[cjbgkagh]

What you are describing as performative I would describe as bureaucratic.

The Iron Law or Bureaucracy:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. (Quoted from Wikipedia)

[ryandvm]

Yeah, pretty much all systems of governance ultimately evolve until their primary purpose is actually ensuring the survival of the system of governance and anything else it accomplishes is kind of a side effect. It's probably some sort of informational axiom of rules systems in general whether bureaucratic or biological or whatever.

Hell, DNA is just rules about what you can build and it's primary purpose is just making sure the rules survive. All the wonderful complexity and diversity of life is a side effect of the little changes necessary to propagate the rules.

[order-matters]

Assigning single purpose to things is not necessary. "Systems are what they do" is a quote for a reason.

I think in addition to rules survival and admin self-concern, people genuinely underestimate how much maintenance and effort go into accomplishing goals in an organized, communicable, trustable way. It is also why AI is not as successful as people thought it was going to be at taking over jobs.

If you think the only value add to a business is the business output, you are taking admin work for granted.

[danudey]

The quote that I heard was "the purpose of a system is what it does", which was to a degree kind of revelatory.

The example I heard was McDonald's ice cream machines. What is the purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine? To make ice cream? No, they break down all the time, they're actually pretty bad at making ice cream.

The purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine is to create billable service calls and ensure support contracts. The company making these machines isn't making bad machines because they're incapable of making good ones, they're making bad machines because bad machines are more profitable in the long term.

[hyperhello]

It doesn’t hold to reason that McDonalds would publicly and continuously put up with that from a supplier. Much more likely that they have control over the machines and use them for impromptu advertising, to keep calorie per dollar lower, and to starve out local ice cream shops as needed.

[jurgenburgen]

> It doesn’t hold to reason that McDonalds would publicly and continuously put up with that from a supplier.

I thought McDonalds is the supplier and the franchisee is the one paying. Either way, that money is transfer-billed out of the country.

[order-matters]

>"the purpose of a system is what it does"

thank you, i believe this is closer to, if not exactly, the original wording.

>The purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine is to create billable service calls and ensure support contracts

this is spin, but does have truth. i think people dramatize the quote too much towards conspiracy or alternative intent.

I think the best way to interpret the quote is to remove intent and purpose from the system entirely and keep it somewhere above the system. i think it is really meant to undermine any purpose you think a system intrinsically has. it is a collection of tools and processes that have inputs and outputs.

Responsibility for how a system is used and what it accomplishes stays with the people using it. When you know what the consequences of using a system are going to be and you use it anyway, then those consequences are what the purpose of your action is, regardless of what it might seem like the system was initially designed to do.

[mattjoyce]

Therefore the purpose of a system is to support incentives.

[order-matters]

in a way, for sure - but the incentive exists outside the system so the system would not know what incentives people have for using it. but it usually has rules, input/outputs, delegated authorities for limited scopes, etc. so the system is just the result of those things which may be a greater or lesser scope than any given incentive. Systems are usually used to manage many different incentives as well, so perfect alignment with all of them is often impossible

For example, we might say the US postal systems intended purpose is to deliver mail legal packages. the unabomber had an incentive to use that system to deliver bombs through the mail and it worked. So it was more true to say the purpose of the us postal system (at that time) was to move any items at all from one location to another, at least with respect to the incentive of wanting stuff moved around.

but having a mailman potentially go to every home every day is also something the system does. exciting dogs is something the system does. Just like how blocking the street is something that the garbage collection system does in its current state, which might have an impact on the hours of the day chosen to send hte trucks to collect. There may not be an incentive for everything the system does, and when framed around purpose you might call them side effects, but it's all the same to the system.

when a person is operating as part of the system and something goes wrong, we try to shift blame to them - and it becomes a grey area. this is often why individuals are not held accountable for their actions on behalf of a system when they hurt someone. if you call the police on your neighbor falsely claiming he is violent, the police show up and are too aggressive, and your neighbor get injured - there is mixed responsibility. Using force is within the scope of the police system, you subjected your neighbor to that system knowing that, and the officers have discretion oso depending on the details may or may not have been acting as reasonable representatives of the police system. Taken to an extreme though, SWAT-ing your neighbor is now seen as a serious crime on your part, as we understand teh system that supports a SWAT team showing up to a location to include damages and a low bar for lethal force. we cant say the purpose of the 'SWAT system' is to attend to threats, its not. it is to act on behalf of information claiming a threat exists, because thats what it does.

okay im yapping again, my bad

[quotemstr]

And that's why command economies fail. They fail in the same way that firms do, except that because the whole economy is one giant firm, you can't get the you need to remove entrenched bureaucrats until the situation gets so bad that you have a revolution or lose a war.

