[jshevek]

Taken literally, you are correct and you advocate good advice - to remember this and presumably weigh it among the pros and cons. However, your phrasing could be interpreted to have a subtext suggesting less bureaucracy is always better.

[whatshisface]

There's no way to criticize any bureaucracy without having a subtext that less bureaucracy is always better, if the mere implication that less bureaucracy would have prevented the problem is enough to conjure that subtext in the minds of the readers.

[ithkuil]

Why do we always measure burocracy as an "amount" (something of which there can be "less" or "more"). Surely there can be unnecessary, pointless, frustrating, harmful, nerve-wracking acts burocracy which can require more or less time to be performed. But isn't the real measure we should have one about quality of the outcome and balancing that against any effort endured by the populace?

[AnthonyMouse]

> Why do we always measure burocracy as an "amount" (something of which there can be "less" or "more").

Because large bureaucracies only ever get modified in the aggregate.

You have a bureaucracy that imposes 500,000 rules. If you want to know which are worth it, you have to evaluate each of the rules individually, because some may be worth it and others not.

Really evaluating 500,000 separate rules would take a large staff multiple lifetimes, so you still have to decide whether the bureaucracy as a whole is doing net good or net harm in order to determine whether it should be suspended for the years it will take to evaluate all the rules.

But by the time you finish the evaluation, years have passed since you started and the facts on the ground may have changed, or new rules proposed, so the evaluations are stale before they're completed and you have to start over.

It leaves you with only the systemic question of whether large bureaucracies are a net positive force as an institution. The answer could reasonably be no.

But notice that the answer is also related to the size. Because if the bureaucracy is smaller, you can finish the evaluation sooner, possibly soon enough that the evaluation results are still relevant by the time you finish. Having fewer rules allows you to have better rules, because the fewer you have the more time and other resources you have to make sure each is doing more good than harm.

[jshevek]

> There's no way to criticize any bureaucracy without having a subtext that less bureaucracy is always better, if the mere implication that less bureaucracy would have prevented the problem is enough to conjure that subtext in the minds of the readers.

I would agree it is impossible to prevent all potential misunderstanding when writing for a large audience, but various methods can make this kind of misunderstanding less likely:

- Emphasize qualifiers like "some", "most", "often", "sometimes", "not all", "many", etc.

- Anticipate and explicitly disclaim possible misinterpretations

- Acknowledge valid counter arguments

- Be very precise and explicit about our intended mentioning