The Jolly Contrarian

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{{a|devil|}}Newsletter cribnotes
{{a|devil|{{catbox|newsletter draft}}}}Newsletter crib-notes
====In progress====
*[[Reasons to hope we are in a post truth world]]
*[[Contract and tort as finite and infinite games]]
*[[VAR as a metaphor for litigation]]
*[[Working from home]]
*[[The domestication of law]]
*[[Data modernism]]
*[[ABS field guide]]
*[[System redundancy]]
*[[Legal evolution]]
*[[Party A and Party B]]
*[[A swap as a loan]]
*[[When variation margin attacks]]
====More on averagarianism and customer surveys====
Customer surveys are a kind of self-serving averagarianism. To ask online subscribers "how satisfied are you with the quality of the Times’ journalism” on a five point scale from “extremely satisfied” to “extremely dissatisfied” asks the user to construct some sort of ad hoc blended average of the quality of all the writing in the paper, whereas it inevitably varies between departments, between writers, topics, articles, and even days of the week. And that average reflects the priorities and values of the individual readers, who are not the same. Some might buy the times —and therefore judge it —  for its sports coverage, others for the comment, business, politics or cultural coverage, or any combination. The times, we imagine, already knows which subscribers read which articles, so it is not learning anything useful by asking an artificial question, aggregating what are, effectively, responses to different questions, which users are already answering in the affirmative, anyway, because we should presume they buy the paper for the parts they like, and they like the parts they buy the paper for.


==[[Modernism]], [[formalism]] versus [[pragmatism]]==
Nor is there any value in carefully framing questions to drag out specific answers which may play well when presented as a graphic in an investor presentation, but which don't really reflect the customer's real interests or opinions.
*Vertex versus edge
===Crisis of confidence in the Western intellectual tradition===
*Text versus meaning
[[Cultural appropriation]] as a backwards way of looking at memetic strength.
*[[Algorithm]] versus [[heuristic]]
*Formal versus informal
*Tool versus application
*Innate versus emergent
*Obvious versus subtle
*God versus Darwin
*[[Simple]] versus [[complex]]
*Quantitative versus qualitative
*Calculated versus interpreted
*Static versus dynamic
*Stocks versus flows
*Things versus interactions
*Nouns versus verbs
*Trees versus wood
*Permanent versus ephemeral


{{Quote|“I should explain that in the Soviet scientific community in those days, mechanistic determinism held sway over all other approaches. Researchers believed that the natural world was governed by the iron law of cause and effect. This mentality was a product of the political environment.”
Basic sense of shame in the western intelligentsia, when in fact  western intelligentsia has (a) created the tools for all this hand-wringing, such as Marxism, critical theory, which grew directly out of the enlightenment tradition and arguably could not have emerged in any other culture (b) painstakingly documented and recorded and studied the indigenous cultures it was supposedly demolishing, giving them the tools for their present revival (c) facilitated the sharing and cultural transmission of its own intelllectual property — including, by the way, the concept of “intellectual property” enabling incredible advances in the standards of living of people all over the world. The remarkable tolerance for new ideas and acceptance of culture
:— Cixin Liu, ''Ball Lightning''}}
A running theme in the [[JC]] is the distinction between top-down and bottom-up of organisation models.
The financial services world is currently in the swoon of a passionate love affair with [[data]], [[technology]] and the [[algorithm]]. [[Thought leader]]s perceive an inevitable, short, path to a [[singularity]] where everything can be planned, everything calculated, everything provisioned, and reliance on on irrational, costly, inconstant, error-prone  [[meatsacks]] will finally be indefensible. [[This time is different]]; a we have before us a future of [[technical unemployment]] and unlimited leisure. The challenge is going to be figuring out what to do with all our spare time.


