Technical person meets a bureaucracy. Good clean fun, like the Mr. Bill show. I wish I had been there when Thomas Sowell interned for the Department of Labor.
The only things about your story that surprised me was that you weren’t shit canned within a month, and that an actual company exists that would hire you. You, and by extension them, rocked the boat and survived. That’s not what anyone is paying you for. You’re there to validate that they’re doing the right thing. I don’t know how you and your company have survived this long, but I’d like to thank you all for saving some students from the regularly scheduled destruction of their lives.
As for your conversations with the bureaucracy, do you really think their confusion was in not understanding your point? I’d guess that any confusion they had was in how you had a job there at all, while you were busy saying things that shouldn’t be said. I think you were the one not “getting it”.
Every so often someone says something that opens a new world to me. I’ll pass on the new world to you.
The purpose of a bureaucracy is to further the interests of the bureaucracy, whatever goals they give lip service to. But even theoretically, you don’t have the lip service goal right. That goal is not to help students. It’s to remake society so that it looks right, primarily as measured by equality of outcomes for groups. Helping a white child is helping the white group, thereby making group inequality worse.
If you think in racial groups, everything makes sense. Blacks are more likely to have poor achievement, therefore you help blacks, regardless of achievement. But also, if you judge them by group, then you conclude they aren’t ready for the advanced math classes either.
Why not use test scores? Because test scores are objective measurements. Can’t allow those into the school system. Then the bureaucracy’s performance can be judged, as you demonstrate. Can’t have that.
And of course the proposal’s execution is the goal of the proposal. Well, it’s really the grant itself which is the goal, but they couldn’t write “receive check” as the goal, so they write what they plan to do, something entirely in their power. If they wrote that the goal was the delivery of some objective measurement, someone crazy person might measure it and determine that they had failed. Can’t have that. Who in the system would possibly want that? Only people like you who just don’t “get it”.
An anecdote from corporate bureaucracy. I was in a meeting with two managers, where they were describing back and forth what some other woman did. Except their story was completely false. And we all knew it was false. Having the foolishness of youth, if not the years and health, I came out and said “But she didn’t really do that, right?” Silence. For a moment. Then the subject was changed and they moved on. People in bureaucracies spend much of the day telling each other social truths that are epistemically false. I don’t say lying, because as George Constanza would say, it’s not a lie, if you believe it. Their standard of truth is the socially useful. They forgot they had let a fool into the room whose standard was epistemic truth. That buffoon just doesn’t get it. We won’t invite him to more of these meetings.
Not to lower signal-to-noise, but—I really liked this comment. It shows of a fine mind made cynical, a delicate sarcasm born of an impinging upon by a horrific, Cthulhian reality.
At first I didn’t agree with the “horrific, Cthulhian reality”, but I think that’s one of the Orwellian problems.
Bureaucracy’s are infuriating and frustrating and horrific, but they are the way they are for reasons, like gravity. If you’re willing to stare into the abyss, it’s not hard at all to see why things are the way they are. An institution is a machine, indifferent to our wants and intentions. Make the machine wrong, and it will be a meat grinder for everyone involved.
But’s there’s the other, more human Orwellian horror. People really are different in the head, running different algorithms. Or more to the point, they aren’t aliens, I am. That manager’s meeting was a peek behind the curtain to true and habitual Doublethink. In their heads, the epistemic truth algorithm was completely inoperative. The Lie was completely True until I opened my yap. People can be frustrating and infuriating—but they too are what they are for reasons, like gravity, and they’re not mysterious at all if you stare into their abyss.
The Hitch had a catchy phrase—“just two chromosomes away from a chimpanzee”. We aren’t so smart, rational, or sane. All sorts of “mysteries” dissolve in the light of that.
“As for your conversations with the bureaucracy, do you really think their confusion was in not understanding your point? I’d guess that any confusion they had was in how you had a job there at all, while you were busy saying things that shouldn’t be said. I think you were the one not “getting it”.”
I’m torn myself; I could see it being due to self-interested playing dumb, but also the genuine kind given that we are talking about gross failings of basic education, after all, which has to have consequences down the line.
