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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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The role of a corporation and bureaucracy is to avoid risk, or more simply put, to build infrastructure to the extent that a single human cannot damage it all. The inverse of that is that humans become so unimportant that doing good doesn't affect the outcome either. Naturally, the system no longer optimizes for doing good, but for avoiding risk.

This is definitely true. But sometimes it’s out of necessity, sometimes it also happens for other reasons. Larger institutions that are sensitive to certain changes have to minimize risk as much as they can, just due to the inherent nature of the industry they’re in. If you’re in health care, you need to avoid silly mistakes that can have catastrophic consequences, or you’re always having to dodge serious regulatory penalties even though skirting them could empower you to perform much better.

It’s also one of the reasons why smaller companies and start-up's are generally faster and better at innovating wholly new ideas, but aren’t necessarily the best for developing a long-term strategic vision for them. When you’re a quick, move fast and break things type of company it’s easy to be a pioneer with that kind of risk assuming attitude.