
The Shirky Principle (2010) - gits1225
http://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/
======
DanielBMarkham
I've worked in a lot of different organizations and have seen this happen over
and over again.

One point the author misses is that it becomes received knowledge that certain
parts of the problem are insolvable. After a dozen or two meetings trying to
solve something, the participants believe (and tell one another) that this
part of the problem can't be solved.

There's a certain pivot point that happens when you join an organization. At
first, you're asking "Why can't we do X?" and "If we do Y, won't that fix this
part of the problem?"

Each time, you are told that yes, we tried that. Several times. Really smart
people tried. It didn't work.

Now the trick here is that you don't know if that's true or not. You don't
know how many times it was tried, who tried it, what strategy they used, or
exactly how things played out. It's all just secondhand information.

Do that enough? Pretty soon you're the person telling the new guy that we've
already been down this road. It just can't be done. You stop being part of the
solution and start being part of the problem. (And then some new organization
comes along and solves the problem quite nicely. Cue up a lot of "Well, we
could do it to if we only had Z like they did!" sour grapes talk.)

For an outsider trying to help people, when you hear yourself doing this, it's
time to go. You are no longer a positive agent of change.

~~~
jnellis
Isn't there a famous monkey experiment that describes this situation. Long
after the original monkey that exhibits some (natural monkey) action and gets
reprimanded for it, other monkeys try to stop new monkeys coming into the
group from doing the same action generations later, even after the original
monkey is no longer in the group and the action is no longer reprimanded
against.

~~~
fernandopj
Yes: [https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the-
ex...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the-experiment-
with-five-monkeys-a-ladder-a-banana-and-a-water-spray-condu)

~~~
laretluval
Your link indicates that there is no evidence that this experiment ever took
place.

------
montrose
One of the scariest examples of this phenomenon is the lobbying that police
and prison guard unions do:

[https://theintercept.com/2016/05/18/ca-marijuana-
measure/](https://theintercept.com/2016/05/18/ca-marijuana-measure/)

[https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/07/us/political-gains-by-
pri...](https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/07/us/political-gains-by-prison-
guards.html)

~~~
candiodari
... until you think about what this means for CPS, and mental health
services/institutions. Then the police actions seem positively polite.

------
wycx
The post linked in the post is a better read:

[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-
complex...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-
business-models/)

------
maxxxxx
Let's just keep in mind that while we observe this in others we probably play
the same game ourselves.

Lately I have developed doubts that a system I was part in building up over
the last few years and is generally well regarded is still necessary. It's
pretty hard to admit this in public if a potential consequence may be to lose
your job. I think people would be less prone to preserving problems if they
wouldn't potentially lose their job and livelihood.

~~~
js8
> I think people would be less prone to preserving problems if they wouldn't
> potentially lose their job and livelihood.

I agree with that. And I think part of the problem is the cultural notion that
everything has to be "efficient". But a trade-off must be made between
efficiency and robustness.

I think it's a big myth that free market is efficient. No, free market is
ridiculously redundant, but what actually makes it working so well is its
robustness resulting from the redundancy.

Hierarchical planning, like in big companies, is actually efficient. Global
optimization. But being too efficient at the expense of robustness is what
leads to unexpected disasters. Being ultra-efficient means no margin for
failure. And unfortunately, the executives in big companies are motivated to
take risk and overshoot the desired efficiency.

And this idea came to public policy, where we don't want the public money to
be "wasted", so we would rather have unemployment than people who are
redundant for one reason or another. And that's what the basic income (as
other commenter noted) debate is about, essentially.

In the other comment here I also suggest 20% innovation time as a solution.
It's actually the same problem - innovation time is seen as wasted, because it
doesn't increase efficiency, only robustness.

------
maltalex
I like to think of organizations as large living things. Just like people are
made out of numerous living cells, organizations are living things made out of
numerous living people.

As such, they behave similarly to other living things is some ways. And all
living things want to keep living.

~~~
amelius
> And all living things want to keep living.

