Nassim Nicholas Taleb summed up in a simple aphorism what most of us instinctively know about bureaucracies:
Bureaucracy is a construction designed to maximize the distance between a decision-maker and the risks of the decision.
When something goes wrong, the bureaucrats play the blame-shifting game. Musical chairs will begin, and some poor fool will be stuck without a chair. When something goes right, of course, executive management will take credit. Your job as a bureaucrat is to be an implicitly political creature; to make your boss look good and, for yourself, to evade blame.
Bureaucracies become much worse when they are divorced from the profit motive. At least a large corporation must theoretically serve its customers in some positive manner, or they won’t remain in business for long. So while the internal politics of a large corporation are likely to suck like a Hoover, the external face of the company is often still somewhat pleasant for the customer.
With government bureaucracy, even that small consolation is lost. Go to the DMV, or any large government bureau. Long lines, smelly “customers”, and agents with extremely unpleasant attitudes abound. The motive is not to serve citizens well, or even to serve them quickly, but rather to meet the bare minimum necessary to avoid blame — and sometimes not even that.
Thales, “Bureacracy is Designed to Suck”, The Declination, 2018-05-02.
July 26, 2020
QotD: Bureaucracy at its heart
July 18, 2020
QotD: Peace can also be the health of the state
The story Bruno Nardi told made me think of the book that explains how peace is also the health of the state, namely Mancur Olson’s public choice theory classic, The Rise and Decline of Nations. It is years since I read this, but the story that this book tells is of the slow accumulation and coagulation of politics, at the expense of mere business, as the institutions of a hitherto thriving nation gang up together to form “distributional coalitions” (that phrase I do definitely recall). The point being that if you get involved in a war, and especially if you lose a war, the way Germany and Japan lost WW2, that tends to break up such coalitions.
The last thing on the mind of a German trade unionist or businessman, in 1946, was lobbying the government for regulatory advantages or for subsidies for his particular little slice of the German economy. Such people at that time were more concerned to obtain certificates saying that they weren’t Nazis, a task made trickier by the fact that most of them were Nazis. Olson’s way of thinking makes the post-war (West) German and then Japanese economic miracles, and the relative sluggishness of the British economy at that time, a lot more understandable. Winning a war, as Olson points out, is not nearly so disruptive of those distributional coalitions, in fact it strengthens them, as Crozier’s earlier posting illustrates.
Brian Micklethwait, “The view from Brazil is that peace is also the health of the state”, Samizdata, 2018-04-13.
July 3, 2020
Birth, rapid growth, profitable stasis, bureausclerosis, decline, death – typical tech firm lifecycle
In the Continental Telegraph, what looks to be a pretty solid characterization of the corporate life-cycle for technology firms:
There are generally, 6 stages in the life of a tech company:
- Inception. A couple of smart kids start something in a garage. Massive innovation.
- Fast growth. The business moves to some good offices, number of staff increases. They take on smart, fast moving people who are innovating big. A few people know them.
- Steady growth. The business is now something of a household name. They get their own small head office. Staff are more like normal business. Innovation continues, but the bureaucracy starts to grow.
- Bureaucracy. The business is a household name. They have multiple offices, or something designed by a smart-ass architect. There’s still staff coming in, but they’re mostly seeing it as a nice warm place to sit and be bureaucrats. The innovators start leaving as it’s just not interesting. They might even be making lots of money, but it’s mostly just living off what was built in earlier phases, or large dumb wasteful projects that go nowhere for years.
- Decline. A new disruptor arrives on the scene. They innovate in a field you’re involved in. You can’t keep up because in the previous phase, you replaced the innovators with bureaucrats. You’re outsmarted.
- Terminal decline and death. You slowly or quickly disappear, maybe holding onto a few customers who habitually use you.
I think there might also be something about when government starts taking an interest in you, and I think it’s quite some time into stage 4. Google are already there. Firing James Damore is very much bureaucracy state behaviour. They wouldn’t have cared when it was a tiny number of staff in an office. And how much have they really innovated in the last decade?
June 23, 2020
QotD: Scientific discoveries despite “research” and “planning”
For from the “planning” point of view, the little nerd has endangered billions of dollars in funding, and thus the livelihoods of innumerable bureaucratic drudges. That is, after all, why they retain the China Wall of lawyers: to prevent unplanned events from happening. But glory glory, sometimes they happen anyway.