The [[JC]] is a crusty old refusenik, and while that is in great part a function of self-interest — he ''is'' an irrational, costly, inconstant, error-prone [[meatsack]] — there are broader metaphysical considerations at play. Before we mortgage our futures to the machine, it is worth nutting through them.
===Bowie, bonds and the bloodbath of banking===
Dilemma of banking matching long term liability to short term risks. Making a spread which is the same thing as maintaining a capital buffer comma when your assets cannot go up in value and your liabilities cannot go down. Well evidence in silicon valley bank which locked itself into long-term assets at low interest rates, meaning it had absolutely no upside and significant Downside on them even without credit loss, while it's liabilities were deposits comma being extremely short term, were very sensitive to interest rates and could be withdrawn at the moment's notice. The trick to making the business work is to manage that gap semicolon this as we have seen it's partly a function of treasury competence and partly a function of market confidence petards and black ducks flap around.


===[[Modernism]]===
This is of course hardly new to silicon valley bank and has been the perennial problem with which banks must wrestle. The classic bank lending activity is a mortgage: collateralized, secured over real estate, but long dated and something the bank must commit to for a long period of time stop banks generally fund these mortgages with short dated instruments such as deposits.
The top down models are basically “[[modernist]]” in the sense of Le Corbusier’s urban planning.  They view organisations as [[complicated]] machines, ultimately directed and controlled by a homunculus sitting at the bridge in a kind of  [[Cartesian theatre]]. [[Form]]al design is important, and follows (centrally determined) function; the better regimented the parts of your contraption and the more efficient it is, the better it will navigate the crises and opportunities presented by the environment in which it operates — the market. Modernism regards the market — for all practical purposes — as an infinitely complicated mathematical problem: hard, but ultimately calculable.  Modellable. So when the model turns out not to work, the answer is to develop it.  


Thus Basel I was 20 pages, Basel II, 60 pages, Basel III 400 pages. We are asymptotically tending to to perfection.
How to manage that risk? Largely, by diversity on both sides of the ledger. Banks would lend at scale to thousands or hundreds of thousands of homeowners and take deposits, x-scale from thousands hundreds of thousands or millions of depositors. The basic play was that such diversity would give the depositors confidence not to all withdrawal their money at once comma and on the asset side would give the bank confidence that not all homeowners would default on them mortgages at once. It became a matter of actual aerial management; Banks new that some part of its deposit base was liable to withdrawal bracket and deposit); and new that some part of its asset base was liable to default. It didn't need to know which part; it could manage actuarily on the assumption that, say, 5% of a mortgage portfolio might default over a given period.


These shortcomings in engineering and technology mean we cannot (yet) fully solve that problem. But we should prioritise the algorithm, and deploy humans in its service. We still need humans to make sure the machine operates as best it can, but the further humans in the organisation get from that central executive function, the more they resemble a maintenance crew: their task is simply to ensure the orderly functioning of the plant. As technology advances, human agency can be progressively decommissioned.  
Bank regulators would manage for that risk by requiring banks to hold a level of capital against its mortgage book that more than covered that default rate.


The modernist narrative focusses on what it can see, which is the content of its own model. Its baseline is immediate, costless performance of the program. Positive variance from this baseline is not possible: as with a Newtonian equation, real world performance means an inevitable loss of energy and increase in entropy: the goal is to lose as little energy as possible.  
Banks grew more sophisticated, as did bank regulation, and different capital ratios might be applied to different trading and banking books based on this actuarial assessment of the embedded risk.


In Newton’s theory, acceleration equals mass times force. In the practical world, acceleration is inevitably less than mass x force. We know that friction, gravity, heat, entropic energy loss means in the real world, observed A will never be quite amount to M*F. Engineering and environmental control move real A closer to theoretical A, but it is practically impossible for real A to equal theoretical A, and ''theoretically'' impossible to exceed it. Engineering is there for a negative sum game: no amount of engineering, efficiency or insight can on yield an acceleration equal to or greater than M*A.  
But how to manage, actuarily, that embedded risk? How, indeed, to know exactly what it was? As long as this risk was buried in the books of the financial institution there were experts who could model the probabilities based on historical defaults of similar mortgages. It's all very quantitative and analytical. Regulators would scrutinize this actuarial model, because it would determine capital calculations, but other than specific equity analysts, it held little interest outside the institution.


The [[modernist]] disposition holds that the same is true in an organisation.