But there is often also an element of resistance to change.

~~~
ci5er
Well, yeah. Most living creatures tend to do whatever it is that they do that
has let them live until this point. Inertia is commonly a habit of the
successful.

------
duncanmeech
e.g. Tax preparation companies lobbying to prevent the tax authorities from
supplying candidate computer generated tax returns for tax payers.

------
laretluval
Could this apply to social movements too?

------
coldtea
Another aspect of this is that an organization will create busy work for
itself when none is needed.

E.g. the IT or HR department brain farting new things that solve no problem
and nobody asked for just because they can't just sit idle.

------
interfixus
More or less a corollary of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

------
upofadown
>So now the problem with unions is that they are locked into the old
framework, the old system.

Wait, there is a new system? This needs some context.

------
xycodex
H&R Block is the egregious example, with their lobbying against making tax
returns simpler for taxpayers, their customers.

------
ponderatul
Hello pharma industry

~~~
cstross
Yes _but_ ...

Big pharma currently doesn't want to cure medical conditions, it wants to sell
drugs continuously. (See also: lack of development of new antibiotics, huge
over-investment in anti-depressants, etc.)

New medicines are _very expensive_ to develop because of the extreme
regulatory environment and relatively short patent duration (two decades from
registering a patent on a drug to it going into a free-for-all of cheap
generics: development takes 8-16 years and the remaining 4-12 years are all
the time the developer has got to amortize their costs and turn a profit).

But the regulations and requirements for extensive testing exist for very good
reason, to prevent this sort of thing from happening:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_Sulfanilamide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_Sulfanilamide)
(1938: at least 100 dead)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide#History)
(1950s: use for morning sickness caused >2000 deaths, 10,000 born with severe
deformities)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vioxx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vioxx)
(2004: 88-140,000 cases of serious heart disease)

There's no solution to the problem of complex, emergent, lethal drug side-
effects on the horizon. So we have to have expensive clinical trials and
statistical tests to rule out a high risk of harm before a new drug can be
released. So the pharmaceutical industry has a baked-in incentive to maximize
revenue by ignoring certain conditions (brief/acute illnesses, especially
those afflicting the poor or the developing world) and prioritize chronic
diseases of affluence. There's no fix within the established framework,
because the established framework is defective by emergent design.

We could tinker with the international intellectual property regime governing
pharmaceutical patent duration, but that kicks the ball up to WTO treaty
level. Or we could consider non-profit bases for pharmaceutical R&D, but that
goes against the current dominant free market ideology.

~~~
Thriptic
> Big pharma currently doesn't want to cure medical conditions, it wants to
> sell drugs continuously. (See also: lack of development of new antibiotics,
> huge over-investment in anti-depressants, etc.)

I'm so tied of hearing this claim.

Gilead created a cure for hep C and tried to charge users X% of the lifetime
cost of the existing interfeuron therapy which only managed symptoms but was
not a cure. You would expect that this would be received favorably: patient
gets cured, insurance companies save money over the long term, Gilead makes a
healthy profit. Wrong; people flipped a shit, screaming about how this was
price gouging and that a single treatment should never be this expensive.
Gilead has been embattled ever since. If you want pharma companies to make
cures, inventivize them to do so.

~~~
rainbowmverse
>> _If you want pharma companies to make cures, inventivize them to do so._

You stopped _just_ short of a breakthrough. The institution of for-profit
healthcare is something we could do without. No one should suffer or die
because they couldn't get rich enough before facing a life-limiting illness or
injury.

------
tempodox
It's basic systems theory. If you want to get really disillusioned, read one
of Niklas Luhmann's many books on the matter.

~~~
mwerty
Where would you start? Wikipedia says he wrote more than 70 books. Thanks.

~~~
tempodox
You can always start by picking one about a subject that interests you.

~~~
mwerty
Will do but I was asking for suggestions, not permission.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Unions, or example.

Unions were defanged, waylaid and driven into the ground by neoliberal
policies in the US and the UK, in particular. They lost most of their power
and were rendered incapable of supporting workers' rights, which was their
reason to exist. That is the problem with unions, not that they perpetuate the
problems they solve. For that, we have free-market capitalism.

------
ponderatul
Pair this with Taleb's views on globalism, and how it enables this kind of
interconnected environment, that doesn't leave much room for error. And if an
error happens, it's going to be systemic.

