Things I Believe
No additional proof will be given.
Counterexamples will be provided to me the hard way.
Souls are real. Each human is gifted with a scrap of the Divine.
Any given thing one can buy, use, or consume has its maximum-effort, labor-of-love iteration. It is worth finding, for it is a window into someone’s soul.
Any given discipline has its bespoke corpus of rabbit holes and people who devoted their souls to them. It is worth speaking to those people and seeking a window into their soul.
Industrial supply chains are wonders of human output; a gas station sandwich-and-Red-Bull meal deal is an encapsulation of immense human wealth.
Supply chains, and thus modernity as we know it, are much more fragile than we give them credit for. Each node is a trailhead for rabbit holes and labors-of-love.
Supply chains are typically too complicated to fit in a single human brain. Thus, they must be managed by institutions.
An institution is an organization that claims responsibility for a given problem. An institution collects people with varying skillsets and combines their efforts towards a unified mission. The work does not fit in a single brain, so instead an institution must grow until it encompasses its chosen mission.
Institutions carcinize into bureaucracies because scale requires more people than can fit in informal communication structures. An institution of sufficient scale requires payroll systems, HR staff, legal counsel, middle management, and internal metrics, or else the institution collapses under the weight of information and human conflict. Bureaucracy can be done well or poorly, but it is necessary and inevitable.
Institutions have a shelf life—as they bureaucratize from scale, they collect more staff tasked with maintaining the institution (and their place in it) as opposed to directly working on the institutional mission. This decays the institution’s capacity to fulfill its chosen mission, as it is increasingly run the “secret cabal of enemies” of Robert Conquest’s Third Law.
The shelf life of an institution can be extended by an internal small team revitalizing it from within, or else it can be destroyed or prompted to change by a crisis or competitor. In the absence of a crisis or competitor, a decayed institution can survive near-indefinitely.
Small teams have an inherent advantage against old, large, decayed institutions, because they have a larger proportion of people devoted to a given mission instead of institutional maintenance.
However, there is no replacement for institutional scale. A small team can kill or co-opt a large institution, but it cannot replace the institution without growing to comparable size, and thus following the same path to scale, bureaucracy, and decay. If a small team chooses to stay small, it necessarily adopts a smaller mission scope or else suffers from scope creep.
A given staffer’s skillset exists on a continuum between generalist and specialist. Competence can exist anywhere on this spectrum, but extreme generalists and extreme specialists are typically very good at what they do.
A specialist is competent at a very specific skillset, at the extremes to the detriment to other skillsets. They work best in institutions that let them do what they’re good at and offload other tasks to someone else. I know very little about specialists, because I’m not one of them.
A generalist develops a wide base of skillsets, typically starting at an initial locus and pooling outward. Generalists are moderately competent at many skillsets at the expense of deep competence at any particular role and of legibility to institutional metrics. An extreme generalist is under-qualified for jobs with defined roles, but a strong candidate for jobs that don’t exist yet.
Extreme generalists are typically illegible within bureaucracies—either they are boxed in, or else they stretch between institutional functions in bespoke roles. However, small teams depend on generalists to fill staffing holes, particularly staffing holes that are smaller than a full-time-equivalent of work.
A core challenge with American life in the 2020s is that multiple institutions across multiple domains have all reached terminal decline at the same time. The rival institutions that could kill and replace (or seize from within and reform) these established institutions have only made themselves known in some domains.
No one has real answers about what to do about our current state of events—only ideologies.
Ideologies are valuable, because they can guide action towards the future in the absence of clearer information. They can only be falsified decades after the fact.
I’m an ideologue, too. I believe in technocracy implemented by sober experts. However, my ideology is suspect, because technocracy got us here in the first place.
Politics in the 2020s is downstream of GamerGate—and more particularly, the mid-2010s culture war between Tumblr and 4chan. GamerGate was the initial theater for the contemporary arsenal of digital politics. For many Millennials and Zoomers in the 2020s, their politics are downstream of their woes with online dating.
Artificial intelligence—specifically transformer-based large language models—is a normal technology. AI tools will reshape work in the 2020s and be ubiquitous by the 2030s. Some new technology will bamboozle me at the twilight of my career.
The consequences of runaway AI growth are limited by physical constraints on the semiconductor and energy supply chains. San Franciscans neither understand nor seek to understand those physical constraints.
San Franciscan, New Yorker, and Washingtonian elites do not care enough about normal people. They have souls, too.
If I am not bamboozled by a new technology in my middle age, it will be because the supply chains underpinning modern society have at least partially collapsed. Such a future is concerningly possible. We can always go back, and we will not like it.