By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.A good companion to this is a recent article on South Africa, which is a vision of our future. Whites permanently disenfranchised scapegoats; Jews in their own homeland.
The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.
Much in the same way that Ludwig Von Mises showed the distribution of scarce resources via a price system that ignores the nature of human action, and instead favors central planning cannot overcome the economic calculation problem so too will artificial hierarchies be unable to overcome the distribution of human capital, or what I shall dub as the hierarchical calculation problem. From this we can surmise that artificial hierarchies will inevitably result in the same problems as artificial price systems, with the misallocation of human capital. This seems to be indisputable then that if you accept the idea that scarce resources can and will be misallocated through central planning that human beings will also be misallocated to positions of power that they should not inhabit, often to disastrous results.I've written elsewhere about precisely this phenomenon in the corporation, and its corrosive results. Synthetic hierarchies are fundamentally what produce all the bizarre pathology described in "Moral Mazes" (the single-elimination ass-kissing tournament).
“If they cannot get those machines, they will develop them themselves,” he said in an interview. “That will take time, but ultimately they will get there… The more you put them under pressure, the more likely it is that they will double up their efforts.”USG acts like the people in Taiwan don't have families over in Fujian, and a strong incentive to get recruited to assist the Chinese build this expertise. Invincible ignorance.
If mastodon is to be the poster child of the fediverse it needs to drastically simplify the requirements to run and maintain an instance. There should be a single binary, self-updating, single-user instance.It's the tragedy of the commons. The core problem to crack is how to make the costs bearable by the users themselves.
