in a world where the median person is John Wentworth [...] on Earth (as opposed to Wentworld)
Who? There’s no reason to indulge this narcissistic “Things would be better in a world where people were more like meeeeeee, unlike stupid Earth [i.e., the actually existing world containing all actually existing humans]” meme when the comparison relevant to the post’s thesis is just “a world in which humans have less need for dominance-status”, which is conceptually simpler, because it doesn’t drag in irrelevant questions of who this Swentworth person is and whether they have an unusually low need for dominance-status.
(The fact that I feel motivated to write this comment probably owes to my need for dominance-status being within the normal range; I construe statements about an author’s medianworld being superior to the real world as a covert status claim that I have an interest in contesting.)
… is that why this post has had unusually many downvotes? Goddammit, I was just trying to convey how and why I found the question interesting and the phenomenon confusing. Heck, I’m not even necessarily claiming the Wentworld equilibrium would be better overall.
FWIW I downvoted this mainly because I thought you were much too quick to dismiss the existing literature on this topic in favour of your personal theories, which is a bit of a bad habit around here.
… is that why this post has had unusually many downvotes?
Nah, I’d expect it’s more broadly because it’s making an arrogant-feeling claim that the organization-design market is inefficient and that you think you can beat it. Explicitly suggesting that a world in which the median person were you wouldn’t be like this maybe put that in sharper relief, but I don’t think this specific framing was a leading cause at all.
There might also be some backlash from people who’d previously interfaced with relatively more benign big organizations, who are weary of these sorts of models and view them as overly cynical/edgy.
My guess for the downvotes is that independent of the median-you thing, being so critical of large organizations that their existence confuses you can seem like you’re implicitly placing yourself above everyone who, for whatever reason, chooses to partake in such an organization. To them, the calculus could bear out such that it seems beneficial, and starting a post with the assumption that they’re terrible and inefficient can be irksome. That, coupled with the fact that I’m guessing there are people who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to manage organizations well and see it as difficult to opine on from the outside without wisdom from practice, who could see this and think it, well, slightly overconfident.
This is independent of whether the post is true, which I’m probably leaning much more toward than the downvotes. Though it still has a lot of upvotes on net, so trying to figure out why a small fraction of downvotes exist is harder than if they were larger.
You do seem to be implying via your assumption that bureaucracy is so bad that a world like yours wouldn’t have bureaucracy at all because it’s so inefficient and misaligned, so the assumption I was making is that the Wentworld equilibrium would be obviously better than real life equilibriums:
Like, in a world where the median person is John Wentworth (“Wentworld”), I’m pretty sure there just aren’t large organizations of the sort our world has. Nobody would ever build such an organization, because they’re so obviously wildly inefficient and misaligned. And even if somebody tried, everyone would demand prohibitively high prices to work either for the large organization or with it, since it’s just so deeply unpleasant to interface with. Nobody would buy anything sold by such an organization, or vote for such an organization to continue to exist, because the organization as an entity is so obviously both incompetent and untrustworthy. So how on Earth (as opposed to Wentworld) are large organizations stable?
Who? There’s no reason to indulge this narcissistic “Things would be better in a world where people were more like meeeeeee, unlike stupid Earth [i.e., the actually existing world containing all actually existing humans]” meme when the comparison relevant to the post’s thesis is just “a world in which humans have less need for dominance-status”, which is conceptually simpler, because it doesn’t drag in irrelevant questions of who this Swentworth person is and whether they have an unusually low need for dominance-status.
(The fact that I feel motivated to write this comment probably owes to my need for dominance-status being within the normal range; I construe statements about an author’s medianworld being superior to the real world as a covert status claim that I have an interest in contesting.)
… is that why this post has had unusually many downvotes? Goddammit, I was just trying to convey how and why I found the question interesting and the phenomenon confusing. Heck, I’m not even necessarily claiming the Wentworld equilibrium would be better overall.
FWIW I downvoted this mainly because I thought you were much too quick to dismiss the existing literature on this topic in favour of your personal theories, which is a bit of a bad habit around here.
Nah, I’d expect it’s more broadly because it’s making an arrogant-feeling claim that the organization-design market is inefficient and that you think you can beat it. Explicitly suggesting that a world in which the median person were you wouldn’t be like this maybe put that in sharper relief, but I don’t think this specific framing was a leading cause at all.
There might also be some backlash from people who’d previously interfaced with relatively more benign big organizations, who are weary of these sorts of models and view them as overly cynical/edgy.
My guess for the downvotes is that independent of the median-you thing, being so critical of large organizations that their existence confuses you can seem like you’re implicitly placing yourself above everyone who, for whatever reason, chooses to partake in such an organization. To them, the calculus could bear out such that it seems beneficial, and starting a post with the assumption that they’re terrible and inefficient can be irksome. That, coupled with the fact that I’m guessing there are people who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to manage organizations well and see it as difficult to opine on from the outside without wisdom from practice, who could see this and think it, well, slightly overconfident.
This is independent of whether the post is true, which I’m probably leaning much more toward than the downvotes. Though it still has a lot of upvotes on net, so trying to figure out why a small fraction of downvotes exist is harder than if they were larger.
You do seem to be implying via your assumption that bureaucracy is so bad that a world like yours wouldn’t have bureaucracy at all because it’s so inefficient and misaligned, so the assumption I was making is that the Wentworld equilibrium would be obviously better than real life equilibriums: