Martin Sustrik

• Martin SustrikJun 12, 2025, 8:50 PM

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: The Way of a Skeptic

  The story herein is the retelling by Lévi-Strauss of one of the texts in Franz Boas’ “The Religion of Kwakiutl Indians” (1930). That book itself is concerned with the Kwakiutl language (original texts and translations) and does not, as far as I can see, specify the origin of the texts.

  That being said, Boaz lived with Kwakiutl in 1893-1894, so the text likely recounts events in mid- or second half of XIX. century.

The Way of a Skeptic

Hem­ing­way Case

How Epistemic Col­lapse Looks from Inside

• Martin SustrikMay 27, 2025, 8:35 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Knight Lee’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tions on Doge

  Oh, they haven’t had an option. Once private property of the means of production wasn’t banned any more, people started doing all kind of things to get their hands on the state property. Here’s Yeltsin in 1991: “Privatization in Russia has been going on for a long time, but wildly, spontaneously, often in criminal fashion. Today we have to seize the initiative.”

  As for the government services: Yes, that was one of the points I was trying to make. Saakashvili could only shut down the traffic police because it did more harm than use. If Doge tried to do the same thing, traffic chaos, traffic jams, pain and eventually electoral backlash would follow. Reforming functional institutions is much harder than reforming dysfunctional ones.

• Martin SustrikMay 27, 2025, 5:00 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Knight Lee’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tions on Doge

  It’s a complex topic, nobody is going to tell you for sure. But having lived through the period, although in Czechoslovakia, which handled it much better than Russia, I do have some intuitons. In essence, you are going to reform the economy. You are going to open the market. Arbitrage opportunities will abound. You are going to privatize. The entire economy will be up for grabs. Everything is going to be super fragile and exploitable for a while. At the same time you have the secret service inherited from the communist era. Communists were tough on crime, so people who would otherwise be mobsters often ended up in secret services. So you have this well-organized quasi-criminal network, endowed with the power of the state. And the secret policemen attend the same parties as the communist politicians who still form a majority in the parliament. Those guys are going to decide on what the law will be. No way that can go wrong.

• Martin SustrikMay 27, 2025, 4:35 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: FiftyTwo’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tions on Doge

  Not disagreeing with you, just a funny detail: The e-government thing in Estonia was at least partly motivated by the need to fight corruption:

  But while the economic situation was improving, many Estonian state institutions and infrastructure were still in disrepair and there was a constant danger of backsliding. One of the greatest risks came from inside the bureaucracy which was still replete with Soviet-era holdovers. While street violence, and petty and organized crime had been dramatically reduced, there was still a risk of corruption becoming endemic in the new system which would stymie economic growth and destroy Estonia’s burgeoning reputation as a great place to do business. Political leaders desperately needed a way to both defeat corruption and increase state capacity, each of which would be a difficult task independently. Thankfully, the youth of Laar’s cabinet and the Estonian political elite worked in the country’s favor as political leaders embraced the potential of new technologies to solve the country’s most pressing problems. After all, as former President Toomas Hendrik Ilves is fond of saying, “you can’t bribe a computer.”

  -- Joel Burke: Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia, E-Government and the Startup Revolution

  Not as pronounced in Georgia, but Saakashvilli, speaking of weeding out corruption at customs, does mention that “models are now working at customs.” It’s software that does the work.

• Martin SustrikMay 26, 2025, 12:58 PM

  13 points

  0

  in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tions on Doge

  I wrote this after reading the Cowen/​Pahlka interview. Cowen says: Maybe the agencies should be just shut down and rebuilt by the next administration? Pahlka: That would be too much chaos. Cowen: So maybe do it in gradual way? Pahlka: We’ve tried, it does not work. And my reaction was: “Oh my, I know these discussions from the 90′s.”

  It was a cool natural experiment: A bunch of countries tried reforming at the same time, used different approaches, got different outcomes. So maybe there’s something to learn there.

  Or to take the FDA example: You want to do a shake-up. How exactly would you go about that? Organizations are already in equilibrium. If you shake them, they just return to the previous state. Is the only way to shut them down and rebuild them from scratch? Or is there a less destructive, gradual approach? Again, we may get some insights from previous reform attempts, even if the problems don’t match in 1:1 way.

