All else equal, I would expect a secret organisation to have worse epistemics and be more prone to corruption than an open one, both of which would impair its ability to pursue its goals. Do you disagree?
No I agree with these pro tanto costs of secrecy (and the others you mentioned before). But key to the argument is whether these problems inexorably get worse as time goes on. If so, then the benefits of secrecy inevitably have a sell-by date, and once the corrosive effects spread far enough one is better off ‘cutting ones losses’ - or never going down this path in the first place. If not, however, then secrecy could be a strategy worth persisting with if the (~static) costs of this are outweighed by the benefits on an ongoing basis.
The proposed trend of ‘getting steadily worse’ isn’t apparent to me. One can find many organisations which typically do secret technical work have been around for decades (the NSA is one, most defence contractors another, (D)ARPA, etc.). A skim of what they were doing in (say) the 80s versus the 50s doesn’t give an impression they got dramatically worse despite the 30 years of secrecy’s supposed corrosive impact. Naturally, the attribution is very murky (e.g. even if their performance remained okay, maybe secrecy had gotten much more corrosive but this was outweighed by countervailing factors like much larger investment; maybe they would have fared better under a ‘more open’ counterfactual) but the challenge of dissecting out the ‘being secret * time’ interaction term and showing it is negative is a challenge that should be borne by the affirmative case.
No I agree with these pro tanto costs of secrecy (and the others you mentioned before). But key to the argument is whether these problems inexorably get worse as time goes on. If so, then the benefits of secrecy inevitably have a sell-by date, and once the corrosive effects spread far enough one is better off ‘cutting ones losses’ - or never going down this path in the first place. If not, however, then secrecy could be a strategy worth persisting with if the (~static) costs of this are outweighed by the benefits on an ongoing basis.
The proposed trend of ‘getting steadily worse’ isn’t apparent to me. One can find many organisations which typically do secret technical work have been around for decades (the NSA is one, most defence contractors another, (D)ARPA, etc.). A skim of what they were doing in (say) the 80s versus the 50s doesn’t give an impression they got dramatically worse despite the 30 years of secrecy’s supposed corrosive impact. Naturally, the attribution is very murky (e.g. even if their performance remained okay, maybe secrecy had gotten much more corrosive but this was outweighed by countervailing factors like much larger investment; maybe they would have fared better under a ‘more open’ counterfactual) but the challenge of dissecting out the ‘being secret * time’ interaction term and showing it is negative is a challenge that should be borne by the affirmative case.
Yeah, I was thinking about this yesterday. I agree that this (“inexorable decay” vs a static cost of secrecy) is probably the key uncertainty here.