[ACCount37]

If only such a hypothetical could be implemented.

I don't think it's easy to design a firing process that would outperform random chance there. In any non-random process, office politicians would always be first in line with an excuse for why they specifically should not be fired. No matter what the criteria for not getting fired are - they'll do their damn best to make sure they meet them.

[mulmen]

Agreed. But while I agree political operators corrupt all objective processes I refuse to conclude that we should cause random destruction instead.

[ACCount37]

Why not? It's unclear if a better option even exists.

I do think there's a threshold of organizational dysfunction that justifies unleashing "random destruction" upon it. Or even "total destruction" - and building it all anew.

Perhaps the tree of efficiency needs to be watered with the blood of career bureaucrats.

[mulmen]

I refuse the conclusion because the alternative is hopeless.

Random destruction might be the best kind of destruction but that doesn’t mean destruction leads to efficiency. If politicians are inevitable why would what comes next be any less susceptible to political manipulation than what we already built?

What’s step two in the revolutionary underpants gnome playbook?

1) Burn it all down

2) ???

3) profit?

> Perhaps the tree of efficiency needs to be watered with the blood of career bureaucrats.

I assume this is a bad joke because otherwise it’s extremely dangerous and ignorant. In the current climate it translates to an actual call to violence.

Jefferson’s quote is about the necessity of violent revolution which ultimately led to the systems we have today. He had a specific grievance. He desired self-determination. He won. We have it. Why are you so eager to repeat the sacrifice and hard work of our ancestors to get back to where we already are? What benefit do you see in doing so?

Career bureaucrats aren’t politicians. Those are different things. I have had many positive experiences with “career bureaucrats”. They really only exist to help. It’s why we call them public servants.

It is a lot easier to call my public utility provider and solve a problem than it is to call Facebook, Disney, or Alaska Airlines. I have had nothing but positive experiences with the IRS.

It’s easy to break things. Children can do it. What’s your plan for building and operating something if you can’t even operate what we already have?

[ACCount37]

Destruction is a big part of why capitalism works. If a company becomes obsolete or grows too inefficient, it dies, and its dysfunction dies with it. The destruction isn't the goal there - it's the price. The price you pay for maintaining efficiency.

Government agencies rarely face anything like this. TSA exists without facing a risk of being destroyed for being worthless. There is a mechanism missing.

The "step two" is to rebuild it from the grounds up. If there is any need in rebuilding it at all. Never rehire any of the old people. It's how a lot of the post-Soviet countries ended up fixing their dysfunctional government institutions.

They had to thoroughly destroy what was there and build it anew to as much as make them sort of work. There are reasons to believe that the dysfunction would have survived lesser measures - and in some countries that shied away from destruction, it did.

[mulmen]

Capitalism is an economic system. It’s not a system of government. The government exists to solve the problems the economic system can’t. I think it’s dangerous to apply corporate management practices to the system that literally governs such systems.

How do you know what can be rebuilt better? If you can identify these systems why can’t you modify them? If destruction is constructive don’t you have to concede that whatever you build next also deserves destruction? And if so why build it at all?

If you can’t articulate specific failures and propose solutions now then why would you be able to post-destruction?

What properties make a post-Soviet system worthy of keeping? Why shouldn’t those systems also be constructively destroyed? Why should we apply constructive destruction to non-Soviet systems?

If your entire plan is to break things how do you ever build? What philosophy guides your rebuilding process?

[ACCount37]

The point is to remove the most egregious of failures, and let literally anything else take their place.

Sometimes things fail so badly that a randomly initialized system outperforms them. Sometimes things fail so badly that no system at all outperforms them. The point is: recognize that and apply destruction.