On 08/16/2013 04:00 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote: > I'd say stability and trustworthiness are different things. Stability > arises almost necessarily because there are different individuals > competing for power within the organization. [...] > > Once a structure like this becomes stable, the the organization can > become immune from the truth. No one in the lower ranks has an > incentive any more to rock the boat -- everything becomes about internal > political signaling. There is no reason to be trustworthy in any > universal sense because the incentives for survival within the > organization follow a different set of rules.
I'm not convinced of the difference between stability and trustworthiness. I suppose it depends on what one means by "trust". I trust people like Penrose to behave in Penrosian ways. And I trust the Washington Post to behave in Wapovian ways. That's what I mean by trust. The point being that if I hear something from, say Rush Limbaugh, I should be able to make a fast estimation of that thing. I expect it to be Limbaugh-like. So, to me, trust is less about some universal Truth according to a grand unified theory of the universe. It's more about model-ability. > In the case of the NSA, a concern is what manager has any incentive to > enforce their supposed no-US-persons rules? If, as a set of upper > level managers, they all come to believe the only important thing is > showing how signals intelligence can catch violent Islamic extremists, > and that will justify a steadily growing budget, then they just need to > design a plausible-but-weak-self-enforcement mechanism that have no real > teeth. I agree to some extent. But you're ignoring the fact that these people often do have lives outside their work. And those lives often interfere, cognitively, with their more robot-like optimization methods within their work. Of course, as more and more of us _linearize_ and self-select our interactions via tools like facebook, or on-line dating, etc., then those less linear parts of their lives will have less chance to interfere. -- ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella I have gazed beyond today ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
