[hyperpallium2]

Politicians, on politicized issues, come across as children. But I was amazed to discover, in a document discussion non-politicized legislation, they were well-informed and sensible, and, as you say, supported by extremely capable members of a bureaucracy. Each conclusion was tempered by how confidence levels in its supporting material. In other words, it was just what you'd want it to be. Also, clearly written and a pleasure to read.

They are only idiots on stage. Which says something about our democracy.

OTOH mathematically speaking, if you don't perfectly know what you are doing... you you don't know what you're doing.

[smitty1e]

> They are only idiots on stage. Which says something about our democracy.

1. Savvy across the organization adds like resistance in a parallel circuit: the org as a whole is slightly less savvy than the biggest doof therein.

2. Restated: people scale poorly.

3. In the government case, minimizining flailing and tyranny equates to minimizing the size of government.

4. We seem to trend the opposite direction from (3).

[audunw]

> 3. In the government case, minimizining flailing and tyranny equates to minimizing the size of government.

Whoa there. There are plenty of very small governments that have plenty of flailing and tyranny. In the limit, if government is just one guy, he clearly won't have clue about 99% of what he's doing, and will be extremely easy to corrupt since he has no-one else to hold him accountable.

If you want to have even a chance of having a competent government you need at least three fully independent branches of government with their own internal systems of accountability.

I could just as easily argue that you need to maximize the size of the government.

The problem is you hit issues both at the small and the large end. It's like goldilocks. You shouldn't minimize or maximize. You should aim at just the right size for the country/region you're trying to govern.

What's WAY, WAY more important is HOW you govern.

What's really scary these days is how many people think we'll solve all our problems if we just make government smaller and smaller. I guess so much time has passed since the various parts of our government was set up that we've kind of forgotten why the government is the way it is.

Not that we shouldn't have a process that trims down parts of government that has become redundant. But we should have a deep understanding of the problem that part of the government is solving before doing so.

[rayiner]

> What's really scary these days is how many people think we'll solve all our problems if we just make government smaller and smaller.

And what’s really really scary is how many people, at least in the US, worry about government being too small when in reality it has been almost monotonically growing since the 1960s. Non defense federal spending as a share of GDP is bigger than the 1960s. And state and local government spending has grown twice as fast as GDP since 1960.

I think people confuse Reagan’s rhetoric with the reality that Democrats controlled the House, and thus spending bills, his entire presidency. The Reagan era was a period of government retrenchment in the same sense as Biden is the second coming of FDR.

[10000truths]

As with other things, quality matters more than quantity. A village elder or city mayor are just as fallible as a parliament, or a king and his council. The mechanism of corruption may vary with historical circumstance, culture, and/or technology. But at the end of the day, if the "people in charge" are unaccountable and have no desire to exercise their power for the common good, there is no system of checks and balances that will save such a government from collapse.

[smitty1e]

> What's really scary these days is how many people think we'll solve all our problems if we just make government smaller and smaller.

You said "solve". I said "minimize". Details matter, boss.

[jacquesm]

> the org as a whole is slightly less savvy than the biggest doof therein.

I've seen about 220 'orgs' from the outside in, interviewed a few thousand people in those orgs and have done the write up on the state of affairs. I've yet to find a single example that would support this claim, where did you get this from?

[smitty1e]

Personal observation of Congress.

[adrianN]

>Savvy across the organization adds like resistance in a parallel circuit: the org as a whole is slightly less savvy than the biggest doof therein

That seems like a very bold premise to me.