

The Perils of Transparency in Government - mhb
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/against-transparency?page=0,0

======
TomOfTTB
May I just say that article could have been written in 2 pages and still made
its point (probably more effectively).

On the topic, I don’t believe in transparency for people who actually “do
things” (as opposed to say reporters whose job is essentially advisory).
Because I believe in judging results. I would no sooner micromanage my
representatives than I would my employees. I know what I want from my elected
officials and I expect them to deliver it or convince me to want something
different from them. If they try to convince me to want something different I
expect them to justify it to me and I’ll decide whether their justifications
are sufficient.

So while I’d prefer they not take money to have an opinion I don’t really care
either way because the decision to support what they believe in is with me. If
they start taking non-sense opinions, either because of pay offs or simply
because they’ve lost their minds, that’s when it becomes my responsibility to
vote them out.

~~~
cookingrobot
What if your employee was secretly being paid by a competitor to sabotage your
project. As you say, you could just judge the results of his work, but it can
take a lot of time to judge the outcome of complex projects, and to separate
deliberate failure from normal risky-project / try again next time failure.
This is what's happening when oil companies pay-off people in power to
sabotage environmental policy. It's really much more efficient if we can weed
out the saboteurs from our teams.

~~~
dustingetz
or, reduce project complexity, to make it easy to judge the outcome of his
work.

complexity is evil.

------
AndrewDucker
Having read that all the way through I'm still not sure what he actually
_wants_.

Sure, there are good and bad effects from transparency. There are good and bad
effects from _everything_.

But we get 11 pages of waffle, and nothing really useful out the other end.

Unless someone can enlighten me?

