Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

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Banality of Evil? Come on. Equating SIGINT programs to protect America's interest with the Nazi party is really shrill. I'm no NSA defender, but I believe nations have the right to SIGINT programs to protect their interests. The real question is what implementations and limitations are acceptable.

>These documents are interchangeable with some plumbing and heating supply chain company

Efficiency is universal. Powerpoint-like presentations work in the corporate structure. Memos, emails, etc are used for a reason. Look at Al Qaeda's job application form, its bizarrely corporate. Or how Osama Bin Laden's bookshelf is straight out of a HN reading list. Or how drug dealers hire Ivy League finance guys to run operations that, if you didn't know the product, would assume it was some boring commodity widget being sold.

There's no James Bond-ish school of super technology or unique processes. Whatever management fads are popular in the business world work their way into government, and that includes intelligence, military, space programs, etc. I'm always a little surprised at how cheap looking every NASA press conference is and how many technical issues they always seem to have (mic issues, streaming issues, etc). If there's really a balality of evil, I'd say that's just a subset of the banality of all bureaucracies.

If anything, unique organizations that are successful tend to be extremely rare. Startup culture and other 'progressive organizations' just end up being 'office lite' until they go mainstream/IPO/whatever then they fully embrace becoming a regular office. The only non-trivial organization I can think that is successful and has a unique structure is probably Valve, with its fascinating flat management style.

edit: downvotes for suggesting that maybe the NSA shouldn't be compared to the party that gassed 6 million people solely for their ethnicity? Grow up, HN.

> Banality of Evil? Come on. Equating SIGINT programs to protect America's interest with the Nazi party is really shrill.

Comparisons based on common themes are not the same as holding that the things being compared are equal. The source material for the quote is a general comment upon evil, drawn from a reflection upon Eichmann. It is not a specific comment upon the Nazis, but that normal people doing things that seem perfectly normal (indeed right) to them can perpetuate terrible crimes. The observation goes something like this:

"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and our moral standards of judgement, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied… This new type of criminal… Commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong" (s.276)

"It was as though in those last minutes [of Eichmann's life] he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil." (s.252)

- Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the Banality of Evil. Hannah Arendt.

Yes, in fact that is precisely what I meant.

Remember when the idea of having your communications sifted through by the government you elected was restricted to the actions of the Stasi or KGB in the minds of Americans?

> Equating SIGINT programs to protect America's interest with the Nazi party is really shrill.

Totally agree. Please stop me if I ever do that. Those other kind of SIGINT programs, the ones that attempt to collect every single email and phone call and GPS location and internet search in my life and store it indefinitely, are a little more of a direct comparison though, don't you think?

> Efficiency is universal.

Efficiency is actually fairly hard to come by I think. It's terribly designed presentations with bad clip art, illegible diagrams, and meaningless and redundant process slides that seem to be universal as far as I can tell.

I don't think powerpoint is bad as much as meetings and presentations, in general are bad. Powerpoint is just a tool for that social convention. The real question is why do we continue to have low information events like meetings and presetnations? I think the answer is something the typical INTJ male wouldn't like: because its how organizations work on a social and political level. The guy running the meeting, if he does a good job, can impress brass, raise his prestige, etc. Its not a productive event in itself, though it may lead to productivity and efficiency if the ideas are sound. Usually though, they are social events to benefit the careers of certain stakeholders.

The powerpoint bashing seems silly to me. You guys should be bashing meetings. There's a real forest for the trees aspect here. Amazon bans it, and instead they have everyone read a 6 page memo. Both are terrible if you ask me. 90% of meetings and presentations shouldn't exist. Stop-gap measures to "fix" useless meetings will just re-invent the next Powerpoint.

tldr; the culture of meetings is broken, not the tools

I have been to plenty of productive meetings and plenty of meetings with PowerPoint; however, none of the productive meetings used PowerPoint. So, saying it's directly unproductive seems reasonable.

PS: I would suggest flat out banning it from your meetings. If you want to get your point across send a document with your presentation in it, and then open up the meeting for question and answers about that document. Another huge win is to ban 1 hour meetings 30 minutes or the whole day is fine, but 1 hour blocks tend to become a wasteful default.

>Banality of Evil? Come on. Equating SIGINT programs to protect America's interest with the Nazi party is really shrill.

"America's interests" (an insignificant 4% of the global population) are not the same as the world's interests, and in many cases are directly opposed to them. They also historically involve tons of bloodshed and lots of support for dictatorships and friendly lackeys in power worldwide.

>downvotes for suggesting that maybe the NSA shouldn't be compared to the party that gassed 6 million people solely for their ethnicity?

No, but US did spray poisonous gas to several million people for other reasons, like "strategic interests" -- and that's 10.000 miles away from their soil. As to what they did on their own soil, this includes the Native American's genocide and concentration camps (which Hitler admired), and the black slavery.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange

For the millions victims of such interventions, including the 200.000 men, women and children vaporized in Nagashaki and Hiroshima, it makes little difference if "Nazis" did it or not. It is, however, a nice scheme, to hold up a picture of "pure evil" to make everything else OK by comparison.

> downvotes for suggesting that maybe the NSA shouldn't be compared to the party that gassed 6 million people solely for their ethnicity?

The parent never mentioned Nazis. "Banality of Evil" does not equal Nazis, even if that was the context where you first heard the term.

It is the context for which the term was invented by Hannah Arendt.

Agreed. But the term is often used more generally. It is not equivalent to the Nazis. And I don't believe the parent intended it as such.

>edit: downvotes for suggesting that maybe the NSA shouldn't be compared to the party that gassed 6 million people solely for their ethnicity? Grow up, HN.

I really liked your comment, but I downvoted you, let me explain why. I did so because your first sentience is likely to derail the conversation rather than further it. Yes, the phase Banality of Evil comes from a book on the Holocaust, but CPLX was using it in a more general sense. You seem to agree with this usage when you say:

>If there's really a banality of evil, I'd say that's just a subset of the banality of all bureaucracies.

This is what I understand the banality of evil to mean.

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