David Warren, “That’s funny”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-03-08.
June 20, 2020
“What did you do in the Wuhan Coronavirus war, Daddy?”
Chris Selley metaphorically dons the garb of a war correspondent to report on how the Canadian government systematically mishandled the epidemic “war”:
Toronto General Hospital.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
At first, comparisons to wartime seemed a bit silly. All we were being asked to do, after all, was stay indoors. As the World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic 100 days ago, the commanders had everything under control: the borders, the epidemiology, the strategy, support for shuttered businesses and their employees. Traditionally, wartime puts those of us left on the home front to work whether we like it or not. This was entirely the opposite: the worst we would have to put up with — in theory, assuming government aid was as advertised — was the indignity of idleness. Collective inaction would flatten the curve, the forces of COVID-19 would be beaten back, and summer would be saved. Peace in our time.
And then it instantly turned to quagmire. Canadians watched slack-jawed as COVID-19 breached our most fundamental defences. You don’t need Sun Tzu’s perspicacity to inform people arriving in Canada of their responsibility to self-isolate, and exactly what self-isolation means — go directly home, do not stop for groceries, do not receive visitors. I just did it, right there, in half a sentence. But we couldn’t manage it: Where information was distributed at all, it was excessively complex even as it failed to deliver the central message. Provincial forces threatened mutiny. Alberta Commander-in-Chief Jason Kenney stormed into the Edmonton airport demanding answers. It took weeks to sort out.
[…]
If it didn’t seem like a war before, it sure did once the real live army was drafted in to bail out long-term care homes in Ontario and Quebec that had descended into horrifying squalor. We learned the appalling details from leaked military reports. And now, in an almost poetic act of military pigheadedness, the Ottawa Citizen reports the Armed Forces are trying to hunt down and punish the leakers.
The war must go on. But sitting here in still-locked-down Toronto, stewing in my own bile, I cannot say this is filling me with patriotic fervour. I find myself simultaneously envious of other provinces that are in the process of reopening, and sympathetic to their residents: If it weren’t for the two sick men of the federation [Ontario and Quebec] dominating the narrative, they would likely have reopened much earlier.
Indeed, jealousies have bloomed as weeks turned to months. Apartment dwellers envy other apartment dwellers who have balconies. All apartment dwellers envy homeowners. Everyone envies cottage-owners. Some cottage-country mayors have told cottage-owners to stay put and keep their infestations to themselves. People cooped up with their kids sometimes envy those with time to themselves; singletons who have had enough alone time to last a decade occasionally envy those trying to juggle kids with working from home. The pleasant novelty of Zoom-based socializing faded ages ago, as everyone realized that Zoom-based socializing sucks.
More than 8,200 Canadians are dead, most having lived long lives but many having died in grim and lonely circumstances. In future, considerably more deaths and distress will be associated with the lockdown itself. The psychological effects of this will be studied for decades. If war isn’t quite the right analogy, it’s certainly closer to a war than anything that has been contested on Canadian soil in my or my parents’ lifetime, and it will come at a greater cost to the whole of society than any actual war that Canadian forces have fought over that time. It’s a terrible shame that as a nation, we didn’t win.
June 19, 2020
National Defence Headquarters needs to go on a crash diet
Ted Campbell knows how Canada’s NDHQ got into the state it is in, and has some suggestions for getting it out of its critical state of administrative morbid obesity:
Major General George R. Pearkes Building in Ottawa, home of National Defence Headquarters on Colonel By Drive.
Photo by DXR via Wikimedia Commons.
National Defence Headquarters is a HUGE place with diverse functions. First: it is, simultaneously, the management centre of the Department of National Defence, which is a very large (and complex) department of government that includes the Canadian Armed Forces (but the CAF is just one of DND’s “arms”), and it is the national command centre for the Canadian Armed Forces. Second: it is one of the biggest budget departments in Canada. Defence spending supports many hundreds of thousands of jobs in the military, in the civil service and all across the spectrum of Canadian industry from the highest of high-tech enterprises through to janitorial services. It is never surprising when things fall through the cracks in any large, complex organization, is it?