Human operators create a great deal more [[entropy]] than machines. If the only measurement is flawless performance of an [[algorithm]], humans must be worse at it then machines. There is no credit given to insight, diagnosis, creation of alternative models or narratives comma because in the the modernist framework, there is no such thing as a valid alternative model. Economics is a kind of applied physics. There is no room for alternative facts.
In essence what are bank risk analyst would be doing was analysing the incidence of defaults over a given economic cycle and extrapolating from that a likely worst case scenario for defaults on the portfolio within a “liquidity period” — the time it would take the bank to foreclose on its loan get out of its risk position.


{{physics envy quote}}
The likelihood of default of course varies through the economic cycle: for most of it, secured lending is very safe: known to value ratios traditionally were not often greater than 70 percent, meaning a bank would be covered for its whole claim in every situation except where the property value dropped more than 30%.  and defaults are almost nil. During stressed parts of the cycle (following financial crashes and so on) that default level can rise to five or possibly ten percent of the portfolio.


If it is true that bettering an [[algorithm]] is impossible then it stands to reason: [[meatware]] is expensive and inconstant: the largest risk to the organisation is [[human error]], thus the strategic direction of an organisation’s development is to eliminate where possible the need for human intervention. Where that is not possible, human activity should be constrained by rigid guidelines and policies to reduce the probability of mishap, and monitored and audited to record and correct those errors that do happen top prevent them happening again. To the modernist, malfunction and [[human error]] are overarching business risks.
This meant that even in a stressed situation the great majority of the portfolio was completely safe.  


This worldview is one that appeals to many people in business management. Personally I find it it desolate. But desolation, of course, is no argument against it if it is correct.
But, which 10% was not? Therein the dilemma; therein the problem. Since I don't know which thousand of my 10,000 mortgages will default,<ref>it is a little more complicated than that because collateralized loans almost never recover at a zero value, so that 10% loss might be spread over 30 or 40% of the portfolio, but the principal remains the same for every $10 invested, 9 comes back.</ref> we must apply a capital charge against to ''all'' of them. If only we could know definitively that these 9000 mortgage would not default we could apply a lower capital rating.


===[[Pragmatism]]===
Needless to say, obviously impossible: one cannot predict the future.


{{author|Richard Dawkins}} and the differential equations
Banks head to problems then: long-term liabilities that could stretch over several economic cycles and which were hard to quickly liquidate, and which attracted a hefty capital charge despite, in most times, being relatively safe Investments.


Hence the rise of the rating agency: independent Financial experts applying independent models to portfolios and calculating probabilities of default comma from which the rating agencies could derive ratings. Rating methods are of course opaque and in scrutable, but the general idea was that a triple A instrument was unimpeciably safe, and therefore would attract a lower or even zero capital charge)


Bottom-up models are, for want of a better world, “[[Pragmatism|pragmatic]]”. They see the organisation as a constantly changing organism operating with incomplete, ambiguous information in an environment that is also constantly in flux. To survive, firms must respond dynamically and imaginatively to unpredictable, non-linear interactions in the environment which is constantly shape-shifting into new configurations in unexpected, and unexpectable, ways. For a pragmatist, practical control must be exercised at the points where the organisation interacts with its environment. A firm should have talented, empowered, well-equipped people — [[subject matter expert]]s — to handle those interactions. Those in the central management function have a holistic view of the environment and can provide aspiration and tools to the [[subject matter expert]]s, but real decision making is done by those experts at the edges, not the the [[management function in the middle]].
The independent private rating agencies gradually became embedded into the US regulatory system such that what mattered comma more than one's internal appreciation of risk, was the rating that could be applied to one's security. Near line back to our mortgage portfolios and say one has a mortgage portfolio of 10,000 properties of which any could, conceivably, default in a given period. Even in a period of extreme stress perhaps 10% would be likely to default no more.


