Unblinding Our Admin Futures

Nietzche said it best:

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.

Or maybe (I think Sidgwick):

The English system is "No system", Which is also a system, only better.

Robin Hanson has perhaps not read much of Max Weber or Franz Kafka to understand why, in science fiction, bureaucracy is seen as something a successful technological society has overcome.

The article starts with a value neutral account of "futurists" (whatever that may be) engaged in harmless prediction. Without skipping a beat he then proposes a value active role in maximising a set of qualities not all of which are desirable or mutually compatible.

This is why I don't like "futurists" of this persuasion. They have agendas. They sell these agendas based on flimsy and philosophically unsound extrapolation dressed up as "inevitability". "the arc of history" or "determinism".

I'm not buying it. Human intelleigence is the art of outsmarting "futurists" (Like Malthus and Fukuyama) who would have us believe "history is at an end and all we must do is keep dranking the handle on the machine". If anything proves that history is not finished, or that the future is not merely tracing a line on a graph, I would say that wars and pandemics might be clues.

Systemetisation and bureaucracy are not engines of wealth creation. Far from it, they are unfortunate side effects of industry that most wise industrialists and engineers attempt to eliminate. On the contrary, complexity is now a significant threat to a gamut of other desirable human values, like stability, security, freedom, and innovation.

And yet the author seems to celebrate bureaucracy. I cannot fathom this.

The only evidence that bureaucracy is increasing that is given is … a Twitter poll?

Then, that is taken as some sort of universal law and applied to … “public discussions”? It’s really easy to measure actual bureaucracy in that field: it is none, and has always been none.

The idea that people often say it “wasn’t the content of what you said but the way you said it” just doesn’t ring true to me. But in any case, it’s a stretch to define cultural attitudes about language as “bureaucracy”. And still, if one insists on ignoring all these falsehoods, it’s entirely obvious that those unwritten rules have become far more liberal over time. My Grandparents weren’t allowed to utter a single sentence during dinner when they were children. My parents still had to stand up anytime they wanted to say something. Societies used to be stratified into distinct classes and there were specific rules on how to address members of each class, although for the category of arguing about ideas these rules sort-of collapsed for all but a tiny minority to: don’t even think about it.

You want to only talk about online speech? It didn’t exist only a few decades ago, which one might consider “the ultimate bureaucracy”. The cultural bandwidth allocated to online discussions today was occupied by the “mainstream media”, primarily newspapers. The unwritten rule you had to follow to regularly publish in a paper started with “be a man, preferably white”. That, however, didn’t get you anywhere near the power of a mid-sized Twitter account. You had to devote your life exclusively to the profession of journalism and be willing to spend years on post-secondary education before you had a chance to be hired.

Some of the most famous science fiction stories in the world tell administrative stories.

The Dune series chronicles the interlocking machinations of various administrative bodies: governments, religious orders, tribal leadership, activists, company representatives, trade ministers, etc. While they had to make the movie look like action to sell tickets, the books consist primarily of people in meetings talking to each other.

Foundation by Asimov is another one. The book famously features a galactic bureaucracy so large and complex that its offices have taken over an entire planet. And of course it topples under its own weight, giving rise to the titular Foundation. But again, like Dune, many (most?) of the pages are taken up by meetings.

Maybe I come into this with some bias because I don't have the highest opinion of "futurists" but I find it really difficult to engage with this article. Firstly, it's a fairly contentious to claim that bureaucracy was the cause of the industrial revolution rather than simply something that came along as the result of massive increases in productivity. I think it's also really just weird to claim that bureaucracy has increased in the last 10 years. Let's throw away the twitter poll firstly because sampling, secondly let's acknowledge that people's perception in the change in levels of bureaucracy is probably unreliable, and thirdly 10 years isn't a long term trend. If the author wants to see some takes on bureaucracy in the future I'd recommend Gilliam's Brazil for example.

There's lots of interesting ways to take this topic that the author just doesn't address. What if bureaucracy is the result of scale, and scale is the result of population, and the world's population is going to peak pretty soon? Does bureaucracy reverse with population decline? It would make intuitive sense I guess.

We're so suddenly becoming bureaucratic? Even the term is centuries-old French, suggesting it's not such a sudden phenomenon. And formal rules for concepts which didn't exist before are documented at least as far back as Hammurabi's Code.

The piece has a myopic view of the past.

And the obvious result of rules and scrutiny of conversations? That results in echo chambers.

The piece also has a myopic view of the future.

I think that the extension of rules further and further into areas of life that for most people will go unnoticed but for those that want to do something out of the box the limits will be there ever growing.

I don't know if that is an extension of burocracy as such because there may be more automated ways to handle the extra process.

> For example, a twitter poll just found respondents saying 10-1 that the org they know best has been getting more, as opposed to less, bureaucratic over the last decade.

If you believe that organizations tend to increase bureaucracy as they get larger, this is a hilarious poll to cite on “overcomingbias”. More people would be most familiar with a growing organization than are most familiar with a shrinking or shrunk organization. (More people polled would be most familiar with Google, Amazon, or Facebook/Meta than with Altavista, Borders, or MySpace.)

We already have formal models of what to say and advisors you can pay to teach you how to adhere to them - it's called media training.

The idea that bureaucracy caused the industrial revolution is just incorrect. Automation caused it and bureaucracy is just useful to manage the kind of scale problems (eg processes and logistics) that come along with automation.

I would hope that rather than more bureaucracy, we embraced more cybernetic control (building tighter & windier roads rather than putting up more speed limit signs) but I'm not holding my breath.

Weirdly enough, Robin Hanson is using the word "bureaucracy" here for something that would more properly be called institutions, or social mechanisms. The difference is that institutions and social mechanisms are explicitly amenable to optimization aiming at better outcomes whilst "bureaucracy" is really a generic feature of some social/institutional mechanisms, usually highly centralized and hierarchical ones.