Say you're the Chief of an anti-corruption agency. You're trusted with broad decision-making authority.
Your agency has a large budget, staff, career ladder, pension plan, union, &c
One day, a scientist shows you a button that will end corruption forever.
Do you press it?🧵
Your agency has a large budget, staff, career ladder, pension plan, union, &c
One day, a scientist shows you a button that will end corruption forever.
Do you press it?🧵
This thought experiment shows a number of things at the heart of our current civilizational predicament.
On some naive level, you'd expect the Chief of an anti-corruption agency not only to press such a button immediately, but to have been desperately seeking it already.
On some naive level, you'd expect the Chief of an anti-corruption agency not only to press such a button immediately, but to have been desperately seeking it already.
The fact that it seems intuitively obvious that the Chief would be motivated to find a reason not to press the button, even if it was someone deeply honest and caring, shows you how our system is structured in such a way to force good people to do bad things.
Core is that the agency's structure contains an assumption of perpetuity. By hiring, creating a career path and structures that imply the problem will never be truly solved, we both discourage the staff from looking to find a solution and motivate them to prevent the solution.
But even worse, by calling it the Anti-Corruption Agency, we prevent others from trying, giving the impression the problem is under control. And if someone has an idea, they'd be told to take it to the anti-corruption people. Surely they know how to put good ideas to use, right?
Instead what you're likely to see is the Anti-Corruption Agency having its own 10-year or 20-year plans and seemingly-plausible ideas that hit all the politically-savvy talking points, that sound great but never work.
And if another idea takes hold in the public, the Chief of the Agency will be expected to take a public stance against "pseudo-scientific approaches to the problem that come from non-domain experts and interfere with the much-needed work of the Anti-Corruption Agency"
So we have a paradox: The very existence of an Anti-Corruption Agency not only doesn't weed out corruption, it actually ensures that corruption will continue, and any good ideas to combat it will be murdered in their crib.
We do this today for every large-scale problem.
We do this today for every large-scale problem.
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