The problem with random cuts is that the same people whose only skill is to play office politics are the only ones who will be left after.
I don't think it's easy to design a firing process that would outperform random chance there. In any non-random process, office politicians would always be first in line with an excuse for why they specifically should not be fired. No matter what the criteria for not getting fired are - they'll do their damn best to make sure they meet them.
I do think there's a threshold of organizational dysfunction that justifies unleashing "random destruction" upon it. Or even "total destruction" - and building it all anew.
Perhaps the tree of efficiency needs to be watered with the blood of career bureaucrats.
Random destruction might be the best kind of destruction but that doesn’t mean destruction leads to efficiency. If politicians are inevitable why would what comes next be any less susceptible to political manipulation than what we already built?
What’s step two in the revolutionary underpants gnome playbook?
1) Burn it all down
2) ???
3) profit?
> Perhaps the tree of efficiency needs to be watered with the blood of career bureaucrats.
I assume this is a bad joke because otherwise it’s extremely dangerous and ignorant. In the current climate it translates to an actual call to violence.
Jefferson’s quote is about the necessity of violent revolution which ultimately led to the systems we have today. He had a specific grievance. He desired self-determination. He won. We have it. Why are you so eager to repeat the sacrifice and hard work of our ancestors to get back to where we already are? What benefit do you see in doing so?
Career bureaucrats aren’t politicians. Those are different things. I have had many positive experiences with “career bureaucrats”. They really only exist to help. It’s why we call them public servants.
It is a lot easier to call my public utility provider and solve a problem than it is to call Facebook, Disney, or Alaska Airlines. I have had nothing but positive experiences with the IRS.
It’s easy to break things. Children can do it. What’s your plan for building and operating something if you can’t even operate what we already have?
Government agencies rarely face anything like this. TSA exists without facing a risk of being destroyed for being worthless. There is a mechanism missing.
The "step two" is to rebuild it from the grounds up. If there is any need in rebuilding it at all. Never rehire any of the old people. It's how a lot of the post-Soviet countries ended up fixing their dysfunctional government institutions.
They had to thoroughly destroy what was there and build it anew to as much as make them sort of work. There are reasons to believe that the dysfunction would have survived lesser measures - and in some countries that shied away from destruction, it did.
How do you know what can be rebuilt better? If you can identify these systems why can’t you modify them? If destruction is constructive don’t you have to concede that whatever you build next also deserves destruction? And if so why build it at all?
If you can’t articulate specific failures and propose solutions now then why would you be able to post-destruction?
What properties make a post-Soviet system worthy of keeping? Why shouldn’t those systems also be constructively destroyed? Why should we apply constructive destruction to non-Soviet systems?
If your entire plan is to break things how do you ever build? What philosophy guides your rebuilding process?
Sometimes things fail so badly that a randomly initialized system outperforms them. Sometimes things fail so badly that no system at all outperforms them. The point is: recognize that and apply destruction.
Define egregious. Why would the next thing be any different than what it replaced?
> Sometimes things fail so badly that a randomly initialized system outperforms them.
Sometimes? When?
> The point is: recognize that and apply destruction.
How do we recognize what needs to be destroyed? What are the criteria?
What you’re describing here seems incredibly careless.
If you don't find yourself saying "destroying this was a mistake" every once in a while, you aren't destroying nearly enough.
I still don’t see why we should try to cut into the bone of our society. I see no benefit to careless destruction.