Is that a serious blow to Cummings’ thesis, though? If your idea is, say, “we need a ministry of eduction but the current one is irrecoverably broken”, you don’t need to invent Google or Amazon to replace it. Depending on how bad the status quo is (which is partly an empirical question), any random thing you come up with might be better than what’s already there. In which case his use of the term “startup” would be misleading, but the overall thesis would stay relatively intact.
That said, I am quite sympathetic to Chesterton’s Fence in this argument. In particular, trying to abolish and replace the Pentagon on day 1 of a new administration (as Cummings suggests in his essay) is… optimistic in a world where other nations can hear you say that.
Any random thing you come up with might be better than what’s already there. But it might also be worse, even if what’s already there is terribly broken. Maybe there are cases where institutions are so spectacularly screwed up that literally anything you might do is likely to be better, but I wouldn’t bet on there being many.
That seems like the crux of the issue. I can absolutely imagine a world where institutions have become sufficiently bad due to misaligned incentive structures that any random thing would be an improvement (though I would still not want to settle for random).
For instance, take Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” We might be in a situation where institutions that originally worked have increased in complexity to the point that they no longer work, in which case they might be unfixable and one would have to start over.
In any case, whether we actually live in that world seems like an empirical question, but when I compare the world of today to my sky-high expectations (from e.g. transhumanism), there are tons of institutions I would not call particularly functional.
Finally, some institutions are considered so bad by some people that they’d rather abolish them with no replacement than leave them as-is, in which case you wouldn’t even necessarily need the random thing to replace it. Zvi’s FDA Delenda Est stuff comes to mind.
I agree that we might be in a world where the institutions are unfixably bad and the only thing to do is to start over. But if reality and your expectations diverge, I’m not sure it’s a good general practice to assume that reality is at fault. Perhaps those expectations were unrealistic.
Again, that seems like a general argument to do nothing. Like, you could have justified not rebelling against slavery when slavery was a thing in the US.
Obviously what you actually have to do is to figure out whether the positives outweigh the negatives. But if all I’m offered is “things are pretty bad so any change is probably good” I’m pretty comfortably replying “new things like this are usually pretty bad so there’s a real risk that the change makes things worse”. :-)
I think we don’t have the same way of imagining what a “random alternative” would be like. For example, I don’t imagine that a random alternative would be the kind generated by a monkey randomly typing on a keyboard in a reasonable amount of time. Or even the kind generated by an unexperienced child or teenager. I imagine whoever would have the chance to enact an alternative would be more likely to understand how not to “break society by mistake” than a randomly chosen person in the population.
I might be totally off making that analogy, but you seem to me like my aunt who’s afraid her computer is broken every time an unexpected window pops up in her browser. She sees her computer as something beyond comprehension, where changing even the tiniest thing could cause iredeemable damage. In reality, an experience computer user makes plenty of changes that would frighten her, but are safe. And her computer is full of useless stuff that were auto-installed by/with other stuff and slow it down.
I endorse Taran’s comment that’s a sibling of this one. Most startups fail, even though they are generally run by smart hardworking people who have spotted something that could genuinely be better.
Let’s run with your computer software analogy. Ever worked on the insides of a large “mature” software system? It’s common for those to be full of cruft and mess and things no one quite understands and unexpected interactions, such that small changes really can cause severe damage. It’s also notorious that trying to do a wholesale rewrite of such a system is usually a bad move.
The situation there is similar to the one with startups, and indeed is sometimes literally the actual same situation. Eventually your big old crufty legacy-software system will likely get replaced by something smaller and simpler that does the job well enough and is easier for its developers to work on. (That will probably be made by a startup.) But any particular attempt to replace it, your own included, is likely to fail.
I think there’s a difference because the legacy software doesn’t develop itself the way a bureaucracy does. It’s not made up out of actors that try to get more power for themselves.
I agree with Taran’s comment as well. I possibly underestimated how likely to fail an attempt at replacing the current system is. I just think the danger of letting the situation rot is underestimated too. The world is moving on, fast. To keep the software analogy, we’re keeping the same legacy software, but demanding it be used on new use cases every year. That’s not sustainable. I’m open to third options.
