Cummings seems to be making this same argument in the comments: the Pentagon is so unbelievably awful that its replacement doesn’t have to be good, you can pick its successor at random and expect to come up with something better. To believe this requires a lack of imagination, I think, an inability to appreciate how much scope for failure there really is. But this is not really a question we can settle empirically—we can only talk in vague terms about most of what the Pentagon does, and the counterfactuals are even less clear—so I won’t argue the point too much.
More seriously, not every young organization is a startup. A new bowling team is not a startup, a new group at Amazon working on a new service is not a startup, and when Camden NJ replaced its whole police force with an entirely different organization that was not a startup either. “Startup” has a lot of specific connotations which mostly don’t apply here. And yet, it’s the word that Cummings picked. Maybe he doesn’t know this stuff, even though it’s widely known to many people. Or maybe he does know, and used it anyway. I think this is why people keep coming up with Straussian readings of this essay: they have a sense that he’s not sincere about his intended methods and goals.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Cummings plans to help overthrow USG (and I don’t think Yarvin does either): he’s getting paid real money to rehash old grievances in front of a friendly audience, that’s all. Put him in the same bucket as Paul Krugman.
Cummings seems to be making this same argument in the comments: the Pentagon is so unbelievably awful that its replacement doesn’t have to be good, you can pick its successor at random and expect to come up with something better. To believe this requires a lack of imagination, I think, an inability to appreciate how much scope for failure there really is. But this is not really a question we can settle empirically—we can only talk in vague terms about most of what the Pentagon does, and the counterfactuals are even less clear—so I won’t argue the point too much.
More seriously, not every young organization is a startup. A new bowling team is not a startup, a new group at Amazon working on a new service is not a startup, and when Camden NJ replaced its whole police force with an entirely different organization that was not a startup either. “Startup” has a lot of specific connotations which mostly don’t apply here. And yet, it’s the word that Cummings picked. Maybe he doesn’t know this stuff, even though it’s widely known to many people. Or maybe he does know, and used it anyway. I think this is why people keep coming up with Straussian readings of this essay: they have a sense that he’s not sincere about his intended methods and goals.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Cummings plans to help overthrow USG (and I don’t think Yarvin does either): he’s getting paid real money to rehash old grievances in front of a friendly audience, that’s all. Put him in the same bucket as Paul Krugman.