I’ve read a bunch of posts being confused or annoyed at bureaucracies, and I found this post a helpful wake-up call and Open Problem Statement: “why don’t we have any simple models that adequately explain what bureaucracies do?”
I don’t know that I believe there will turn out to such a simple model or unified-theory-of-bureaucracy, but I’d expect the search for one to be worthwhile and churn up interesting things along the way and hopefully output a collection of models that get more useful and easy-to-apply over time.
Curated.
I’ve read a bunch of posts being confused or annoyed at bureaucracies, and I found this post a helpful wake-up call and Open Problem Statement: “why don’t we have any simple models that adequately explain what bureaucracies do?”
I don’t know that I believe there will turn out to such a simple model or unified-theory-of-bureaucracy, but I’d expect the search for one to be worthwhile and churn up interesting things along the way and hopefully output a collection of models that get more useful and easy-to-apply over time.
Something about this also makes think of True Names as a tool to combat goodhart. Bureaucracies are an instance of the generalized alignment problem, and having a good model of what sort of incentives your creating can help you use bureaucracies on purpose.