But there are two other problems:
As defence spending has declined, year-after-year, always in terms of GDP and often in terms of its share of the public accounts and sometimes in real, dollar terms, too, the headquarters, especially the military’s command and control (C²) superstructure, has grown. A bit of growth is not surprising when one must “do more with less” as I well remember being told during the rounds of budget and staff cuts in the 1990s. Although to their credit, defence ministers in the Chrétien-Martin era imposed a series of staff cuts on the HQs in Ottawa, there was a bit of growth in the (largely civil service) policy and financial management areas. But in the Harper era that all changed. Budget pursestrings were loosened by governments after 2001 and, under e.g. Conservative Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor the Canadian Forces began to receive some much needed new equipment including the big CC-177 Globemaster III transport planes, new CH-147F Chinook transport helicopters and Leopard tanks ~ all procured on sole-source contracts, over the objections of many. But then O’Connor was replaced by Peter MacKay and, it appeared to me, the generals and admirals took over and the HQ went from lean to overweight and then to downright fat. Then, in the Trudeau era, the HQ went from simply being fat to being morbidly obese. There are, now, hundreds of admirals and generals, managing a military force that numbers in the (too few) thousands. Even serving flag and general officers have told me that cutting the highest ranks by ⅓ would do no harm and some retired officers and civil servants (with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the HQ at the highest levels) say that a 50% cut would be healthy. The simple fact is that the Canadian Forces have too many very smart, very able senior officers with too little real work to do. They, not surprisingly, fill the time available with “work” of their own devising which, often, involves creating new and more complex command structures which require more and more general officers. The process seems unconstrained from the top.
Why? What happened?
Well, it started with the very best of intentions. I recall being told by one very, very fine general that we, the Canadian Forces, must, above all else, be “interoperable” with our American allies and that, he explained, meant adapting to their command and control system, poor as he thought it was. He said, and he meant, adapting, not adopting. But he retired and a new generation of officers entered the most senior ranks and some of them seemed, to me, to be more interested in adopting than in just adapting to. We seemed, in the 2000s, to be seized by a giant case of military penis envy and we seemed to want to have a local version of whatever the Americans had. The result was a proliferation of new command and control organizations, all put in place as the combat elements were actually shrinking. The end result was an unconscionable GOFO [General Officer/Flag Officer] to combat sailor and solder ratio and a bloated and, in my opinion, weak and inefficient command and control superstructure.
June 17, 2020
“We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”
Theodore Dalrymple on the use of badges within the NHS to virtue signal and compel compliance in the unwilling:
Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.
In Britain’s highly-centralized, almost Soviet-style healthcare system, the National Health Service, staff are being encouraged all over the country to wear little rainbow-coloured metal badges to show that they are homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual-friendly, and do not discriminate against them. The wearing of these badges is voluntary, but about 3,000 of the staff of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals, for example, now wear them. The self-congratulatory website of those ancient hospitals — St. Thomas’ is over 800 years old and Guy’s was founded in 1721, now combined into one administrative unit — says:
The badges are just one way to show that Guy’s and St Thomas’ is an open, non-judgmental and inclusive place for people that identify as LGBT+ [which] stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender). The + simply means we are inclusive of all identities, regardless of how people identify themselves.
This language, which combines the unctuous with the bureaucratic, is typical of the way British hospital administrators express themselves nowadays. And if, as Buffon said, the style is the man himself, we may justly fear for a semi-totalitarian future.
By implication, the badges bully the staff, for if any of them refuse to wear one, their refusal is likely to be taken to mean that their minds are closed, judgmental (in the sense of being censorious, for even the attempt to avoid making judgments is itself based on a judgment), and exclusionary. It is to imply that they would deliberately treat any patients in the above mentioned categories differently and worse from all other patients. Wear the badge or declare yourself to be a bigot.
This is an insult to all those people who worked before the advent of the badges (or who now refuse to wear them) who strove and continue to strive always to treat patients to the best of their ability, irrespective of the many categories into which any individual patient falls. In my experience, the great majority of doctors have always tried to do this.
