Given that no revolution ever produced the system that the people who threw the revolution planned to introduce I don’t think that it’s an easy case to argue that you need to have a specific plan.
no revolution ever produced the system that the people who threw the revolution planned to introduce
This is trivially true if you mean that no revolution produced the desired result up to the end of time. But then, the same is true of anything any human being does.
If you interpret it in a narrow, nontrivial way such as “no revolution produced a result that was close to the desired result and took at least as long enough to become unrecognizeable as the existing order would have taken to become unrecognizeable”, then there are several candidates, including the American Revolution and several post-Soviet states (if you count leaving the USSR as a revolution).
I’m not saying “result” but system. The US constitution got written after the US got independent and not before.
several post-Soviet states (if you count leaving the USSR as a revolution)
Some countries of the USSR did copy the Western style of democracy and free markets. They could do that by letting other countries send people to tell them how to run their country. They didn’t do that because they themselves knew how to create a democratic state with free markets.
This is trivially true if you mean that no revolution produced the desired result up to the end of time. But then, the same is true of anything any human being does.
If my project is to lock my apartment with my key, then I can be quite certain that the result with look roughly like I plan beforehand. The bigger the project the harder it is to plan everything beforehand.
As a result big software projects get these days not fully planned in advance via waterfall but get created in an agile way. Creating a substantial new political system as opposed to just copy some existing one, is much more complex than a software project and therefore even less doable via waterfall.
Perhaps a more precise point is that the first American government failed. John Hanson and the other 9 Presidents of the United States under the articles of confederation were operating the true government they threw the revolution for. It failed almost immediately—you would be astonished at how hard it was to convince someone to run the country, hence the extremely high turnover on Presidents.
I, and many other people here on Less Wrong, live in a massive, surprisingly enduring Plan B of a government.
[It’s worth pointing out I like this one better, because we can find appropriately qualified staff, which is, ya know, pretty good. But alas, I was not a father of the American Revolution.]
The US constitution got written after the US got independent and not before.
They wanted to create a government which was democratic, at least to a certain extent. They had a revolution. And they got one. It’s true that some of the exact details weren’t written down until after the Revolution, but they didn’t have a revolution and then get a dictatorship, or something unsustainable, or find that all private property was abolished two years later—they got something which was clearly within the parameters they were trying to achieve.
They could do that by letting other countries send people to tell them how to run their country. They didn’t do that because they themselves knew how to create a democratic state with free markets.
That’s taking a very narrow interpretation of “planned to introduce”. If you had asked them “when you overthrow the Communists, do you plan to have a free market system”, they would have said yes. I count that as “planning to introduce a free market system, and getting what they planned for”.
This is trivially true if you mean that no revolution produced the desired result up to the end of time. But then, the same is true of anything any human being does.
If my project is to lock my apartment with my key, then I can be quite certain that the result with look roughly like I plan beforehand.
The point of that sentence was to rule out saying “But if you look at the government over 200 years later, they clearly wouldn’t have anticipated high tax rates and gay marriage, so they didn’t get the system they wanted”. If the system produced by the revolution is at least as stable as a non-revolutionary system, even if it has enough instability to show up after 200 years, it should count.
I think quite a few people on the left can tell you a few catch phrases about how their alternative system should look like that are as vague as demoractic.
No plan survives contact with the enemy (or reality), but that doesn’t mean you can just wing it. Of course you need a specific plan, but you also need the ability to change that plan as needed, in a controlled and sensible way. Realising the problems of advanced planning means you need to spend more time, not less, on working out what you are trying to do.
I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.
-- From a speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (November 14, 1957) ; in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957, National Archives and Records Service, Government Printing Office, p. 818 : ISBN 0160588510, 9780160588518
We do agile development where I work. That doesn’t mean we don’t plan. On the contrary. Agile development doesn’t mean throwing a bunch of developers in a room and telling them “do whatever comes to mind” without any thought to what might come out of the process. It means constantly updating your plans, in an adaptive and iterative way.
Well, probably mostly because it’s trendy. But as for why people who choose to do agile development for sensible reasons do so, I suspect it’s because doing planning and data collection in such a way that they inform one another has better results than planning in the absence of data or data collection in the absence of a plan.
If you ask people to give you a clear alternative of a poltiical system then the only way to give you what you are asking is to give you something that migth work in theory but that’s not based on empiric reality.
