Thread by @patio11

The good news: we got much better at running The Sort. The bad news: we got much better at running The Sort.

We, the societal we, implemented a relatively effective nationwide (and increasingly worldwide) dragnet for talent, then plucked that talent from the not-random-but-constrained walk through lives it would counterfactually have encountered and tracked it fairly narrowly.

The Sort makes many mistakes, in both directions. It leaks promising candidates. The Sort doesn’t really feel good or bad about that, because it is an emergent behavior of a system comprised of many disparate actors with differing incentives, values, and similar.

But, if the Sort would tolerate anthropomorphization (knowing which word it would award you points for, not that many, just the properly calibrated amount), it would look at many outcomes and declare them inefficient.

The Department of Public Works in a small Iowa town is a competent administrator? How competent? Because most forms of competent are inefficiently competent. The Sort would prefer him to have ended up with two OOM more budget and four OOM more impacted users.

The Sort, hearing family history, thinks that it was an obvious mistake that my father was a paralegal (swap with worst lawyer, Pareto improvement) and thinks it got closer with regards to me and still squandered a decade. Not a value judgement; just inefficient, you understand.

The Sort is incredibly aware of agglomeration effects. If one doesn’t understand them, NP, low-productivity areas also require labor forces. One will enjoy taking in the cultural delights of the world’s foremost cities when one can afford to vacation to them.

(The Sort didn’t ban building housing in those cities. It is as puzzled by that as everyone else is. It suggests it’s usual remedy: maybe if we just sort harder the problem will go away. The Sort is correct in its perception that this has worked in many contexts for it.)

The Sort is incredibly aware of criticisms of the social implications of the Sort, and has devoted an appropriate number of 90-95th percentile sorted to thinking about that important, but not very important, problem.

The Sort is quite aware that many people viscerally hate descriptions of its operations. It has decided to fib about them as a stakeholder management strategy. Capacity with encoding and decoding this sort of fibs is sorted for, naturally. They’re really quite efficient.