Intellectually, the battle ought to have been won by the pragmatists long since ([[systems theory]], [[complexity theory]], even, for all its obsession with algorithms, [[evolution]]ary theory line up with pragmatism), but modernism keeps devising new ways of getting itself back in the game, and over the last twenty years has been winning. What with the giant strides of the information revolution, the forthcoming [[singularity]], [[technological unemployment]], the abolition of boom and bust in 2005, and the effective management and distribution of financial risks through sophisticated financial derivatives (amirite?), it is easy to be lulled into a sense of security.
===Music royalties===
This same problem of predictability of future income streams applies in many areas of finance. Credit card receivables, automobile loans, and even songwriting royalties.


Getting down amongst the [[elephants and turtles]] is not to everyone’s taste, but if you do it helps to see the planet on top of it more clearly. Here’s a distinction to draw: between things and interactions between things. ''[[Noun|Nouns]]'' versus ''[[verb]]s''.
Imagine you are an otherworldly, androgynous, boundary pushing British musician from the 1970s. Buy the 1990s you have behind you 25 error defining albums and about catalogue of music which has defined a generation of which the JC proudly declares membership. People still listen to your music and you have a healthy forward flow of royalty income. But it's in determinate, and it's in the future. Cash in hand is so much better than cash you may or may not be paid in a year's time.


===The illusion of permanence and the Ship of Theseus===
==Rokos short primer==
We see that even many of the markers we treat as formal, fixed and permanent are really temporary: the Dread Pirate Roberts effect: the personnel comprising a corporation ''change'' over time. Likewise institutions: corporations merge, change business models, change locations, move into different markets. IBM of 2021 is very different from the IBM of 1971.
... Punting on interest rates


But the individuals may be fleeting and transitory; the residue they leave behind is not: The corporation’s devotion to the [[Form|formal]] means that successive individuals become progressively constrained by their predecessors actions and decisions — even if, in the mean time the dynamic considerations that led to the decision no longer prevail. A rule that has been there for a long time, but that no-one knows the provenance of, acquires a kind of mystical quality. I think this is the inverse of the “Lindy effect”.


===The illusion of significance===
==Hammer of the gods==
Because we can see the formal structures easily we tend to imbue them with significance, and assume the static connections between the formal structures are what matters. For example the [[org chart]]: this places every person in a firm in a logical, hierarchical relationship to everyone else, and can be neatly and easily controlled, that’s not to say many organisation charts become positively Byzantine.
When the lender of last resort is a small guy with a dog. What happened to landsbanki and glitnir


There is much management theory around the relationship of “spans” and “layers”<ref>[https://www.google.com/search?q=spans+and+layers Let me google that for you].</ref> optimal organisation charts no more than 5 layers of management; no more than 5 direct reports and so on. This, from [https://peoplepuzzles.co.uk/news/ive-got-too-many-direct-reports/#:~:text=Around%20five%20direct%20reports%20seems,really%20hold%20the%20business%20back People Puzzles], is pretty funny:
==The great deposit withdrawals==
==Where are grads going==


<small>{{quote|'''How many is too many?''' <br>Around five direct reports seems to be the optimum number, according to Mark and Alison, although there are some scenarios where up to nine can work.<br>When it comes to the senior team in a company, however, too many people reporting directly to the owner manager can really hold the business back. Alison recalls working with someone who had 13 people reporting directly to her. “She had to do 13 [[Performance appraisal|appraisals]] at the end of every year!” she says. “It simply wasn’t an effective use of her time.”}}</small>
==Bad apples 2==
Particular the curious recent phenomenon of corporations transmogrify in themselves into moral guardians.  


Witness the formalist disposition, when the most significant thing you can do is carry out a formal process. The ethos is this: look after the form and the substance will look after itself full stop take care of the pennies and the pounds look after themselves. But this is the reverse colon this is to look after the pounds and assume the pennies will take care of themselves.
There once was a time that corporations harboured no illusions that their role on the planet was the comparatively amoral one of generating returns for their shareholders.  


In any case you can’t encode mandatory small teams ''and'' a flat structure. There is a mathematical relationship between them: the smaller the average team, the more management layers there must be.
Some kind of mandate drift with slippage over the last 20 years which is seen corporations increasingly anxious to project and signal social and political values. These things do not come from shareholders but are generated in the executive.