One of the big problem with Soviet style communism was that a central planner made a plan with wasn’t well based on empiric reality.
As a result there are valid reasons for part of todays left to dislike the idea of central planning.
Given that no revolution ever produced the system that the people who threw the revolution planned to introduce I don’t think that it’s an easy case to argue that you need to have a specific plan.
Waterfall is no good design paradigma.
This is trivially true if you mean that no revolution produced the desired result up to the end of time. But then, the same is true of anything any human being does.
If you interpret it in a narrow, nontrivial way such as “no revolution produced a result that was close to the desired result and took at least as long enough to become unrecognizeable as the existing order would have taken to become unrecognizeable”, then there are several candidates, including the American Revolution and several post-Soviet states (if you count leaving the USSR as a revolution).
I’m not saying “result” but system. The US constitution got written after the US got independent and not before.
Some countries of the USSR did copy the Western style of democracy and free markets. They could do that by letting other countries send people to tell them how to run their country. They didn’t do that because they themselves knew how to create a democratic state with free markets.
If my project is to lock my apartment with my key, then I can be quite certain that the result with look roughly like I plan beforehand. The bigger the project the harder it is to plan everything beforehand.
As a result big software projects get these days not fully planned in advance via waterfall but get created in an agile way. Creating a substantial new political system as opposed to just copy some existing one, is much more complex than a software project and therefore even less doable via waterfall.
Perhaps a more precise point is that the first American government failed. John Hanson and the other 9 Presidents of the United States under the articles of confederation were operating the true government they threw the revolution for. It failed almost immediately—you would be astonished at how hard it was to convince someone to run the country, hence the extremely high turnover on Presidents.
I, and many other people here on Less Wrong, live in a massive, surprisingly enduring Plan B of a government.
[It’s worth pointing out I like this one better, because we can find appropriately qualified staff, which is, ya know, pretty good. But alas, I was not a father of the American Revolution.]
They wanted to create a government which was democratic, at least to a certain extent. They had a revolution. And they got one. It’s true that some of the exact details weren’t written down until after the Revolution, but they didn’t have a revolution and then get a dictatorship, or something unsustainable, or find that all private property was abolished two years later—they got something which was clearly within the parameters they were trying to achieve.
That’s taking a very narrow interpretation of “planned to introduce”. If you had asked them “when you overthrow the Communists, do you plan to have a free market system”, they would have said yes. I count that as “planning to introduce a free market system, and getting what they planned for”.
The point of that sentence was to rule out saying “But if you look at the government over 200 years later, they clearly wouldn’t have anticipated high tax rates and gay marriage, so they didn’t get the system they wanted”. If the system produced by the revolution is at least as stable as a non-revolutionary system, even if it has enough instability to show up after 200 years, it should count.
I think quite a few people on the left can tell you a few catch phrases about how their alternative system should look like that are as vague as demoractic.
No plan survives contact with the enemy (or reality), but that doesn’t mean you can just wing it. Of course you need a specific plan, but you also need the ability to change that plan as needed, in a controlled and sensible way. Realising the problems of advanced planning means you need to spend more time, not less, on working out what you are trying to do.
I’m reminded of Eisenhower:
-- From a speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (November 14, 1957) ; in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957, National Archives and Records Service, Government Printing Office, p. 818 : ISBN 0160588510, 9780160588518
Then why does every modern startup do agile development instead of spending more time on planning?
We do agile development where I work. That doesn’t mean we don’t plan. On the contrary. Agile development doesn’t mean throwing a bunch of developers in a room and telling them “do whatever comes to mind” without any thought to what might come out of the process. It means constantly updating your plans, in an adaptive and iterative way.
Well, probably mostly because it’s trendy. But as for why people who choose to do agile development for sensible reasons do so, I suspect it’s because doing planning and data collection in such a way that they inform one another has better results than planning in the absence of data or data collection in the absence of a plan.
Why do you ask?
If you ask people to give you a clear alternative of a poltiical system then the only way to give you what you are asking is to give you something that migth work in theory but that’s not based on empiric reality.
One of the big problem with Soviet style communism was that a central planner made a plan with wasn’t well based on empiric reality.
As a result there are valid reasons for part of todays left to dislike the idea of central planning.