Let me give an example. Working as I did as a doctor in prison, I met many men who had done terrible things. I treated them, as a matter of course, to the best of my ability. I remember, for example, a man who had strangled three children and then impaled them on railings. Though I did not think he was a good man, and in that sense passed a judgment on him within the privacy of my mind, I treated him for his bronchitis exactly as I would have treated anyone else with bronchitis. I did not find this difficult in the least and do not claim any special merit for having done so, for it is only what all my colleagues in the profession did — as a matter not only of course, but of principle.
A couple of years ago, I read the diary of one of Marshal Pétain’s doctors during the latter’s imprisonment after World War II. The doctor had been a member of the Resistance and had no reason to love Pétain, to say the least: Pétain’s supporters would have had not a second thought about killing him if he had fallen into their power. Yet, as the diary makes clear, the doctor treated Pétain, who by then was demented, with the greatest humanity. Moreover, the doctor refused to publish his diary, despite the financial advantage of doing so, because he thought that publishing it would be to break patient confidentiality. It was only after his death, and more than half a century after Pétain’s, that the diary was published. The doctor’s adherence to his medical ethics was impressive, and he needed no badge to proclaim his virtue.
June 12, 2020
QotD: Homelessness in America
90% of the homeless in America and the hard core ones are people with mental health issues, people with drug abuse issues and people who have found they can live without having to do anything for it, and can be “free” and outside society. I’ve overheard conversations in the park, and I suppose that most of the people who “dropped out” in the sixties are dead, but a lot of them are alive and going from soup kitchen to free clinic, with a bit of begging in between.
Yes, there are entire families in this system, including homeless children – but for them to stay in it, the parents need to have some sort of serious issue. Otherwise, even if they can’t find work, there is assistance available to get them at least into public housing, which, nightmarish though it is, is not living in the park.
I’m not going to pretend this doesn’t happen to normal families too – see where I came very close to that level and more than once too – but normal families usually tend to bounce back. They go through a few months of mess and horror, and then they claw back to some semblance of normalcy. (This might change as our economy dives and programs of necessity get cut. The ones for the DESERVING poor will be cut first, of course, since they rarely riot.)
The problem with this is that when people get appalled at the conditions the homeless live in and start offering “homeless services” there is an entire network, not just of homeless but of social workers who direct the homeless to the cities with better services.
I swear to you and I’m not even joking that right now there are plenty more homeless on Colorado Springs streets than in Denver, despite the Springs being much smaller.
The Springs also has its soup kitchens and other services downtown and within easy walking distance of each other.
This means downtown businesses are closing, except for bars and restaurants which can control access. And that the library is of course a place to camp in the cool/warm during the day.
It means more than that. We moved within easy driving distance of downtown, because when we lived downtown when we first came to Colorado Springs, I used to take walks every day. When we moved to our little mountain village, without these, I gained ten pounds a year. I used to love walking downtown, dropping by the deli and the three bookstores (only one left, and it’s MOSTLY a restaurant now) checking out the other little shops which ranged from yarn to weird import crafts.
Now those are gone. Worse – the last two times I walked downtown alone (i.e. without commanding the muscle, aka older son to go with me) someone FOLLOWED me and I had to employ stuff from my childhood to lose them. Once it was a large and addled looking male, and yes, he was following me. And once it was TWO large and addled looking males. For the icing on the cake – not related to this, but from a blog entry – I clicked on the sex offenders registry. Yes, I know, a lot of people there are there because someone accused them and was never proven. Our local one at least has notes on whether it’s accusation, trial or conviction and also whether the crime was against children or adults.
The downtown zipcode is FULL of registered sex offenders who’ve done hard time and who have committed their crimes against adults. The faces are very familiar from my walks, and yep, one was the guy who tried to follow me.
Sarah Hoyt, “Of Books, Compassion And Cruelty A Blast From The Past From June 2013”, According to Hoyt, 2020-03-10.
June 10, 2020
“Gender critical” feminism
Barbara Kay finds herself in agreement with an academic who, having come from a Marxist and radical feminist background, she would not normally have much in common:
Kathleen Lowrey, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, ascribes much of her intellectual formation to Marxism and radical feminism. Not, I think my regular readers would agree, someone with whom I would normally have a great deal in common. And yet, in this strange cultural moment, Prof. Lowrey and I find ourselves amicably united in the service of a mutually revered ideal. I write this column with ardent sympathy for her in her present predicament.