And besides, this is to miss [[The map and the territory|the map for the territory]]. An organisation chart is a static map of the firm configured in the abstract, in theory, ''before it does anything''.  This is how the machine functions when it is idling. [[Org chart]]s are the plan you have ''before you get punched in the mouth''. Formal reporting lines are often the most sclerotic, rusty and ''resented'' interaction channels in the organisation. Communications up and down them — usually reluctant, strained, for the sake of it — are at best responsive to commercial imperatives, and derivative of them: the firm’s business is done only when the gears are engaged, and that means its personnel communicate with those who are ''not'' in their immediate hierarchy.  The business unit is a cog: what matters is the effect a cog has when it is engaged.
This has created at least three kinds of dissonance


But as the complicatedness of our organisations has grown we have developed more and more internal engines which engage not with the outside world but with each other in in heat generating, vibrating, noise emitting, wasteful energy consumption. Of course one needs compliance but when NZ compliance needs its own chief operating officers and and its own internal audit it drift away from optimal efficiency. I know of one internal audit department that has its own internal auditor. Who audits ''that'' function? We approach an infinite regression. But the buck must stop somewhere.
1 it is a kind of judgemental overreach whereby corporations feel entitled to impinge on and evaluate the behaviour of their employees outside the parameters of their professional roles.


You can understand the wish to focus on reporting lines — formal organistional structure — because it can be easily seen. It is is legible. It is measurable. Auditable. But it misses the organisation’s real arterial network: lateral communications that ''cross'' the organisation’s internal and external boundaries: these are the communications that employees ''must'' make — between internal specialists in different departments and with the firm’s clients and external suppliers — to get their job done and move the organisation along. Note: it is ''in'' these interactions, themselves that things happen: it is here that tensions manifest themselves, problems emerge and opportunities arise, and that these things are resolved. It is not the drill, but the hole in the wall.
2 is an old kind of dissociation of “the corporation” from the actions of its employees ''inside'' their professional roles. This is the bad apple phenomenon where the corporations manage to control themselves not as perpetrator, examples the Wells Fargo false accounting, and more recently J.P. Morgan’s studied horror at the behaviour of its former investment bank chief executive, a man who the organisation recruited, employed and promoted to its highest offices over 30 years.


These are informal interactions. They are not well documented, and from above, not well understood. They are hard to see. They are not legible. Yep everyone who has worked in a large organisation knows that there are a small number of key people, usually not in significant formal roles, who who get things done. They know histories, they have networks, they understand procedures and and, more importantly, workarounds. These are the ad hoc mechanics that keep the the superstructure on the road.
The third is a dissonance between the public musings of the organisation, particularly in the realms of social justice and ESG, and its actual historical behaviour, which may take in facilitating money laundering, financing terrorism, drugs and and chips, evading tax and assisting clients to evade tax and bracket as per above the food in its own customers on a fairly systematic scale.


They are hard to see precisely because they do not derive their significance from their formality, but from their function. From the frequency of interaction and the comprehensiveness of connection. These people are the super spreaders. They are the informal hubs of a multiple hub-and-spoke network. They earn their authority not from their formal position, nor their formal grading, but their informal reputation, earned daily, interaction by interaction.
===2022===
Machines of Loving Grace - John Markoff
Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan and Peter Drucker
Whole Earth Catalog


A map of interactions is not a top-down, God’s-eye view. It disregards the artificial cascade of formal authority, in favour of informal credibility. It reveals the organisation as a point-to-point multi-nodal network, is a far richer organisation than that revealed by the org chart. This is how the firm actually works, and and inevitably the formal organisation will frustrate it.
[[Blockchain]] and the financialisation of everything. How blockchain commits the daycare fallacy - {{author|David Graeber}}’s debt analysis


Yet no firm I know of even considers it. Yet, with data analytics, it would not even be hard to do: Log the firm’s communication records for data to see where those communications go: what is the informal structure of the firm? Who are the nodes?
Superstition → a belief based on a fear of the unknown and faith in magic or luck. Actions based on that belief can lead to ’'malign'' outcomes (e.g. ritual sacrifice) benign/neutral outcomes (touching wood, rubbing David Hume’s toe) or a method for undertaking a task you had to do anyway (putting your cricket pads on in a certain order before batting: you have to put your pads on in ''some'' order and neither is (objectively) worse than the other, so from a rationalist perspective the superstition here has no practical effect on the world at all.


