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by trabant00
1245 days ago
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Cargo culting is unavoidable. We build everything "on the shoulder of giants". We do not have the infinite time and energy to analyse every problem from beginning to end and develop a perfectly fitting solution for it. For the most part we must copy behavior observed in successful entities. We also do not have the energy and effort to perfectly analyze the observed behavior so some data is lost in the copy. You end up with ceremonial solutions to problems that might not even exist in your case. Ceremonies mostly get discarded by evolutionary pressure in the long term. Some end up taking a lot of time and energy to perform for zero benefits so they reduce the evolutionary fitness of those who perform them. These ceremonies get gradually removed from the "gene pool", being replaced by behaviors that actually bring some benefit. But those will be imperfectly copied as well and the cycle begins again. |
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There may be huge variances in the degree that we do that, though, and to the degree that we're able to prevent really bad ideas to spread. Some organizations are seeing really bad (but good looking) ideas spread like cancers, until the organization is completely perverted.
> Ceremonies mostly get discarded by evolutionary pressure in the long term.
This is perhaps the main strength of capitalism. There needs to be an actual mechanism for bad ideas to die off. Many large organizations (especially "too large to fail" or publicly owned) lack good mechanisms to limit the growth of organizational entropy.