Is that a serious blow to Cummings’ thesis, though? If your idea is, say, “we need a ministry of eduction but the current one is irrecoverably broken”, you don’t need to invent Google or Amazon to replace it. Depending on how bad the status quo is (which is partly an empirical question), any random thing you come up with might be better than what’s already there. In which case his use of the term “startup” would be misleading, but the overall thesis would stay relatively intact.
That said, I am quite sympathetic to Chesterton’s Fence in this argument. In particular, trying to abolish and replace the Pentagon on day 1 of a new administration (as Cummings suggests in his essay) is… optimistic in a world where other nations can hear you say that.
Any random thing you come up with might be better than what’s already there. But it might also be worse, even if what’s already there is terribly broken. Maybe there are cases where institutions are so spectacularly screwed up that literally anything you might do is likely to be better, but I wouldn’t bet on there being many.
That seems like the crux of the issue. I can absolutely imagine a world where institutions have become sufficiently bad due to misaligned incentive structures that any random thing would be an improvement (though I would still not want to settle for random).
For instance, take Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” We might be in a situation where institutions that originally worked have increased in complexity to the point that they no longer work, in which case they might be unfixable and one would have to start over.
In any case, whether we actually live in that world seems like an empirical question, but when I compare the world of today to my sky-high expectations (from e.g. transhumanism), there are tons of institutions I would not call particularly functional.
Finally, some institutions are considered so bad by some people that they’d rather abolish them with no replacement than leave them as-is, in which case you wouldn’t even necessarily need the random thing to replace it. Zvi’s FDA Delenda Est stuff comes to mind.
I agree that we might be in a world where the institutions are unfixably bad and the only thing to do is to start over. But if reality and your expectations diverge, I’m not sure it’s a good general practice to assume that reality is at fault. Perhaps those expectations were unrealistic.
Again, that seems like a general argument to do nothing. Like, you could have justified not rebelling against slavery when slavery was a thing in the US.
That’s not a good example, since the North already functioned without slavery.
You could use that as a general argument against about any change. Funny to find that on a transhumanist forum.
Obviously what you actually have to do is to figure out whether the positives outweigh the negatives. But if all I’m offered is “things are pretty bad so any change is probably good” I’m pretty comfortably replying “new things like this are usually pretty bad so there’s a real risk that the change makes things worse”. :-)
I think we don’t have the same way of imagining what a “random alternative” would be like. For example, I don’t imagine that a random alternative would be the kind generated by a monkey randomly typing on a keyboard in a reasonable amount of time. Or even the kind generated by an unexperienced child or teenager. I imagine whoever would have the chance to enact an alternative would be more likely to understand how not to “break society by mistake” than a randomly chosen person in the population.
I might be totally off making that analogy, but you seem to me like my aunt who’s afraid her computer is broken every time an unexpected window pops up in her browser. She sees her computer as something beyond comprehension, where changing even the tiniest thing could cause iredeemable damage. In reality, an experience computer user makes plenty of changes that would frighten her, but are safe. And her computer is full of useless stuff that were auto-installed by/with other stuff and slow it down.
I endorse Taran’s comment that’s a sibling of this one. Most startups fail, even though they are generally run by smart hardworking people who have spotted something that could genuinely be better.
Let’s run with your computer software analogy. Ever worked on the insides of a large “mature” software system? It’s common for those to be full of cruft and mess and things no one quite understands and unexpected interactions, such that small changes really can cause severe damage. It’s also notorious that trying to do a wholesale rewrite of such a system is usually a bad move.
The situation there is similar to the one with startups, and indeed is sometimes literally the actual same situation. Eventually your big old crufty legacy-software system will likely get replaced by something smaller and simpler that does the job well enough and is easier for its developers to work on. (That will probably be made by a startup.) But any particular attempt to replace it, your own included, is likely to fail.
I think there’s a difference because the legacy software doesn’t develop itself the way a bureaucracy does. It’s not made up out of actors that try to get more power for themselves.
I agree with Taran’s comment as well. I possibly underestimated how likely to fail an attempt at replacing the current system is. I just think the danger of letting the situation rot is underestimated too. The world is moving on, fast. To keep the software analogy, we’re keeping the same legacy software, but demanding it be used on new use cases every year. That’s not sustainable. I’m open to third options.