Typically, ''vertical'', staff-to-manager communications don’t have those qualities. Reporting lines are more an interaction ''constraint'' rather than an indicator of productivity. They ''impede'' the firm from interacting freely.
On the other hand, acting out a superstition can have unintended psychosomatic consequences (my confidence my pads went on in the lucky way may trigger for getting into system 2? - no opportunity cost ... )
CF hubris: missing the humility of acknowledging there's something bigger than all of us out there
pascal’s wager → opportunity cost and importance of psychological safety and community consensus (believing God in Salt Lake City) → modern day superstition netting ESG (motivated irrationality = the livelihoods one can make from believing stupid things


The [[modernist]] theory is that the firm is a unitary machine that must be centrally managed and controlled from the top; therefore the more organisational structure the better.
Paradigm = system. Explains the multiple paradigms in Kuhn's model ... They are all paradigms - interlocking systems


The “agilist” advocates removing layers, disestablishing silos, and decluttering the organisational structure.
===2021===
Variation margin as source of systemic risk. Would it not be better to manage margin exposure by declining to trade? Thanks do not provide margin on the upside, so that puts a natural cap on on clients preparedness to transact. Thanks still call margin on the downside reflecting at this is fundamentally a lending business and the use of bilateral contracts banks role and regulation and capital is the primary systemic risk mitigant.


The agile theory is that risks and opportunities both arise unexpectedly, come from places unanticipated by the formal management structure, and therefore the optimal organising principle is to allow talented people at the the coalface the maximum flexibility to react to those risks and opportunities. Thus, the imperative is to have the best people, with the best equipment, in the best place to react skilfully. Those people aren’t middle managers, the optimal equipment isn’t the one that leaves the best audit trail, and that place is not the board room, much less the [[steering committee]] or the [[operating committee]]. It is out there in the jungle. the fewest number of formal impediments to their creative use by those people.
The interplay with netting being a a giveaway: variation margin + netting = worse xposure
The bilateral nature of ISDA being a great misconception


For a [[modernist]], this is inevitably a scary prospect. The [[modernist]] view is that as long as the structure is correct the quality of the people in any of the positions on the organisational structure is immaterial as they have predefined roles to perform.
The shitness of netting
 
 
'''The power of Ignorance''': The most powerful  response to a contrary idea is to ''ignore'' it.
 
“we love automation. We can automating complex things”. WRONG QUESTION DUDE.
 
It's structural questions, its new clauses its new schedules. The complexity is mind bending.”
 
 
Big ideas... Your tech needs to make the process better, bit just accelerate or anaesthetise existing process
 
Contracts and processes as formal and informal structures in systems
 
Claryllis
 
Ricky, listen, maybe, maybe death wasn’t the right word, I meant you know, he's still here, Ricky, he 's still here, he still exists in the [[space time continuum]]. The way it works is like when he's ceased to be, he actually turned into a different type of energy — [[space-time continuum]] — and the way the universe up there, the black holes and everything, they wrap around, there’s [[string theory]], that can prove that different things, that he can live here in the [[space-time continuum]], I mean that’s how the universe works, Ricky, black holes and thermodynamics can fold over time space like that so he's actually still, existing.
 
logical undecidability of libertariaism. John highs example of the right to choose which side of the road to drive on.
*Average being comprised of individuals. There is no magic, no emergence from the average. Just because cour category performs, on average, differently to another category doesn't mean you perform differently to him.
*Categories are as hoc and non-exclusive. The Simpson paradox
*The category error
*That guy
*Opportunity cost
 
Dear lord and father of mankind is the back end of a poem written during a hallucinogenic trip brought on by drinking Soma in some vedic ritual: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Brewing_of_Soma
 
Soma was a sacred ritual drink in Vedic religion, going back to Proto-Indo-Iranian times (ca. 2000 BC), possibly with hallucinogenic properties.
 
