Comments on: If you want to profit from expertise, you must first tame it

By: Sam J.

Sam J. — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 06:11:41 +0000

I think Trump won for much more common sense reasons. Mass immigration, ignoring illegal aliens, endless wars for Israel and the movement of manufacturing overseas. All of these are to the benefit of the already wealthy and powerful and to the detriment of the average American. It has nothing to do with rejecting competence. He was the only one willing to even talk about these, the main issues, that concern people.

By: Kirk

Kirk — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 21:43:43 +0000

Let me share an epiphany I just experienced, thinking about how best to word this:

The best system is no system.

In other words, any attempt to impose order on chaos is doomed to failure; instead, we must embrace chaos and dance along its knife-edge, adjusting our behavior and solutions to match the challenges of the moment. Any attempt to freeze the state into a rigid and inflexible straight-jacket so that you can deal with the challenge via some fixed hierarchy is doomed to failure from the start. This is why bureaucracies tend to metastasize and grow far past the point where the problem or situation that they were brought into being to deal with even exists in a recognizable form. The problem isn’t the nature of the bureaucracy, it is the nature of man and the universe as they interact. Nothing is perfect; nothing is perfectible. You must deal with things in the moment, and improvise as best you can. And, today’s solution is likely tomorrow’s problem…

By: Kirk

Kirk — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 21:14:28 +0000

This pretty much synthesizes what I’ve been thinking for years. The root of the problem is that the academic “expert” is trying to impose control on a fundamentally chaotic phenomenon, wherever they attempt it–And, that phenomenon will push back, hard, at every attempt.

This is why command economies fail: There is no way they can possibly function as efficiently as the chaotic free-for-all of traditional economics. Everywhere they try to exert control, whether it’s Diocletian Rome or the early Soviet Union, the nature of things defies the attempt, and the resulting positive feedback just results in more speaker squeal.

We badly need to recognize this, and start building systems and cultures that recognize this, small self-sufficient cellular structures that work together as necessary to deal with problems, as opposed to these massive dysfunctional hierarchies that choke out innovation and actual success.