The “Organizations vs. Getting Stuff Done” post is about anarchist political activism. This is a rather unusual area—under normal circumstances organizations are a relevant tool to aid in getting things done, not an obstacle to it.
to partially rehash what was on discord and partially add more:
I don’t think saying that institutions have benefits and are effective is at all an argument against specific drawbacks and failure modes. Things that are have pros can also have cons, pros and cons can coexist, etc.
I agree that a portion of the criticism is moot if you don’t on priors think hierarchy and power are intrinsically risky or disvaluable, but I think having those priors directs one’s attention to problems or failure modes that people without those priors would be wise to learn from. Moreover, if you look at the four points in the article, I don’t think those priors are critical for any of them.
specifically, I think a variety of organizations are interested in trading off inefficiency problems of bottom-up against the information bottleneck problems of top-down. People who are motivated by values to reject the top-down side would intuitively have learned lessons about how to make the bottom-up side function.
If I find the name of the individual, I’ll return to thread to make my point about the german scientist who may have prevented the nazis from getting nukes by going around and talking to people (not by going through institutional channels)
The “Organizations vs. Getting Stuff Done” post is about anarchist political activism. This is a rather unusual area—under normal circumstances organizations are a relevant tool to aid in getting things done, not an obstacle to it.
to partially rehash what was on discord and partially add more:
I don’t think saying that institutions have benefits and are effective is at all an argument against specific drawbacks and failure modes. Things that are have pros can also have cons, pros and cons can coexist, etc.
I agree that a portion of the criticism is moot if you don’t on priors think hierarchy and power are intrinsically risky or disvaluable, but I think having those priors directs one’s attention to problems or failure modes that people without those priors would be wise to learn from. Moreover, if you look at the four points in the article, I don’t think those priors are critical for any of them.
specifically, I think a variety of organizations are interested in trading off inefficiency problems of bottom-up against the information bottleneck problems of top-down. People who are motivated by values to reject the top-down side would intuitively have learned lessons about how to make the bottom-up side function.
If I find the name of the individual, I’ll return to thread to make my point about the german scientist who may have prevented the nazis from getting nukes by going around and talking to people (not by going through institutional channels)