 
{{modernism versus pragmatism}}
 
==Psychology in negotiating==
Why you should call call before writing.
 
If you wanted to persuade someone of a a course of action, wouldn't you you first explain it to them?
 
What works better, a pitch or a deck?
 
Standard operating practice amongst professional negotiators is to proceed almost entirely in written form. There are a few selfish grounds for doing so: firstly it's a bit like pre preparing a performance. You don't need to be perfect, you don't need to react to to expected turns of events, and you have time to prepare the perfect answer.
 
Calling and debating live requires confidence, preparedness, and a greater command of the technical material over which you are negotiating. This is intimidating . Effective interpersonal communication also requires empathy, psychology and wit: these are are skills one generally acquires with experience and and expertise and they are generally not available from school leavers in Bucharest operating with a PlayBook on their lap.
 
So negotiators have evolved away of operating which best suits they are degree of skill and experience, and more or less guarantees and ongoing stream of work. The the orderly, leisurely, thorough exchange of correspondence. One can ensure all boxes are ticked, or processes followed, without tension comic conflict unexpected crisis or or risk of inadvertent error.
 
The cost is is the speed and waste it generates as an a inevitable by-product. The unnecessary trials of correspondence. The waiting, the over detailed drafting as each side tries to unpick the others goal. All of this can be circumvented by direct conversation.
 
Yes; this means having skilled negotiators and they are expensive. But avoiding that is a false economy.
 
===Nepotism and networks of trust===
Is nepotism the problem or is it lack of networks of trust? When when the bosses nephew gets that plum job, what is the value in it of the the credibility signal sent by the boss. I vouch for this person full stop my reputation is at stake if he he fails. In recommending him to you I have skin in the game.
 
By looking at at these arrangements purely from the perspective of unfair advantage and privileged access that they undoubtedly also have, we miss a trick. But it is true that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and deprived areas have much less opportunity of this kind. But if these reinforcing social vouching systems have value, and it seems that they do (otherwise privileged would not use them), then is not the answer to look for ways of constructing these vouchers systems amongst children who would otherwise not have them.
 
Many corporations have relationships with inner-city schools, for example, which run summer internships and similar programs. These are fantastic opportunities to create relationships of trust and recommendation. This is what networks like LinkedIn are basically designed to achieve. But are there other similar systems question mark if not, how could we invent them? Raising levels of trust in a community, however that is done, is clearly of value to the whole community.


So to understand a business one needs not understand its formal structure, but its ''informal'' structure: not the roles but the people who fill them: who are the key people whom others go to to help get things done; to break through logjams, to ensure the management is on side? These lines will not show up in any organisational structure. They are not what {{author|James C. Scott}} would describe as legible. They are hard to see: they are the beaten tracks through the jungle: the neural pathways that light up when the machine is thinking. They show up in email traffic, phone records, swipecode data.


==Turtles==
==Turtles==
Line 123: Line 181:
We have been been warning ourselves since the dawn of civilization about the folly of using magic to take shortcuts. If we take {{author|Arthur C. Clarke}} at his word that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic then are we forgetting our oldest lessons?
We have been been warning ourselves since the dawn of civilization about the folly of using magic to take shortcuts. If we take {{author|Arthur C. Clarke}} at his word that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic then are we forgetting our oldest lessons?


===[[Critical theory]], [[post-modernism]], [[modernism]] and the death of objective truth===
{{Critical theory, modernism and the death of objective truth}}
Most conspiracy theories contain a grain of truth. Some are completely true. There has to be something for the credulous people to glom onto. The conspiracy theory of our time is critical theory
 
[[Critical theory]]’s grain of truth, ironically, is that ''there is no truth''.  This is its debt to post-modernism, and it is a proposition that contemporary rationalists find hard to accept. Those on the right — {{author|Douglas Murray}}’s {{br|The Madness of Crowds}} is an articulate example — and the left
 
The irony deepens, for defenders of the enlightenment bring critical theory to book for its ignorance of obvious truths, while critical theory itself has bootstrapped itself into assembling a new set of of objective truths, which happened to be different to the conventional enlightenment ones.
 