Academics’ time is generally split 40/40/20 amongst, respectively, research, teaching and “service” to their community — meaning committees, mainly. Until late March, Lowrey served as associate chair for undergraduate programs on behalf of the department of anthropology. Following anonymous complaints about her views from one or more students to the university’s office of safe disclosure and human rights, as well as to the dean of students, Lowrey was asked to resign. She was not given a precise reason, only told that because she holds “gender critical” opinions, she was making the learning environment “unsafe” for the anonymous complainants who felt that her views caused them “harm.” (It’s not clear — Lowrey believes it is doubtful — that the complainants were even taking her courses.)
“Gender critical” refers to what was shortly ago normative feminism doctrine in considering biological sex of primordial importance in fighting for women’s rights. Where the traditional rights of biological women collide with asserted rights of trans women — sport, intimate spaces, rape crisis centres, prisons — gender-critical feminists join with conservatives like me in insisting that biological women’s rights must prevail: for the sake of their safety, privacy and right to a level playing field.
Until what seems like a few minutes ago, there was nothing controversial about this opinion. But now there is. The only “correct” opinion to hold is that gender expression trumps biology in any rights-based claims. And in academic circles, Lowrey’s views, which she is at no pains to hide on campus and off, are a form of apostasy that cries out for punishment.
May 27, 2020
Comprehensive planning and communication failures are the hallmark of Canada’s response to the Wuhan coronavirus epidemic
Chris Selley understands why the internet shaming community is dunking on the apparently large number of people who crowded into Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods park over the weekend but doesn’t feel the need to join them:
Screencap from a CBC report on unorganized social distancing civil disobedience at Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods Park on Saturday.
Human beings need to get outside and socialize. They have breaking points, and many are very understandably at them. (An aside: I can’t help noticing how many people venting fury on social media have also treated their followers to images of their back-patio office setups, or updates on their new vegetable gardens.) There is also no surplus of parkland in downtown Toronto. Photographic evidence suggests other neighbourhood greenspaces were very busy as well, though not to the same extent.
In other words, this was always going to happen. So the time is long past when politicians like Ontario Premier Doug Ford or Toronto Mayor John Tory should be able to cluck their tongues or stamp their feet at such people and expect their constituents to nod along in solidarity.
Jurisdictions facing significant COVID-19 outbreaks had one finite period of time in which to try to knock this bastard virus down. After that period of time, the socioeconomic costs of the shutdown would become unsustainable and the economy would have to reopen. We’re seeing that happen all over the world right now: in essence, countries are rolling the dice. If they did well in the allotted time, fewer people will have to die in the name of getting back to normal.
The federal, Ontario and Toronto governments have not done well — certainly not to any extent that justifies their leaders’ soaring approval ratings.
The feds have been abysmal since even before Day One, with Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam actively downplaying the threat. We shipped 16 tonnes of personal protective equipment to China with no viable plan to replace it. Whatever you think of travel bans as an anti-pandemic measure, the government undermined its own credibility by insisting they don’t work, then changing course 180 degrees over the course of a weekend. Most astonishingly, the feds at first utterly failed to communicate the most basic advice to returning travellers — advice such as “don’t stop for groceries or at the pharmacy on your way home.”
And Tam’s initial ludicrous “masks don’t work” narrative has grudgingly evolved to support the use of non-medical masks “where social distancing is not possible.” But the federal government’s official advice on “safe shopping” — indeed the entire web page titled “COVID-19 and food safety” — still doesn’t mention masks, even as the berth shoppers give each other seems to narrow by the day. This anti-mask stance seems to be ideological, bred in the bone.
May 18, 2020
Safetyism
Safetyism is a disposition that has been gaining strength for decades and is having a triumphal moment just now because of the virus. Public health, one of many institutions that speak on behalf of safety, has claimed authority to sweep aside whole domains of human activity as reckless, and therefore illegitimate.
I suspect the ease with which we have lately accepted the authority of health experts to reshape the contours of our common life is due to the fact that safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears. At the level of bureaucratic grasping, we can note that emergency powers are seldom relinquished once the emergency has passed. Together, these dynamics make up a kind of ratchet mechanism that moves in only one direction, tightening against the human spirit.
