
Nobody Knows What They're Doing (2013) - iamjeff
http://prospect.org/article/nobody-knows-what-theyre-doing
======
whack
An obvious counter-argument to this: NSA. If someone had said 10 years ago
that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic
surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed
at as a conspiracy theorist. One can only imagine what Ezra Klein would have
said to such a person.

 _" What you're saying is too improbable. No one can carry out complicated
plans. All parties and groups are fractious and bumbling."_

Turns out organizations like the NSA do actually exist, and they are capable
enough to carry out complicated plans in secrecy for many many years. Despite
it being a non-partisan government agency staffed by government workers
reporting to our elected leaders. One can only wonder what other kinds of
scheming and backroom deals are being done by private organizations such as
lobbyists, super-PACs and think-tanks.

~~~
dragonwriter
> An obvious counter-argument to this: NSA. If someone had said 10 years ago
> that an organization like NSA exists, and that it is conducting electronic
> surveillance at the level that it currently is, they would have been laughed
> at as a conspiracy theorist.

The NSA has been well known for decades; while it was initially secret (its
name and existence, not just its work), its existence has been public
knowledge for a long time, and its massive, widespread, and frequenrlt-
politically-abused surveillance was revealed in the Church Committee hearings
in 1975, and was the key impetus behind the restrictions on domestic
surveillance adopted at that time in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(restrictions that were weakened by amendments in the war on terror _exactly
and publicly so that_ the NSA could engage freely in widespread, massive
surveillance to identify and track auspecred terrorists and their associates
several steps removed.)

Anyone who was paying even a little bit of attention 10 years ago — or even
_forty_ years ago — was well aware of the NSA and it's widespread
surveillance.

Now, if you said this about "10 years ago" in 1977 instead of 2017, you'd have
a good point.

~~~
discreditable
> Anyone who was paying even a little bit of attention 10 years ago — or even
> forty years ago — was well aware of the NSA and it's widespread
> surveillance.

It was even a joke in the Simpson's Movie (2007).

~~~
danbruc
The knowledge was not widespread, but people in the field certainly had
suspicions and started getting an idea in the late 1980s, at the very latest.
The EU conducted an investigation in 2000 and certainly knew what was going on
pretty well when the final report [1] was presented in mid 2001. Probably not
in too much detail but they certainly had an idea of the [possible] scale.

[1]
[http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN)

------
Animats
That's painfully true. There have been, though, broad long-term plans that
succeeded. Here are two classics:

* "Attack on American Free Enterprise System" (1971), by Lewis J. Powell.[1] This is the founding document of the modern conservative agenda. Powell later became a Supreme Court justice. He proposed heavily funded groups to push a conservative pro-big-business agenda, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce taking the lead. This was quite successful, especially noting how politically weak big business was at the time.

* "The Overhauling of Straight America" (1987), by Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill (pseud. of Hunter Madsen). This is the founding document of the modern gay agenda. This, too, was quite successful. It outlines a detailed program, and most of the goals listed were achieved.

[1]
[http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...](http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1078&context=darter_materials)
[2]
[http://library.gayhomeland.org/0018/EN/EN_Overhauling_Straig...](http://library.gayhomeland.org/0018/EN/EN_Overhauling_Straight.htm)

~~~
kirse
_" The Overhauling of Straight America"_ seems to be eye-poppingly accurate on
first read because one can easily trace back the past 10-20 years and identify
events that fit much of what was written... However I think I'd label this one
moreso prophetic than any sort of targeted plan.

By that I mean if you were to pick any behavior that is generally unacceptable
to society and attempt to change the tide of public opinion, the game plan
would come out looking very similar to this document, with simple
substitutions for the behavior.

I say that because there is a direct Biblical reference in this article to
spiritual warfare - _the shield and sword of that accursed "secular humanism"_
\- which is a dig at Paul's instructions to Christian believers on how to
remain on-guard in their faith (Ephesians 6:10-17).

So the fact that the strategy in this article mimics what Christians would
recognize as spiritual warfare is not really surprising... The article's "six
things" are very similar to how Satan works to deceive (John 8:44) and move
just about any sin from abhorrent to acceptable -- desensitizing, redefining
truth, identity attacks, guilt/shaming, social pressure & ostracizing, etc.