[scottyah]

Ray Dalio has been preaching this for awhile now. Mad respect for him spending an non-insignificant amount of time and money to educate the masses (and all the pushback that comes from it).

[Npovview]

I read this a decade back. Lot of good ideas. Explains lot of different fields and how they operate. I recommend people to read it or use AI to get the gist.

https://dn710707.ca.archive.org/0/items/BridgewaterRayDalioP...

[whattheheckheck]

What does he say

[psychoslave]

How is failure/success discriminated here and which concrete command economies are assessed?

[TheOtherHobbes]

The whole economy is always one giant firm.

[cjbgkagh]

In a way the bureaucracy takes on a life of its own. I think it’s only external pressures that’ll keep the bureaucracy in check, as in if the organization is at risk of dying the interests are aligned so that a more symbiotic relationship is necessary. When organizations are not at risk, either through massive initial success or state intervention (ZIRP) then feedback loop is cut and the bureaucracy will run rampant.

[sethjgore]

Makes me think of this timeless and excellent quote by Oscar Wilde:

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

[BurningFrog]

Great sounding quotes of unclear origin are usually attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill, or a few others.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Misquotations

[antonvs]

*Commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde. There doesn't appear to be any definitive source for it.

The quote actually reads like a summary of Parkinson's Law, that bureaucracies inherently tend to grow because officials create work for each other another and seek to increase their numbers. But the exact quote doesn't appear in Parkinson's original essay. Quote from that essay:

"Factor 1: An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and

Factor 2: Officials make work for each other."

-- https://archive.org/details/parkinsons-law-the-economist

[glitchc]

I suggest reading the book if you can get your hands on a copy. It's a short and highly entertaining read:

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/parkinsons-law_c-northcote-par...

[bell-cot]

Unfortunately, real-world bureaucratic orgs of any meaningful size or age always include a third type of person - dedicated neither to the org's goals, nor to the org itself.

In general, one should speak more circumspectly about that third type.

[pavel_lishin]

> There was a point of equilibrium in any organization’s middle management, a fulcrum of responsibility that remained still while the upper and lower ranks of the bureaucracy moved around it. Tyren knew from experience that a shrewd official could find this pivot-point within the org chart and, once entrenched, enjoy near-complete autonomy with almost no responsibility.

From "Son of a Liche", by J. Zachary Pike.

[Obscurity4340]

Do you think this pivot-middle idea is generalizable to other domains?

What is the logic or context that allows them such latitude and autonomy or to even conceptually exist at all? Are they specialized in such a way that they are qualified and expected to focus on higher-quality problems or difficult to hire for or they maybe dont have to deal directly with people in some sense

How does one become sufficiently shrewd to capitalize or orient oneself towards that Golidlocks zone?

[jamesfinlayson]

I saw someone like this just get made redundant - they talked a good game and did enough to cement themselves in the organisation, then ended up reporting into a manager who was already over capacity so didn't have the bandwidth to chase up a guy who wasn't causing him any trouble.

[Npovview]

It was a good run then. Now that guy will run in another organization.

[pavel_lishin]

To be clear, the book makes it very clear that Tyren was a bad person, and a bad manager, and that what he is doing is not something people should aspire to.

As far as logic and context? Every system has a place for... maybe "parasite" isn't a particularly good term, but there are places where one could get lost in the basement - hopefully with their favorite stapler.

[saulpw]

In cybernetics, the first kind of people are devoted to System 1, and the others are devoted to Systems 2-5. Any functioning organization has all 5 systems.

Imagine a school with only teachers and no administration. Who hires the teachers, who collects tuition, who schedules classes? Even if the teachers could do those things, now the teachers have to do the administration, which takes away from teaching--and the teachers quickly find (like any new business owner) that most of their time is spent on 'overhead' and very little on teaching itself.

The Iron Law is generally viewed as undesirable, because the 'doers' don't want the 'managers' to control the organization--this is how everything becomes enshittified. At best you have benevolent managers who are extremely sympathetic to the doers and act accordingly, but this is generally short-lived and depends on the organization hiring those benevolent managers. So the big question is, how can we ensure that the values of the organization (System 5) remain aligned with the values of the doers?

[drfloyd51]

The doers can fire the system 5 people.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

The doers can't remove the bureaucracy-focused people, because doing so would run counter to Pournelle's Iron Law; it's like crossing the streams. Let's instead replace bureaucrats with AI, since the same pressures that drive bureaucracies toward self-preservation might instead push AI systems toward AGI .

[drfloyd51]

The law doesn’t define behavior. It describes behaviors.

Those behaviors can change by giving the doers more power. If a bureaucrat is trouble, and the doers can cause the bureaucrat to be fired, to doers will have more power.