• Martin SustrikMay 26, 2025, 10:29 AM

  6 points

  1

  in reply to: Knight Lee’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tions on Doge

  I am no expert, but AFAIU, in the Russian case there was an economic reform, but no political reform:

  1. The parliament elected in 1990, before the parties existed. It was filled with communists and hasn’t been dissolved.

  2. The civil service remained as it was. Yeltsin: “It would have been disastrous to destroy the government administration of such an enormous state. Where it was possible to put in experienced ‘old’ staff, we did.” This is the classic gradualist argument, as seen elsewhere.

  3. Old secret services from the communist era persisted.

  The result was a relatively isolated group of economic reformers around Gaidar and at the same time takeover of the economy and state by apparatchiks, secret services and organized crime. Kind of similar to the Bulgarian example in the article.

• Martin SustrikMay 25, 2025, 5:39 PM

  6 points

  1

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Med­i­ta­tions on Doge

  Don’t read to much into it. What I meant was that common naive attitude like: “Are people are doing X? Let’s punish it by law. Are they still doing it? Let’s punish it some more.”

Med­i­ta­tions on Doge

Laugencroissant

• Martin SustrikMay 18, 2025, 10:45 AM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: sanyer’s comment on: Euro­pean Links (18.05.25)

  True about the single market. Luis Garicano had a nice blog post about those problems recently: https://​​www.siliconcontinent.com/​​p/​​the-myth-of-the-single-market

  As for the regulations, I am an outsider, but the noises from Brussels feel quite ambiguous to me. I’ll believe it once I see it.

  As for the cookie banners, those probably have close to zero economic impact, but frankly, it’s a terrible and at the same time highly visible PR for the EU.

Euro­pean Links (18.05.25)

From Com­ments on Ac­countabil­ity Sinks

Euro­pean Links (07.05.25)

• Martin SustrikMay 5, 2025, 1:59 PM

  10 points

  2

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Ac­countabil­ity Sinks

  This is what the investigation found out (from the Asterisk article):

  1. LAX was equipped with ground radar that helped identify the locations of airplanes on the airport surface. However, it was custom built and finding spare parts was hard, so it was frequently out of service. The ground radar display at Wascher’s station was not working on the day of the accident.

  2. It was difficult for Wascher to see Intersection 45, where the SkyWest plane was located, because lights on a newly constructed terminal blocked her view.

  3. After clearing the USAir plane to land, Wascher failed to recognize her mistake because she became distracted searching for information about another plane. This information was supposed to have been passed to her by another controller but was not. The information transmission hierarchy at the facility was such that the task of resolving missing data fell to Wascher rather than intermediate controllers whose areas of responsibility were less safety-critical.

  4. Although it’s inherently risky to instruct a plane to hold on the runway at night or in low visibility, it was legal to do so, and this was done all the time.

  5. Although there was an alarm system to warn of impending midair collisions, it could not warn controllers about traffic conflicts on the ground.

  6. Pilot procedure at SkyWest was to turn on most of the airplane’s lights only after receiving takeoff clearance. Since SkyWest flight 5569 was never cleared for takeoff, most of its lights were off, rendering it almost impossible for the USAir pilots to see.

  Does that make you update your heuristic?

The Ukraine War and the Kill Market

Euro­pean Links (30.04.25)

• Martin SustrikApr 27, 2025, 5:30 PM

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: TristanTrim’s comment on: Ac­countabil­ity Sinks

  In every layer, the truth is altered slightly to make things appear a justifiable amount better than they really are, but because there can be so many layers of indirection in the operation of and adherence to policy, the culture can look really different depending on where you find yourself in the class hierarchy. This is especially true with thinking things through and questioning orders.

  Not sure whather that aligns with your thinking, but Jenifer Pahlka has this nice concept of rigidity cascades. What she means is that a process get ever more rigid as it travels down the hierarchy. What may have been a random suggestion at the highest level becomes a “prefered way of doing thing” a level below that and an “unviolable requirement” at the very bottom of the hierarchy. https://​​www.eatingpolicy.com/​​p/​​understanding-the-cascade-of-rigidity