So I've seen that playbook before, and it wasn't written in 1987.

~~~
Animats
To make something happen politically, both a plan and an organization are
needed. This was the plan part. The organization was the Human Rights Campaign
Fund, originally a political action committee (PAC).[1]

A plan without an organization behind it is just an essay. An organization
without a plan just thrashes around. That's what happened to Occupy. They
never had a coherent agenda.

[1] [http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/HRC/](http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/HRC/)

------
uncle_d
This is a false dichotomy: either everyone is "ceaselessly, ruthlessly,
effectively scheming" or "all parties and groups are fractious and bumbling"

How about the truth is somewhere in between? Some people are scheming - and
some schemes do come off successfully.

There has been nothing but scheming and counter-scheming since this U.S.
election - the removal of General Flynn being, according to some commentators,
just the latest example:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j_ZfKmcnSk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j_ZfKmcnSk)

~~~
learc83
The article doesn't say that no one is scheming, just that what starts as a
plan devolves into a mess of reaction and counter reaction. No battle plan
survives contact with the enemy and all that.

Schemes are occasionally successful, but that is because the schemer either
got lucky and everyone reacted the way they wanted, or because the scheme was
incredibly simple.

What the article is talking about is the mythical scheming that involves
correctly predicting the behavior and reactions of the opposition through
multiple iterations of attack and counter attack--the hypothetical chess
master who can see 5 moves ahead.

The systems we are dealing with are generally just too complex for that.

~~~
r00fus
> No battle plan survives contact with the enemy

I always (as a Vet) thought this was a misnomer - it's often best described as
"no battle plan survives contact with reality" \- reality being the new info
you get that you didn't get or couldn't have gotten.

~~~
drdrey
"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." \-- Mike Tyson

~~~
erikb
It's also a great quote, but it's a different one. "No battle plan survives
contact with the enemy" is more like you get punched as much and in a way that
you didn't expect, even if you planned to get punched. Tyson's saying "When
you get punched the sensation is so unexpected that your brain stops working
for some time". The 'counter' to the changing environment quote is to be
flexible from the beginning. The 'counter' to Tyson's situation is to train so
much, that your muscle memory will continue to work even if your brain
doesn't.

~~~
liotier
> your muscle memory will continue to work even if your brain doesn't

Indeed, it is only when you encounter an actual combat situation that you
understand why the karate elders insist on so many thousand mindless
repetitions of basic movements back & forth: even though you have no time to
think (and even if you did it would do no good because combat stress reduces
your intellectual capacity by 80%), it instantly executes spontaneously and
afterwards you find yourself thinking "wow - I did that ?". Brutal repetitive
training that focuses on the basics: it works.

~~~
drdrey
I feel like the there is something similar at play in long distance running.
By repeating the same motion a lot, your nervous system probably works out the
most efficient pathways to activate and can work without your conscious mind
getting too involved.

------
charles-salvia
I'm inclined to be very sympathetic to this article, even though I don't agree
entirely. In an age when conspiracy theories about "global elites" are
rampant, it helps to remind everyone that most human designs fail due to
unforeseen complexity and unpredictability. When faced with people who
actually believe in "master-plan" type conspiracy theories, I have to really
wonder if they've ever actually tried to do anything hard.

That said, it's certainly possible to apply long-term planning and
coordination in a very effective way. It's just that hindsight and selection-
bias tends to make success stories look like the human agency involved was
hyper-competent, while glossing over all kinds of factors like simple luck or
even just gross incompetence on the part of those who were opposed to the
goals of the planning.

And how exactly is the NSA a refutation of anything? They leveraged enormous
government resources to pull off massive surveillance covertly for a while,
but now we're talking about it publicly so I guess they weren't exactly so
hyper-competent after all.

Seeing hyper-competent human agency and design behind everything is
essentially just another example of the general human brain-defect called
Apophenia
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia)).

------
hunvreus
This doesn't just apply to politics.

That was probably my earliest epiphany as a founder: nobody knows what the
fuck they're doing. Nobody.

That VP of marketing at a fortune 100? No idea what he's doing. That young
startup CEO who's successful while being 10 years your junior? No freaking
idea at all.

Even in areas where you would assume process and numbers outweigh the human
element (e.g. finances), I was surprised to see how the sausage is made (and
how messy it is).

Once you've internalized that truth, the world is a lot less intimidating,
especially as a founder.

~~~
mabramo
Hanlon's Razor in action, as I see it.

------
RangerScience
So... My honest take away is: Can you disrupt Washington by coming up with a
better coordination tool?

I mean - that's clearly not the bulk of the problem (unclear causal
relationships between the actions you can take and the outcomes you want seems
to the real problem), but it's specifically cited and seems doable...

...until I think about how well teams inside companies communicate.

~~~
spott
Part of the problem is probably that there is no money in it: Congressional
offices don't have a big enough budget for the _staff_ they need, much less
any pieces of software/services.

