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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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Right now, the bureaucratic class in education, government, and elsewhere exert a strongly negative influence on productivity, and they have absolutely no incentives to trim down red tape to put themselves out of jobs or reduce the amount of power they hold.

I think this is a misdiagnosis of whats going on. On an individual level where someones work is individually threatened by the removal of some administrative or bureaucratic requirement they might oppose it's removal but at the same time there's at least ten people in the same organization that is burdened by said requirement and dreams of it being removed. Also, even if the requirement is removed they're unlikely to be fired, they'll be reassigned and hiring will be reduced.

It is not the administrative state that is driving this, it's the regulatory state, mostly because they don't actually have to deal with the consequences of the regulations they create. It is good to pass regulation because you're then seen as "doing something" and the costs are too diffuse to be tracked back to you by the electorate. There is noone that can say no so the regulatory complexity grows and with it cost disease. It's kind of like a spaghetti code base that is never refactored because people with power have no incentive to do so and the code will never actually fail to execute, only work worse and require more compute.

That said, opinions of a department wholly concerned with dealing with some bureaucratic hurdle is suspect when asked about the value of said regulation. But again, these are usually small parts of the overall organisation that are concerned with something else of concrete value.

It is possible that llms will help but I could see it being a wash because it also enables bad behaviour which necessitates further regulation and enforcement.