Acquiescence in this appears to be most prevalent among the meritocrats who staff the managerial layer of society. Deferring to expert authority is a habit inculcated in the “knowledge economy”, naturally enough; the basic currency of this economy is epistemic prestige.
Among those who work in the economy of things, on the other hand, you see greater skepticism toward experts (whether they make their claim on epistemic or moral grounds) and less readiness to accept the adjustment of social norms by fiat – whether that means using new pronouns or wearing surgical masks. I am regularly in welding supply stores, auto parts stores and other light-industry venues. Nobody is wearing masks in these places. They are very small businesses: an environment largely free of the moral fashions and corresponding knowledge claims that set the tone in large organisations. There is no HR in a welding shop.
A pandemic is a deadly serious business. But we would do well to remember that bureaucracies have their own interests, quite apart from the public interest that is their official brief and warrant. They are very much in the business of tending and feeding the narratives that justify their existence. Further, given the way bureaucracies must compete for funding from the legislature, each must make a maximal case for the urgency of its mission, hence the necessity of its expansion, like a shark that must keep moving or die. It is clearer now than it was a few months ago that this imperative of expansion puts government authority in symbiosis with the morality of safetyism, which similarly admits no limit to its expanding imperium. The result is a moral-epistemic apparatus in which experts are to rule over citizens conceived as fragile incompetents.
But what if this apparatus were revealed to be not very serious about safety, the very ideal that underwrites its authority? What then?
May 16, 2020
The Wuhan Coronavirus, the excuse for an emergency without end
Mark Steyn on the seven-hundred-and-fifty-third day of our captivity:
Emergency without end is the staple of almost every futuristic dystopia — and that’s true for real life, too. So Americans shuffle shoeless through the airports for twenty years while their governments negotiate with the very organization that enabled those attacks — the Taliban — to restore them to power. Is a culture that cannot see off goatherds with fertilizer really going to rouse itself to decouple from a global superpower that supplies everything from its crappy “These Colors Don’t Run” T-shirts to its surgical masks and pharmacy medications?
~For my own part, I have been reading ancient accounts from Occupied France and Vichy for tips on finding workarounds for restraints on the citizenry. As wily and innovative as the French Resistance were, I wonder if their efforts would even be possible in an age when cheap Chinese-made drones can hover unseen and monitor every conversation.
[…]
Even without governors terrorizing those tavern-keepers or hairdressers who defy them, the lockdown has exaggerated the contradictions: The state wants open borders for “migrants” but a security perimeter around the homes of its citizens. Maybe the absurdities become so obvious that there is widespread rejection of them. Or maybe, one by one, the poor put-upon over-surveilled citizenry take a cue from their undocumented non-brethren. Perhaps I should just mug an illegal immigrant and steal his fake ID…
~The emergency is already feeling permanent. It starts with the social norms: Dr Fauci tells us the handshake is gone for good. That’s not a small loss. I don’t care for the suggested replacements, like the lame-o hand-on-heart gesture. I bow from the neck to the Queen — and just last year I did so to her Canadian vicereine, Mme Payette. Her Excellency then stepped forward and gave me a hug. But I don’t suppose she’s doing that anymore…
People ask me why I haven’t been on TV lately. Well, I mainly like going on TV to behave like a person who’s on TV. So, if you notice, on the “Fox & Friends” live-audience shows, I come bounding in like Tigger and do a lot of gladhanding with those on the aisle (including the odd hug), and then I give Steve and Brian manly handshakes and do a little light kissy-kissy with Ainsley. And all that — the basic language of telly for seventy years — is gone, apparently forever.
[…]
The WHO, the Beijing public relations firm whose pronouncements the BBC, The New York Times et al insist on taking as gospel, now says Covid-19 is here to stay — like HIV. With HIV, it wasn’t that difficult to avoid catching it, because it required the exchange of bodily fluids, which is a fairly intense and specific degree of intimacy. With Covid, we are rolling a protective condom down over every routine social intercourse.
A contributor at the Continental Telegraph explains why he no longer supports the lockdown:
First, it turns out that the drastic steps we were taking were based on one model. That no one outside the team using it was allowed to review. We were even told that we couldn’t check the coding because it was so old & patched together that it’s too hard to follow. That’s like saying you can’t check the brakes because you won’t be able to see all the duct tape and Velcro we’re using. Further, we’re told that this software doesn’t provide the same results from one run to the next.
