A thing on my mind is, I expect a lot of people to have taken at least a brief look at these arguments, and been like “I dunno, maybe, but scaling organizations still seems really useful/important, and I don’t know that I buy the effects here are strong enough to outweigh that.”
And… that’s super fair! The arguments here are pretty abstract and handwavy. I think the arguments here are good enough to promote this as a serious hypothesis. But I think it’s kinda reasonable for most people’s actual guesses about the world to be informed more by their broader experience of what orgs tend to be like.
I think it’d be fair ask “okay, cool, but can you go do some real empirical work here to see how reliably Moral Maze problems tend to come up, and how strong the effect size is?”. I think this is maybe a thing worth putting some serious research time on. But, in order for that to be useful, there needs to be a real person with some real cruxes, and the data-gathering needs to actually address those cruxes.
So, if you are someone running a company, or hiring, and you could be persuaded of the Recursive Middle Manager Hell Hypotheses but want to see some kind of data… I’m interested in what sort of evidence you’d actually find compelling.
I just added this to the bottom of the post:
A thing on my mind is, I expect a lot of people to have taken at least a brief look at these arguments, and been like “I dunno, maybe, but scaling organizations still seems really useful/important, and I don’t know that I buy the effects here are strong enough to outweigh that.”
And… that’s super fair! The arguments here are pretty abstract and handwavy. I think the arguments here are good enough to promote this as a serious hypothesis. But I think it’s kinda reasonable for most people’s actual guesses about the world to be informed more by their broader experience of what orgs tend to be like.
I think it’d be fair ask “okay, cool, but can you go do some real empirical work here to see how reliably Moral Maze problems tend to come up, and how strong the effect size is?”. I think this is maybe a thing worth putting some serious research time on. But, in order for that to be useful, there needs to be a real person with some real cruxes, and the data-gathering needs to actually address those cruxes.
So, if you are someone running a company, or hiring, and you could be persuaded of the Recursive Middle Manager Hell Hypotheses but want to see some kind of data… I’m interested in what sort of evidence you’d actually find compelling.