coffee shop around 2002. He would talk about all aspects of these activities in plain terms, because most of it was in the news already.

Nobody was listening then, that's all.

your friend must have been, ahem, lacking wisdom about the consequences of discussing classified programs

> If someone had said 10 years ago that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed at as a conspiracy theorist.

I present, for your consideration ([1], [2]) some of many articles written about the Echelon program, more than 10 years go. These two were by the BBC and The Guardian, hardly niche publications. They were published in 1999 and 2001. It has been widely known, for decades, that the NSA was conducting large scale surveillance on a global scale. There was even a hollywood movie about NSA surveillance in the 90's (http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/enemy-of-the-state-1998).

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/may/29/qanda.janeperr...

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/503224.stm

No need to imagine. They did, and they were.

That's painfully true. There have been, though, broad long-term plans that succeeded. Here are two classics:

* "Attack on American Free Enterprise System" (1971), by Lewis J. Powell.[1] This is the founding document of the modern conservative agenda. Powell later became a Supreme Court justice. He proposed heavily funded groups to push a conservative pro-big-business agenda, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce taking the lead. This was quite successful, especially noting how politically weak big business was at the time.

* "The Overhauling of Straight America" (1987), by Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill (pseud. of Hunter Madsen). This is the founding document of the modern gay agenda. This, too, was quite successful. It outlines a detailed program, and most of the goals listed were achieved.

[1] http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=... [2] http://library.gayhomeland.org/0018/EN/EN_Overhauling_Straig...

I'm halfway through [1] and it seems to capture the spirit of the times very well. I'm interested in a better understanding of US politics. Do you know any more classics in this genre?

The "Attack on American Free Enterprise System" paper was circulated to CEOs of large companies, many of whom replied. The replies are here.[1] The beginnings of fund-raising for right-wing news are in those letters. Fox News was still 20 years away, but the roots are here.

This is where CEOs of US companies started to become an organized national political force. Until then, they mostly saw each other as competitors. Small business owners were generally anti big business. Banks, railroads, and chain stores were powerful enough to crush small businesses, and they looked to government to keep from being run over. But this free enterprise coalition was able to pull together big and small businesses under the banner of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

[1] http://law2.wlu.edu/powellarchives/page.asp?pageid=1251

"The Overhauling of Straight America" seems to be eye-poppingly accurate on first read because one can easily trace back the past 10-20 years and identify events that fit much of what was written... However I think I'd label this one moreso prophetic than any sort of targeted plan.

By that I mean if you were to pick any behavior that is generally unacceptable to society and attempt to change the tide of public opinion, the game plan would come out looking very similar to this document, with simple substitutions for the behavior.

I say that because there is a direct Biblical reference in this article to spiritual warfare - the shield and sword of that accursed "secular humanism" - which is a dig at Paul's instructions to Christian believers on how to remain on-guard in their faith (Ephesians 6:10-17).

So the fact that the strategy in this article mimics what Christians would recognize as spiritual warfare is not really surprising... The article's "six things" are very similar to how Satan works to deceive (John 8:44) and move just about any sin from abhorrent to acceptable -- desensitizing, redefining truth, identity attacks, guilt/shaming, social pressure & ostracizing, etc.

So I've seen that playbook before, and it wasn't written in 1987.

To make something happen politically, both a plan and an organization are needed. This was the plan part. The organization was the Human Rights Campaign Fund, originally a political action committee (PAC).[1]

A plan without an organization behind it is just an essay. An organization without a plan just thrashes around. That's what happened to Occupy. They never had a coherent agenda.

[1] http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/HRC/

This is a false dichotomy: either everyone is "ceaselessly, ruthlessly, effectively scheming" or "all parties and groups are fractious and bumbling"

How about the truth is somewhere in between? Some people are scheming - and some schemes do come off successfully.

There has been nothing but scheming and counter-scheming since this U.S. election - the removal of General Flynn being, according to some commentators, just the latest example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j_ZfKmcnSk

The article doesn't say that no one is scheming, just that what starts as a plan devolves into a mess of reaction and counter reaction. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy and all that.

Schemes are occasionally successful, but that is because the schemer either got lucky and everyone reacted the way they wanted, or because the scheme was incredibly simple.

