Hello, LessWrong! Long time reader, first-time commenter.
I think that your description of the counter-maze tendency is wrong, and you’ve misunderstood some aspects of Zvi’s model while being distracted by superficialities in the other. To wit:
Startups employ a trivial percentage of the workforce and do not contribute much to the economy. Startups that get big occupy more economic space, but by that point they’re no longer startups. So the attributes of startup culture are not really relevant to the economy at large.
It’s understood by everyone that being a startup is a kind of corporate childhood—romanticised, but temporary. It is implicitly accepted by everyone, including startup founders, that growing up and becoming a mature, “adult” company requires becoming a maze with multiple levels of hierarchy.
Tech culture is anti-maze only insofar as it consists of startups. All of FAANGM are fully converted to mazes. Consequently, most actual tech workers work within mazes.
The change away from suits etc. is a change of fashion with no impact on the underlying dynamics. Arguably it actually helps out the sociopaths because it replaces a fixed, legible standard of dress with an unclear and illegible question of “culture fit”, which creates more room for maze games.
The move away from “company men” was not a move away from large firms, but rather a move away from a vertical system to a stratified one. In the old system (prior to 1970) you could expect to work your entire life for the same company, and middle and upper management was typically promoted from the rank-and-file. In the newer system, middle and upper management are hired from people with MBAs and other credentials, and they move freely between industries. As a consequence, the maze-nature is transmitted quickly from company to company, and to a certain extent all management everywhere is joined in a super-maze, as all management shares the same culture and experiences which is completely separate from the culture and experiences of the workers.
Actually, this last point deserves more elaboration: according to Zvi, the main thing that mitigates against mazes is direct engagement with the object-level reality. This engagement is present in the rank-and-file, and to a certain extent at the very top, but is absent in the middle. However, in a vertical system of advancement, where management hires are made from within, the middle ranks will at least have a memory of working on the object-level concerns of the firm. The rise of a permanent managerial class means that many middle managers are of a type which has never worked directly on the actual product that their company makes, and whose entire education and experience is in the context of immoral mazes.
So I find it unpersuasive to think that any of the cultural changes of the previous decades have done anything to reverse the advance of mazes as the normative corporate structure, and some of the things that you mention as inhibiting maze structures (such as frequently changing companies over the course of a career) have probably actually accelerated them.
An additional, unrelated note: the model of The Dictator’s Handbook suggests that incentives push away from the middle, towards total democracy (when there are already a large number of key supporters) or total autocracy (where the number of key supporters approaches one). But don’t other models suggest that the middle state of oligarchy is actually the default, and that both democracy and monarchy tend to decay towards oligarchy over time? And aren’t examples of this widespread? I notice that I am confused.
I was nodding along in agreement with this post until I got to the central example, when the train of thought came to a screeching halt and forced me to reconsider the whole thing.
The song called “Rainbowland” is subtextually about the acceptance of queer relationships. The people who objected to the song understand this, and that’s why they objected. The people who think the objectors are silly know this, and that’s why they think it’s silly. The headline writer is playing dishonest word games by pretending not to know what the subtext is, because it lets them make a sick dunk on the outgroup.
The point is: this is not a lizardman opinion. Regardless of what you think about homosexuality itself, or whether you think a song that’s subtextually about a culture war issue should be sung by first graders anyway, you cannot pretend that the objectors are voicing an objection found in only 5% of people! 30-40% of people share that view. Whether or not it’s well-founded, it’s not fringe.
And this thought made me look more closely at the rest of the argument, which I think boils down to:
Sufficiently unpopular opinions can be ignored
Authority figures should shut down people making appeals to unpopular opinions
This is necessary, because responding to every fringe wierdo will suck up your time and ruin your institution
I actually concur with the third point here, but it should be clear that this is a pragmatic, not an epistemic stance. And the point chosen to illustrate it is actually a bad fit for the argument as presented.