~~~
uiri
Isn't software a tool for leverage? If staff is additive, then software is
multiplicative. The right software would allow a staff of 10 to do the work of
30 or 100.

------
abraae
Seems a slightly simplistic analysis.

We know there are people who scheme and plot to get what they want, and will
stop at nothing to do so.

We also know that the real world is chaotic, that no battle plan survives
first contact with the enemy.

The most successful schemers are not those who can think ten moves ahead,
because no-one can do that.

Instead they're the ones who can turn on a dime, who can rapidly re-scheme,
and re-scheme again, always adapting to circumstances so quickly that the rest
of us are left wondering wtf happened.

------
Bouncingsoul1
Reminds me of this ramble [https://nickbradbury.com/2014/12/11/the-
programmers-dream-a-...](https://nickbradbury.com/2014/12/11/the-programmers-
dream-a-ramble/) . I printed it out and hung it in my livingroom, keeps me
sane.

~~~
qaq
Well one can argue that people "in charge" are not at all the people that hold
the public offices so we have no clue whether or not they have a clue. If one
wants a decent conspiracy theory one could start with the fact that Capital
Group, Fidelity , BlackRock and Vanguard have 13 trillion under management
majority of which is invested in US stock market so if they collude they would
have majority of votes in a majority of US public companies.

~~~
breischl
But the point of both articles is that these groups are not even unified
within themselves, much less can they collude effectively, or out-maneuver the
various forces that would not want them to control everything. And even if
they could - what then? Managing even one company is difficult, trying to
coordinate several thousand is essentially impossible.

More pedantically, you're assuming those groups could take all of those assets
from where the owners of those assets put them (including bonds, commodities,
foreign investments, etc) and put them into the US stock market. Even if they
did so they're barely above 50% of the US market cap (put at 25 trillion by
World Bank).

[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/CM.MKT.LCAP.CD?locations...](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/CM.MKT.LCAP.CD?locations=US&name_desc=true)

~~~
qaq
You are not counting effects of circular ownership citi owns 5% of Chase and
Chase owns 5% of Citi and on and on you effectively don't need 50% to control
the vote. Even if those 4 are off you can add next two or three with trillion
+/\- under management. So worst case you need 7 people to collude.

------
arca_vorago
Having studied the deep state for a long time now, I have come to a more
nuanced conclusion:

Incompetence abounds, but is useful cover for the few malicious actors.

Often in discussion I have derided the use of Hanlons razor, for I think it a
logically fallacious statement from the get-go, but I understand the spirit of
it. The problem is that at a certain point, incompetence becomes
indestinguishable from malice. At some level, attributing incompetence to
everything because _nobody knows what they are doing so it 's just the
complicated process of organic failure_ no longer suffices.

The irony is that I most often hear this defense from the realpolitik
subscribers of the Kissinger type defending bad actions... the ones I highly
suspect of being the primary malicious actors abusing the incompetence in the
first place!

You want a perfect example of this? High level manipulation of events via the
triple agents of the Cambridge 6. This is also why I theorize that the deep
state is largely unkown the middle-high level managers, they simply corrupt
from the top down.

For those curious about the deep state, I suggest starting with works of Peter
Dale Scott.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Dale_Scott](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Dale_Scott)

------
5_minutes
The truth is that the difference between many companies is the perception,
that they can create towards the external world, and 3rd parties: that they
KNOW what they are doing.

Eventually, when you talk to your friends, you notice it's a mess at most
workplaces. Management often is very shaky and clueless. People keeping up
apperances etc. This is all more or less the same in alot of companies (though
not all), however: the perception of it to the outside world, is what makes
the difference.

I've been validating this theory many times throughout the years and it's very
applicable and true.

------
erikb
How about nobody knows what they are doing, but people are making plans to
screw other people anyways, and sometimes they work. And as always there will
actually be people who do this for so long and really work on improvement that
they will beat the others in most cases, even if sh*t hits the fan.

------
appleflaxen
I've seen this written slightly differently:

"Never attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by
stupidity."

------
zaque1213
I think it was Jessica Yellin on NPR's On Point who said something about
Washington being way more like VEEP than House of Cards. Comforting somehow.

------
zelos
So _The Thick of It_ is more accurate than _House of Cards_?

------
cs702
Well, I would agree that _most people most of the time_ don't know what the
heck they're doing...

...but some people DO know what they're doing, at least some of the time.

Applies to business too.

------
mxfh
No reference to Adam Curtis yet?

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER)

discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6184984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6184984)

------
User23
This article was written with the intent to make its readers worse at
recognizing patterns. Put bluntly, it was written to make you more stupid for
the benefit of the authors or their principals.

It doesn't belong here. The persuasion is ham-handed and obvious, but clearly
effective enough to get it on the front page here.

------
vonklaus
I agree with the premise but not the conclusion. Worked at/have seen a few
start-ups close up; people don't know what they are doing-- I mean this in a
"cliff jump build parachute" way not pejoratively.

With that in mind, you have a fragmented ecosystem and a lot to gain. I don't
think people are organized or agreeable enough for an "illuminati"-esque
conspiracy, but people and groups can scheme so well here w/ little oversite.

Article seemed to say that small specific task goals can get done but because
some large groups can't execute a large scale goal there is no "scheming". I
disagree.

------
wu-ikkyu
Tldr; a strawman + an anecdote: Author posits fictional conspiracy movies are
fictional, and the author has never personally witnessed a successful
"scheme", so you have nothing to worry about.

History shows otherwise.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_conspiraci...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_conspiracies)

------
mwsherman
Think in terms of natural selection. Behaviors (and personalities) that make
more successful choices in that environment will tend to survive in the
environment, regardless of whether they know what they are doing.

Most of the bumbling fails. Some of the bumbling works. And so the most
“effective” politicians (and organizations) will survive, even if their
success has little to do with deliberate scheming.

------
guelo
That probably applies much more to underfunded grassroots activists then to
large corporate lobbyists. The large corporate lobbyists have organized long
term plans working from state houses to DC to accomplish multi year goals.
Take a look at ALEC for example.

It's like the difference between some GPL open source project and Google's
latest Android release.

------
technologyvault
This article reminds me of a book I read several years ago: None Dare Call It
Conspiracy by Gary Allen, written in the 1971

For anyone who wonders whether there are sinister things being done in concert
by groups of individuals, I highly recommend reading that book.

------
JoeAltmaier
I have a theory: human civilization is at about the peak of what can be
achieved, with people in charge. We're just too error-prone and selfish and
shortsighted to ever form a larger functioning society.

