I may be oversimplifying here, but if I wanted to sum up what being a maze is about in a few words, I would say it has to do with a kind of Goodhart law problem: in large organizations, it is hard for the top to get information, so everything is reduced to simple metrics, and we end up optimizing for them, eventually destroying everything else. If that problem of information really is the bulk of it, the fact that your plan does not really remove the need for indirect measurements of things is the big issue, and I am not sure of what could be done to solve that. In fact, I’m not sure we could do it completely in any context: You want to reward people who “Disengage entirely with mazes and traditional distortionary incentives, competitions and signals of all kinds”, for mazes, something might be tried, but disengaging from status-seeking, attractive as it sounds, looks like saying “just disengage with cognitive biases”, good goal if you know you won’t achieve it.
More broadly, the most reliable thing I can think of to reduce these communication problems — indeed the one thing we replaced with mazes — is a lot of social capital, which probably implies limiting oneself to small communities and small businesses. Also, much more social pressure, with all its problems. To an extent, that’s the point, but it’s also something we really would want to avoid doing too much. Or it may even be that we are mainly complaining about mazes because that’s what they are already doing. I wonder to what extent the need for social capital if we don’t want to have mazes might be compensated by the fact that, compared to an hypothetical pre-mazes era, communication costs are down by a massive amount nowadays.
I may be oversimplifying here, but if I wanted to sum up what being a maze is about in a few words, I would say it has to do with a kind of Goodhart law problem: in large organizations, it is hard for the top to get information, so everything is reduced to simple metrics, and we end up optimizing for them, eventually destroying everything else. If that problem of information really is the bulk of it, the fact that your plan does not really remove the need for indirect measurements of things is the big issue, and I am not sure of what could be done to solve that. In fact, I’m not sure we could do it completely in any context: You want to reward people who “Disengage entirely with mazes and traditional distortionary incentives, competitions and signals of all kinds”, for mazes, something might be tried, but disengaging from status-seeking, attractive as it sounds, looks like saying “just disengage with cognitive biases”, good goal if you know you won’t achieve it.
More broadly, the most reliable thing I can think of to reduce these communication problems — indeed the one thing we replaced with mazes — is a lot of social capital, which probably implies limiting oneself to small communities and small businesses. Also, much more social pressure, with all its problems. To an extent, that’s the point, but it’s also something we really would want to avoid doing too much. Or it may even be that we are mainly complaining about mazes because that’s what they are already doing. I wonder to what extent the need for social capital if we don’t want to have mazes might be compensated by the fact that, compared to an hypothetical pre-mazes era, communication costs are down by a massive amount nowadays.