What the article is talking about is the mythical scheming that involves correctly predicting the behavior and reactions of the opposition through multiple iterations of attack and counter attack--the hypothetical chess master who can see 5 moves ahead.

The systems we are dealing with are generally just too complex for that.

> No battle plan survives contact with the enemy

I always (as a Vet) thought this was a misnomer - it's often best described as "no battle plan survives contact with reality" - reality being the new info you get that you didn't get or couldn't have gotten.

"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." -- Mike Tyson

It's also a great quote, but it's a different one. "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" is more like you get punched as much and in a way that you didn't expect, even if you planned to get punched. Tyson's saying "When you get punched the sensation is so unexpected that your brain stops working for some time". The 'counter' to the changing environment quote is to be flexible from the beginning. The 'counter' to Tyson's situation is to train so much, that your muscle memory will continue to work even if your brain doesn't.

> your muscle memory will continue to work even if your brain doesn't

Indeed, it is only when you encounter an actual combat situation that you understand why the karate elders insist on so many thousand mindless repetitions of basic movements back & forth: even though you have no time to think (and even if you did it would do no good because combat stress reduces your intellectual capacity by 80%), it instantly executes spontaneously and afterwards you find yourself thinking "wow - I did that ?". Brutal repetitive training that focuses on the basics: it works.

I feel like the there is something similar at play in long distance running. By repeating the same motion a lot, your nervous system probably works out the most efficient pathways to activate and can work without your conscious mind getting too involved.

This "chess master who can see 5 moves ahead" definition of scheming is fiction. Every software developer knows: The more complex the more fragile.

Great schemes are simple. It means looking for opportunities where you cannot lose. More generally, either you win or your opponent loses or both. You can try to influence things to produce such situations, but in general you need some luck and/or time. You can actively search for opportunities of disruption or work on some hard stuff for decades.

Thanks for the link. Props to Kucinich for not being a political opportunist like so many others and for pointing out the frightening context of the Flynn leak.

The frightening context that the White House belongs to Putin? I find that pretty frightening, personally.

Putin happens to be someone who is good at scheming. This is because he is largely unfettered by politics, and he sticks to fairly simple goals like "destabilize the enemy".

There appears to be a popular confluence of high-discount-rate political leaders nowadays. Wonder if MAD will eventually be outmoded by instant & retaliation-disabling schemes.

Bert the turtle was very alert..

The truth is somewhat in between. In war you have to make fewer screwups than your enemy, or if you can't then you need a good feedback system so you can recover more quickly.

I'm inclined to be very sympathetic to this article, even though I don't agree entirely. In an age when conspiracy theories about "global elites" are rampant, it helps to remind everyone that most human designs fail due to unforeseen complexity and unpredictability. When faced with people who actually believe in "master-plan" type conspiracy theories, I have to really wonder if they've ever actually tried to do anything hard.

That said, it's certainly possible to apply long-term planning and coordination in a very effective way. It's just that hindsight and selection-bias tends to make success stories look like the human agency involved was hyper-competent, while glossing over all kinds of factors like simple luck or even just gross incompetence on the part of those who were opposed to the goals of the planning.

And how exactly is the NSA a refutation of anything? They leveraged enormous government resources to pull off massive surveillance covertly for a while, but now we're talking about it publicly so I guess they weren't exactly so hyper-competent after all.

Seeing hyper-competent human agency and design behind everything is essentially just another example of the general human brain-defect called Apophenia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia).

This doesn't just apply to politics.

That was probably my earliest epiphany as a founder: nobody knows what the fuck they're doing. Nobody.

That VP of marketing at a fortune 100? No idea what he's doing. That young startup CEO who's successful while being 10 years your junior? No freaking idea at all.

Even in areas where you would assume process and numbers outweigh the human element (e.g. finances), I was surprised to see how the sausage is made (and how messy it is).

Once you've internalized that truth, the world is a lot less intimidating, especially as a founder.

Hanlon's Razor in action, as I see it.

So... My honest take away is: Can you disrupt Washington by coming up with a better coordination tool?

I mean - that's clearly not the bulk of the problem (unclear causal relationships between the actions you can take and the outcomes you want seems to the real problem), but it's specifically cited and seems doable...

...until I think about how well teams inside companies communicate.

Well, the context of working within a company is different. Especially if you rely on the money you're making.