Next, I heard about Dr. Ferguson’s history of wildly overestimating the fatalities from mad cow disease and bird flu (50k compared to <200, 200 million versus <500 respectively). Also, the CDC’s estimate of Ebola deaths in Sierra Leone (1.4 million compared to 8k). And let’s not forget the U.S. Public Health Service’s overshoot on the number of AIDS infections in 1993 (450k versus 17k). At this point I gave more thought to the issue of modeling – prior to retiring I was an actuary and modeling was what I did for a living. A few points about how modeling works: The more complex a system is, the more difficult it is to build a good model. And, more importantly, the more difficult it becomes to test your model and confirm that it accurately mirrors the real world. And this looks like one of the most complex systems to model I’ve ever heard of. How can you test this against reality? I don’t think you can. You can run simulations and confirm it looks like you expected, but that doesn’t mean the virus behaves like your model. Another point about modeling is that the results are extremely dependent on the assumptions you’re using. And in this case two critical assumptions are how infectious the virus is and how lethal it is. We still have a poor understanding of these variables months after we started Lockdown. Then a lot of us noticed that the goal shifted from “flattening the curve” to avoid a catastrophic overflow at hospitals to Lockdown until “fill in the blank” (in some states a vaccine, in others no deaths for 14 days, etc.). And the lockdown rules are inconsistent and illogical – in Michigan you can’t buy plant seeds but you can buy lottery tickets. To add insult to injury, many of the people with their foot on our necks violate the rules (the mayors of Chicago and New York, Dr. Ferguson, etc.). I’m stunned and angry at how little attention the human costs of the Lockdown receive. We know that this will lead to increased suicides, homicides and drug overdoses. Let’s not forget more child abuse, domestic violence, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, the list of miseries goes on a very, very long way (I may write up an article just on this, the Lockdown harpies should have to admit to all the harm they’re so enthusiastically spreading).
May 9, 2020
Sidewalk Labs pulls out of their Panopticon-on-the-harbour project in Toronto
Chris Selley clearly hoped the Google-affiliated Sidewalk Labs would turn out to be a benign addition to the Waterfront:
Sidewalk Labs Toronto demo, 17 April 2019.
Photo by Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Scalable Grid Engine via Wikimedia Commons.
It would be a mixed-income and family-friendly community: 20 per cent low-income and 20 per cent middle-income, with 40 per cent of units two-bedrooms or larger. It would be fantastically energy-efficient. It would discourage waste production using “pay-as-you-throw chutes” leading to pneumatic tubes that would rocket your trash, recycling and organic waste to the proper facilities.
Some of the details seemed a bit far-fetched, and some of the ideas came to naught at the design stage. But the Google family of companies is not known for wretched failure. To many Torontonians, it was a compelling vision.
Unfortunately, a lot of the very people it was designed to impress hated the hell out of it.
[…]
So there is blame to go around — and to be clear, no one is officially blaming the city bureaucracy or the project’s opponents for scuppering the deal. But the fact is, Sidewalk simply wandered into the wrong saloon. Toronto is an intensely conservative city in the strictest sense of the word. Its establishment doesn’t even believe things that work in other cities would work here. It’s why we pilot-project food carts to death, instead of just allowing food carts. It’s why we’re closing parks and crowding people on sidewalks during the pandemic, instead of following other the lead of other cities and dedicating roads to safely spaced pedestrians and cyclists. When Ontario loosened alcohol regulations, many Torontonians predicted tailgate parties and picnics-with-wine would lead to mayhem — and they really, really meant it.
Sidewalk wanted to do something no other city had ever done. You can imagine the terror and confusion it sowed. And that was over 12 acres — six football fields. Toronto has a great many things going for it. I have argued in the past that its conservatism, broadly speaking, has served it very well. But Sidewalk reminded us what we trade for that. If we can’t take a bit of a chance on 12 acres, it doesn’t bode at all well for the many hundreds of other acres in this city that have been begging for redevelopment my entire lifetime — not if we want them to be at all innovative or memorable, anyway.