The deep problem that critical theory has, all agree (from Christopher Hitchens, {{author|Richard Dawkins}}, {{author|Helen Pluckrose}}, {{author|Douglas Murray}} and recently {{author|Matthew Syed}}) is that something things — physical sciences are a favourite example — just ''are'' true. No amount of identifying with an alternative theory of gravity will stop you from hitting the ground if you throw yourself out of a window.
 
On the other hand [https://www.city-journal.org/american-campus-as-a-factory Jacob Howland] made the interesting assertion recently that so completely has [[critical theory]] escape its [[postmodern]] origins, that it has become captured by, of all people the [[high modernist]]s who inhabit an intellectual world that seeks to solve all problems by top-down taxonomies and computation.
 
{{quote|''An illiberal alliance of technological corporatism and progressivism is rapidly turning universities into a “talent pipeline” for the digital age. When fully constructed, this pipeline will deliver a large and steady flow of human capital, packaged in certifiable skill sets and monetised in social-impact or “pay-for-success” bonds. But the strongly particular or eccentric shapes of mind, character, and taste that make human beings, as John Stuart Mill says, “a noble and beautiful object of contemplation” would clog the talent pipeline.''}}
 
Critical theory has escaped its usual confines in the liberal arts faculties of universities and is now inhabiting the management and human resource departments of corporations, and who are using their rationalist framework to advance what is a fairly radical political agenda. [[Critical theory]] is not an alternative narrative by which we can puncture the arrogant assumptions of the capitalist class: it has ''displaced'' them altogether and is making its own arrogant assumptions in their place.
 
That's not altogether a bad thing — although the practical effects of the updated dogma seem more pronounced the further from the executive suite you go — but it seems to me to substitute one set of bad ideas with another.
 
The idea of transcendent truth — a truth that holds regardless of language, culture or power structure in which it is articulated — is not ''false'' (that would be a paradox right?) So much as ''incoherent''.  It is incoherent because, as Richard Rorty pointed out, truth is a property of a sentence about the world, not the world itself. Truth depends on language.
 
And languages are intrinsically ambiguous. This is the tragedy and the triumph of the human condition.
 
The statement there is no truth is not an article of postmodern faith, by the way: you can trace it back as far as David Hume, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty. I know, I know: all old, dead, white, men. And Nancy Cartwright.
 
If you accept the proposition that truth is a function of a sentence and therefore the language of that sentence comma for there to be a transcendent truth the language in which it was uttered would necessarily need to be complete, comprehensive, and itself true. The nearest linguistic structures that we have to to complete languages are those of mathematics and perhaps science. Yet we know that mathematics is a necessarily incomplete language something Colin from that we know that any natural language is necessarily incomplete semicolon and in the case of science we know with certainty that science is not what a complete and comprehensive statement of the laws of the physical universe. We haven't solved the universe yet. There are large fundamental unknowns; dark matter; dark energy; the incommensurability of quantum mechanics and and special relativity. Even if the concept of transcendent truth were coherence we have nothing like enough information to access it. In the same way that the fielder does not have enough physical information to calculate the trajectory of a cricket ball, and therefore pragmatically approximates it, so we do not have anything like enough information to confidently predict the scientific performance of the universe and therefore we pragmatically approximate it.


Pragmatic approximations comma being provisional, contingent, and subject to revision at any time I’m are are more tolerant, plural and liberal than concrete scientific calculations.


The lack of a a coherent concept of transcendent truth is a a roadmap to tolerance, pluralism, and liberalism. It obliges us to treat as contingent anything we know comma to expect things to change and to be prepared for new and more effective ways of looking at the world. All it requires is that we substitute a certainty about how we view the world and ash that we see it as true with a pragmatism about how we view the world, seeing it as effective.


===Power structures are all around us===
===Power structures are all around us===
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