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by JabavuAdams 5345 days ago
So at the risk of pedantry ...

I was making a claim about large organizations that depend on loyalty, not even specifically military organizations.

So, the specific difference between military organizations and cultures are neatly excluded.

The pattern (of which I gave a specific example) is:

Person X in large org Y claims something is true for ALL members of org Y, based on X's personal experience.

I submit that humans being what they are and organizations being what they are, it's more likely that there are bad behaviours that are tolerated in sub-organizations of Y even if they violate the officially stated rules.

TL;DR Without perfect knowledge it's better to assume that something somewhere is going wrong than to assume that nothing anywhere is going wrong.

A lot of science, engineering and process control basically boils down to this. Why do we forget it when dealing with human systems?

1 comments

Behavior/discipline will necessarily be noisier in a conscripted organization than in a self-selected volunteer organization. I don't think you can generalize that away.