May 4, 2020
Government “problem solving” is an oxymoron
Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan explain why you should back away quickly when you hear a variant of “We’re from the government and we’re here to help”:
A central theme of our recent book, Cooperation & Coercion, is that all governments are hamstrung when they attempt to fix problems. Policymakers suffer from the knowledge problem: they don’t know enough to foresee every eventuality that will follow from what they do. Politicians see a problem, speak in sweeping statements, then declare what will happen, assuming their edicts will settle matters. But that is always just the beginning. More often than not, all manner of unintended consequences emerge, often making things worse than they were before their policies went into effect.
Consider the United States’ three high-profile wars against common nouns over the past half-century. Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty in the 1960s, Richard Nixon a War on Drugs in the 1970s, and George W. Bush declared a War on Terror in the early 2000s.
How are those wars working out? Because a back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that we have spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $23 trillion in our attempt to eradicate poverty, drugs, and terror. Not only have we not won any of these wars, it is unclear that any of them can be won. These three so-called wars have managed to saddle future generations of taxpayers with unprecedented debt. And, as is the case with all coercive endeavors, policymakers ask us to imagine how bad things would have been had we not spent the trillions we did spend. And then they ask for even more money. So now we have unwinnable wars along with institutionalized boondoggles to support them.
We see the same sort of thing happening now in the face of the COVID-19 threat that has induced the largest panic attack in world history. In the name of safety, policymakers have shut down myriad productive endeavors. And there will be a raft of unintended consequences to follow. We are already seeing them manifest, and they portend potential disaster as supply chains fail.
The first cracks in US supply chains appeared in the meat industry. Smithfield Foods, reacting to a number of workers contracting the virus, shut down its Sioux Fall plant. Kenneth M. Sullivan, President and CEO, explained in a press release that, “the closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply.” But it’s not just the meat plant that’s implicated. It’s everyone from the cattle farmer to the person who cooks dinner, and there are a number of people who have a place in that process who might first escape attention. The people who make packing materials needed to ship food, the maintenance workers who service machines up and down the supply chain, the truck drivers who move product from one place to another, the grocers who sell the product, the daycare workers who care for the grocers’ children so the grocers can work, and many, many more are all at risk.
[…]
In declaring some jobs “necessary” and others not, in focusing on one supply chain versus another, policymakers show how little they know about the nation’s economy. In their view, they can simply declare things they want to happen, and then those things will happen. But that is not how economies work. An economy is the sum total of everyone’s activities, and when the government declares that something must happen, all kinds of other things happen too.
Consider how all the “non-essential workers” have been sent home for the past two months. Who gets to declare which workers are non-essential to the economy, and by what standard? Most assumed that politicians had the correct answers to these questions. But, as we are discovering, there is no such thing as “non-essential” workers. All workers are essential. How do we know? Because their jobs existed. Profit-driven businesses do not create non-essential jobs. Those people’s jobs were essential to their employers. Further, those people’s jobs were incredibly essential to the people themselves. They need their wages to pay the rent, buy their food, make their car payments, and for everything else that makes their lives livable.
But policymakers simply declared them non-essential, as if there would be no fallout from that decision.
April 29, 2020
QotD: “Ethical” ways to prevent scientific progress
The hobbling of research is not just a symptom of bureaucratic mission creep. It is actually rationalized by many bioethicists. These theoreticians think up reasons that informed and consenting adults should be forbidden to take part in treatments that help them and others while harming no one. They use nebulous rubrics like “dignity,” “sacredness,” and “social justice.” They try to sow panic about advances in biomedical research with far-fetched analogies to nuclear weapons and Nazi atrocities, science-fiction dystopias like Brave New World and Gattaca, and freak-show scenarios like armies of cloned Hitlers, people selling their eyeballs on eBay, and warehouses of zombies to supply people with spare organs. The University of Oxford philosopher Julian Savulescu has exposed the low standards of reasoning behind these arguments and has pointed out why “bioethical” obstructionism can be unethical: “To delay by 1 year the development of a treatment that cures a lethal disease that kills 100,000 people per year is to be responsible for the deaths of those 100,000 people, even if you never see them.”
Steven Pinker, “The Intellectual War on Science”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018-02-13.