~~~
zaque1213
There are some theories, such as those laid out by Francis Fukuyama in the
Origins of Political Order, which postulate that homo sapiens are optimized to
form functioning societies of about 120 units. However, certain features have
evolved in our species, such as the ability to speak AND write, and form
mythologies and stories, which allows our ability to form political societies
to exponentially increase. Who's to say we won't keep evolving to find ways to
cooperate in ways that were impossible before?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Because, look at the newspaper (or blog or whatever). Its coming apart at the
seams.

------
dziungles
The biggest thing is that people are scheming "behind the scenes".

People are scheming in politics, in business, in family, with friends.

We all agree on this?

Why we are living in such a Machevellian society? Are there any alternatives?

------
throwanem
Hell, all you need to know that is to read Frank Rich's bio and then watch
_Veep_. You'll learn just as much, and laugh a lot more while you do it.

------
hkon
I agree with the title. The few places I have worked where things were not
horrible, were places where one guy had a masterplan for it all.

------
ebcode
I upvoted this before I read the article, simply because I agree with the
headline. I wonder how many others here did the same?

------
wallace_f
Since the rise of Trump, first political comments stopped being flagged. Now
HN is entertaining daily threads on politics.

~~~
grzm
If you think a submission is inappropriate for HN, please flag and move on.

~~~
wallace_f
What's with the hostility? I'm pointing out something factual that some users
(especially new users) may not be aware of.

~~~
grzm
There's no hostility. There are plenty of comments from mods, including the
discussion on Political Detox Week, that discuss politics on HN, which are
actually helpful rather than just observations.

Here's one such comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13522433)

~~~
wallace_f
What? Well I'm sorry my comment was not helpful to you. In the future should
we judge everyone's comments with respect to someone in a position to offer
better information?

For example, here is a comment by you:

>Disclaimer: I don't have a comp sci degree.

>I've found having an understanding of the underlying theories supporting the
tools (that includes languages and libraries) I use makes me use them better,
understand their strengths, weaknesses, and how to improve them. It also helps
me look at problems from various perspectives and see how other solutions may
fit, including those that don't already have a tutorial or library.

>I suspect that if you're an effective programmer, you're doing more than
copying and pasting and growing in experience, and you're actually absorbing
and apply more computer science than you realize.

You also post observations without being an authority. That is fine. You need
to relax with the, yes, hostility.

~~~
grzm
I'm sorry you're reading so much hostility and negativity into my replies.
It's very much not intended.

------
harry8
J. Edgar Hoover.