It depends on the company but I would say the thing about Washington and this article makes this point well is that there are a significant number of people actively trying to prevent you from doing anything big because they disagree with your goal. In a company, that's less often the case, although I have seen it at larger places.

Part of the problem is probably that there is no money in it: Congressional offices don't have a big enough budget for the staff they need, much less any pieces of software/services.

I would happily work on something like this for free

Isn't software a tool for leverage? If staff is additive, then software is multiplicative. The right software would allow a staff of 10 to do the work of 30 or 100.

The lack of coordination tooling isn't the problem, the complex interlocking structure of conflicting interests is. The obvious fallout of a congressional communication tool is that it becomes a firehouse of what congress members strategically share to further their own goals.

Seems a slightly simplistic analysis.

We know there are people who scheme and plot to get what they want, and will stop at nothing to do so.

We also know that the real world is chaotic, that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

The most successful schemers are not those who can think ten moves ahead, because no-one can do that.

Instead they're the ones who can turn on a dime, who can rapidly re-scheme, and re-scheme again, always adapting to circumstances so quickly that the rest of us are left wondering wtf happened.

Reminds me of this ramble https://nickbradbury.com/2014/12/11/the-programmers-dream-a-... . I printed it out and hung it in my livingroom, keeps me sane.

Well one can argue that people "in charge" are not at all the people that hold the public offices so we have no clue whether or not they have a clue. If one wants a decent conspiracy theory one could start with the fact that Capital Group, Fidelity , BlackRock and Vanguard have 13 trillion under management majority of which is invested in US stock market so if they collude they would have majority of votes in a majority of US public companies.

But the point of both articles is that these groups are not even unified within themselves, much less can they collude effectively, or out-maneuver the various forces that would not want them to control everything. And even if they could - what then? Managing even one company is difficult, trying to coordinate several thousand is essentially impossible.

More pedantically, you're assuming those groups could take all of those assets from where the owners of those assets put them (including bonds, commodities, foreign investments, etc) and put them into the US stock market. Even if they did so they're barely above 50% of the US market cap (put at 25 trillion by World Bank).

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/CM.MKT.LCAP.CD?locations...

You are not counting effects of circular ownership citi owns 5% of Chase and Chase owns 5% of Citi and on and on you effectively don't need 50% to control the vote. Even if those 4 are off you can add next two or three with trillion +/- under management. So worst case you need 7 people to collude.

That is a superb quote.

Having studied the deep state for a long time now, I have come to a more nuanced conclusion:

Incompetence abounds, but is useful cover for the few malicious actors.

Often in discussion I have derided the use of Hanlons razor, for I think it a logically fallacious statement from the get-go, but I understand the spirit of it. The problem is that at a certain point, incompetence becomes indestinguishable from malice. At some level, attributing incompetence to everything because nobody knows what they are doing so it's just the complicated process of organic failure no longer suffices.

The irony is that I most often hear this defense from the realpolitik subscribers of the Kissinger type defending bad actions... the ones I highly suspect of being the primary malicious actors abusing the incompetence in the first place!

You want a perfect example of this? High level manipulation of events via the triple agents of the Cambridge 6. This is also why I theorize that the deep state is largely unkown the middle-high level managers, they simply corrupt from the top down.

For those curious about the deep state, I suggest starting with works of Peter Dale Scott.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Dale_Scott

The truth is that the difference between many companies is the perception, that they can create towards the external world, and 3rd parties: that they KNOW what they are doing.

Eventually, when you talk to your friends, you notice it's a mess at most workplaces. Management often is very shaky and clueless. People keeping up apperances etc. This is all more or less the same in alot of companies (though not all), however: the perception of it to the outside world, is what makes the difference.

I've been validating this theory many times throughout the years and it's very applicable and true.

How about nobody knows what they are doing, but people are making plans to screw other people anyways, and sometimes they work. And as always there will actually be people who do this for so long and really work on improvement that they will beat the others in most cases, even if sh*t hits the fan.

I've seen this written slightly differently:

"Never attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by stupidity."

I think it was Jessica Yellin on NPR's On Point who said something about Washington being way more like VEEP than House of Cards. Comforting somehow.

So The Thick of It is more accurate than House of Cards?

Well, I would agree that most people most of the time don't know what the heck they're doing...

...but some people DO know what they're doing, at least some of the time.

Applies to business too.