Technical person meets a bureaucracy. Good clean fun, like the Mr. Bill show. I wish I had been there when Thomas Sowell interned for the Department of Labor.
The only things about your story that surprised me was that you weren’t shit canned within a month, and that an actual company exists that would hire you. You, and by extension them, rocked the boat and survived. That’s not what anyone is paying you for. You’re there to validate that they’re doing the right thing. I don’t know how you and your company have survived this long, but I’d like to thank you all for saving some students from the regularly scheduled destruction of their lives.
As for your conversations with the bureaucracy, do you really think their confusion was in not understanding your point? I’d guess that any confusion they had was in how you had a job there at all, while you were busy saying things that shouldn’t be said. I think you were the one not “getting it”.
Every so often someone says something that opens a new world to me. I’ll pass on the new world to you.
The purpose of a bureaucracy is to further the interests of the bureaucracy, whatever goals they give lip service to. But even theoretically, you don’t have the lip service goal right. That goal is not to help students. It’s to remake society so that it looks right, primarily as measured by equality of outcomes for groups. Helping a white child is helping the white group, thereby making group inequality worse.
If you think in racial groups, everything makes sense. Blacks are more likely to have poor achievement, therefore you help blacks, regardless of achievement. But also, if you judge them by group, then you conclude they aren’t ready for the advanced math classes either.
Why not use test scores? Because test scores are objective measurements. Can’t allow those into the school system. Then the bureaucracy’s performance can be judged, as you demonstrate. Can’t have that.
And of course the proposal’s execution is the goal of the proposal. Well, it’s really the grant itself which is the goal, but they couldn’t write “receive check” as the goal, so they write what they plan to do, something entirely in their power. If they wrote that the goal was the delivery of some objective measurement, someone crazy person might measure it and determine that they had failed. Can’t have that. Who in the system would possibly want that? Only people like you who just don’t “get it”.
An anecdote from corporate bureaucracy. I was in a meeting with two managers, where they were describing back and forth what some other woman did. Except their story was completely false. And we all knew it was false. Having the foolishness of youth, if not the years and health, I came out and said “But she didn’t really do that, right?” Silence. For a moment. Then the subject was changed and they moved on. People in bureaucracies spend much of the day telling each other social truths that are epistemically false. I don’t say lying, because as George Constanza would say, it’s not a lie, if you believe it. Their standard of truth is the socially useful. They forgot they had let a fool into the room whose standard was epistemic truth. That buffoon just doesn’t get it. We won’t invite him to more of these meetings.
Not to lower signal-to-noise, but—I really liked this comment. It shows of a fine mind made cynical, a delicate sarcasm born of an impinging upon by a horrific, Cthulhian reality.
“People are crazy, the world is mad.”
Thank you.
At first I didn’t agree with the “horrific, Cthulhian reality”, but I think that’s one of the Orwellian problems.
Bureaucracy’s are infuriating and frustrating and horrific, but they are the way they are for reasons, like gravity. If you’re willing to stare into the abyss, it’s not hard at all to see why things are the way they are. An institution is a machine, indifferent to our wants and intentions. Make the machine wrong, and it will be a meat grinder for everyone involved.
But’s there’s the other, more human Orwellian horror. People really are different in the head, running different algorithms. Or more to the point, they aren’t aliens, I am. That manager’s meeting was a peek behind the curtain to true and habitual Doublethink. In their heads, the epistemic truth algorithm was completely inoperative. The Lie was completely True until I opened my yap. People can be frustrating and infuriating—but they too are what they are for reasons, like gravity, and they’re not mysterious at all if you stare into their abyss.
The Hitch had a catchy phrase—“just two chromosomes away from a chimpanzee”. We aren’t so smart, rational, or sane. All sorts of “mysteries” dissolve in the light of that.
“As for your conversations with the bureaucracy, do you really think their confusion was in not understanding your point? I’d guess that any confusion they had was in how you had a job there at all, while you were busy saying things that shouldn’t be said. I think you were the one not “getting it”.”
I’m torn myself; I could see it being due to self-interested playing dumb, but also the genuine kind given that we are talking about gross failings of basic education, after all, which has to have consequences down the line.