Zvi has been writing about topics inspired by the book Moral Mazes, focused on a subset of large corporations where politics rather than productivity are seen as the primary competition dimension and life focus for participants. It’s not clear how universal this is, nor what size and competitive thresholds might trigger it. This is just a list of other Maze-like situations that may share some attributes with those, and may have some shared causes, and I hope solutions.
Consumerism and fashion.
Social status signaling and competition.
Dating, to the extent you are thinking of eligibility pools and quality of partner, rather than individual high-dimensional compatibility.
Acutal politics (elected and appointed-by-elected office).
Academic publishing, tenure, chairs.
Law enforcement. Getting ahead in a police force, prison system, or judiciary (including prosecutors) is almost unrelated to actually reducing crime or improving the world.
Bureaucracies are a related, but different kind of maze. There, it’s not about getting ahead, it’s about … what? Shares the feeling that it’s not primarily focused on positive world impact, but maybe not other aspects of the pathology.
Expand on that a bit—is this an employment/social maze for lawyers and legislators, or a bureaucratic maze for regular citizens, or something else? I’ll definitely add policing (a maze for legal enforcers in that getting ahead is almost unrelated to stopping crime).
Employment and social maze for both lawyers and legislators, and sometimes judges as well a police (as you mention). For lawyers perhaps there is some asymmetry between DA side and Defendant in criminal cases, not sure there. Examples for DA and police are the incentives to get convictions and so the image of making things safe and producing justice leading to some pretty bad cases of bad behavior that amounts to either framing and innocent in some cases, getting a conviction by illegal means (slippery slope situations) which then undermine the entire legal structure/culture of a rule of law society.
Similar for legislators—election results tend to drive behavior with lots of wiggle room for not actually working on delivering campaign promises or not ever actually having intended to push the advertised agenda. The incentives of being a tenured politician, particularly at the federal and state level, related to personal benefit seem poorly aligned with serving the electorate (representing constituents values rather than maximizing the politician’s income, status and the like.
There might be some dynamic related to rent-seeking results too. If rent-seeking is purely a structural reality (standard organizational costs facing special versus general interests) that should stabilize until the underlying costs structures change. But I’m not entirely sure that is the case, if we can make the cases that rent-seeking is growing then perhaps a moral maze would provide a better explanation of that growth where no shift in underlying cost are able to explain the growth.
For the regular citizen certainly the bureaucracy creates problems both for engaging with government as well as perhaps engaging with politics and elections—though I’m less sure this is a real maze problem.
Types and Degrees of Maze-like situations
Zvi has been writing about topics inspired by the book Moral Mazes, focused on a subset of large corporations where politics rather than productivity are seen as the primary competition dimension and life focus for participants. It’s not clear how universal this is, nor what size and competitive thresholds might trigger it. This is just a list of other Maze-like situations that may share some attributes with those, and may have some shared causes, and I hope solutions.
Consumerism and fashion.
Social status signaling and competition.
Dating, to the extent you are thinking of eligibility pools and quality of partner, rather than individual high-dimensional compatibility.
Acutal politics (elected and appointed-by-elected office).
Academic publishing, tenure, chairs.
Law enforcement. Getting ahead in a police force, prison system, or judiciary (including prosecutors) is almost unrelated to actually reducing crime or improving the world.
Bureaucracies are a related, but different kind of maze. There, it’s not about getting ahead, it’s about … what? Shares the feeling that it’s not primarily focused on positive world impact, but maybe not other aspects of the pathology.
We should also add law and legislation to that list.
Expand on that a bit—is this an employment/social maze for lawyers and legislators, or a bureaucratic maze for regular citizens, or something else? I’ll definitely add policing (a maze for legal enforcers in that getting ahead is almost unrelated to stopping crime).
Employment and social maze for both lawyers and legislators, and sometimes judges as well a police (as you mention). For lawyers perhaps there is some asymmetry between DA side and Defendant in criminal cases, not sure there. Examples for DA and police are the incentives to get convictions and so the image of making things safe and producing justice leading to some pretty bad cases of bad behavior that amounts to either framing and innocent in some cases, getting a conviction by illegal means (slippery slope situations) which then undermine the entire legal structure/culture of a rule of law society.
Similar for legislators—election results tend to drive behavior with lots of wiggle room for not actually working on delivering campaign promises or not ever actually having intended to push the advertised agenda. The incentives of being a tenured politician, particularly at the federal and state level, related to personal benefit seem poorly aligned with serving the electorate (representing constituents values rather than maximizing the politician’s income, status and the like.
There might be some dynamic related to rent-seeking results too. If rent-seeking is purely a structural reality (standard organizational costs facing special versus general interests) that should stabilize until the underlying costs structures change. But I’m not entirely sure that is the case, if we can make the cases that rent-seeking is growing then perhaps a moral maze would provide a better explanation of that growth where no shift in underlying cost are able to explain the growth.
For the regular citizen certainly the bureaucracy creates problems both for engaging with government as well as perhaps engaging with politics and elections—though I’m less sure this is a real maze problem.