No reference to Adam Curtis yet?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER

discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6184984

This article was written with the intent to make its readers worse at recognizing patterns. Put bluntly, it was written to make you more stupid for the benefit of the authors or their principals.

It doesn't belong here. The persuasion is ham-handed and obvious, but clearly effective enough to get it on the front page here.

I agree with the premise but not the conclusion. Worked at/have seen a few start-ups close up; people don't know what they are doing-- I mean this in a "cliff jump build parachute" way not pejoratively.

With that in mind, you have a fragmented ecosystem and a lot to gain. I don't think people are organized or agreeable enough for an "illuminati"-esque conspiracy, but people and groups can scheme so well here w/ little oversite.

Article seemed to say that small specific task goals can get done but because some large groups can't execute a large scale goal there is no "scheming". I disagree.

Tldr; a strawman + an anecdote: Author posits fictional conspiracy movies are fictional, and the author has never personally witnessed a successful "scheme", so you have nothing to worry about.

History shows otherwise.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_conspiraci...

Think in terms of natural selection. Behaviors (and personalities) that make more successful choices in that environment will tend to survive in the environment, regardless of whether they know what they are doing.

Most of the bumbling fails. Some of the bumbling works. And so the most “effective” politicians (and organizations) will survive, even if their success has little to do with deliberate scheming.

That probably applies much more to underfunded grassroots activists then to large corporate lobbyists. The large corporate lobbyists have organized long term plans working from state houses to DC to accomplish multi year goals. Take a look at ALEC for example.

It's like the difference between some GPL open source project and Google's latest Android release.

This article reminds me of a book I read several years ago: None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen, written in the 1971

For anyone who wonders whether there are sinister things being done in concert by groups of individuals, I highly recommend reading that book.

I have a theory: human civilization is at about the peak of what can be achieved, with people in charge. We're just too error-prone and selfish and shortsighted to ever form a larger functioning society.

So, replace people in charge with non-humans ? On the bright side the political spectrum can be perfectly defined to the average of the voters. (People would vote on ethical, moral, socialism-liberals problems basically.) But the code is not going to be easy, or easily accepted ;)

There are some theories, such as those laid out by Francis Fukuyama in the Origins of Political Order, which postulate that homo sapiens are optimized to form functioning societies of about 120 units. However, certain features have evolved in our species, such as the ability to speak AND write, and form mythologies and stories, which allows our ability to form political societies to exponentially increase. Who's to say we won't keep evolving to find ways to cooperate in ways that were impossible before?

Because, look at the newspaper (or blog or whatever). Its coming apart at the seams.

The biggest thing is that people are scheming "behind the scenes".

People are scheming in politics, in business, in family, with friends.

We all agree on this?

Why we are living in such a Machevellian society? Are there any alternatives?

Hell, all you need to know that is to read Frank Rich's bio and then watch Veep. You'll learn just as much, and laugh a lot more while you do it.

I agree with the title. The few places I have worked where things were not horrible, were places where one guy had a masterplan for it all.

I upvoted this before I read the article, simply because I agree with the headline. I wonder how many others here did the same?

Since the rise of Trump, first political comments stopped being flagged. Now HN is entertaining daily threads on politics.

If you think a submission is inappropriate for HN, please flag and move on.

What's with the hostility? I'm pointing out something factual that some users (especially new users) may not be aware of.

There's no hostility. There are plenty of comments from mods, including the discussion on Political Detox Week, that discuss politics on HN, which are actually helpful rather than just observations.

Here's one such comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433

What? Well I'm sorry my comment was not helpful to you. In the future should we judge everyone's comments with respect to someone in a position to offer better information?

For example, here is a comment by you:

>Disclaimer: I don't have a comp sci degree.

>I've found having an understanding of the underlying theories supporting the tools (that includes languages and libraries) I use makes me use them better, understand their strengths, weaknesses, and how to improve them. It also helps me look at problems from various perspectives and see how other solutions may fit, including those that don't already have a tutorial or library.

>I suspect that if you're an effective programmer, you're doing more than copying and pasting and growing in experience, and you're actually absorbing and apply more computer science than you realize.

You also post observations without being an authority. That is fine. You need to relax with the, yes, hostility.

I'm sorry you're reading so much hostility and negativity into my replies. It's very much not intended.

J. Edgar Hoover.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com