Designing structures and systems is hard. Designing structures and systems that will act upon people, and will channel their behavior into a form consonant with your goals, is very hard.
People are different. Different people will interact with your system in ways different enough that it would be impossible for your design to handle them all.
People have goals of their own. They will exert optimization pressure upon your system, to make their desired results come about; some of these results will be at odds with what you want; and you cannot foresee everything that anyone might do to, with, or in your system, to ensure that people’s behavior has only those results you want.
Make your structures rigid enough to minimize the odds of undesired outcomes, and that same rigidity will constrain you as well. You cannot build your system out of manacles and chains, if you wish anything of any consequence to come of it.
Make your structures flexible, and you make them corruptible.
There is no structure so perfect that none may be found who are so stupid or so evil as to wreck it.
Here you may do well to remember that the real rules have no exceptions. But what are “the real rules” but your (and your system’s) values?
How will you ensure that those remain “the real rules”, except by never giving power within your system to anyone who isn’t aligned with your system’s values?
Now you once again face a selection task.
More problems: designing structures being hard, will you do it on your own? Or will you work with others? How will you be sure that they are suitable? If only the ideal people could be found for the task… and now you’re back to the beginning.
The regress is not infinite, surely, but any systems we have, from which to start the process—the recursive base case—already exist. They are not perfect structures, surely! So, at some point, you must rely on other methods than only structural ones.
Problems with structural methods:
Designing structures and systems is hard. Designing structures and systems that will act upon people, and will channel their behavior into a form consonant with your goals, is very hard.
People are different. Different people will interact with your system in ways different enough that it would be impossible for your design to handle them all.
People have goals of their own. They will exert optimization pressure upon your system, to make their desired results come about; some of these results will be at odds with what you want; and you cannot foresee everything that anyone might do to, with, or in your system, to ensure that people’s behavior has only those results you want.
Make your structures rigid enough to minimize the odds of undesired outcomes, and that same rigidity will constrain you as well. You cannot build your system out of manacles and chains, if you wish anything of any consequence to come of it.
Make your structures flexible, and you make them corruptible.
There is no structure so perfect that none may be found who are so stupid or so evil as to wreck it.
Here you may do well to remember that the real rules have no exceptions. But what are “the real rules” but your (and your system’s) values?
How will you ensure that those remain “the real rules”, except by never giving power within your system to anyone who isn’t aligned with your system’s values?
Now you once again face a selection task.
More problems: designing structures being hard, will you do it on your own? Or will you work with others? How will you be sure that they are suitable? If only the ideal people could be found for the task… and now you’re back to the beginning.
The regress is not infinite, surely, but any systems we have, from which to start the process—the recursive base case—already exist. They are not perfect structures, surely! So, at some point, you must rely on other methods than only structural ones.