We are in a class war, but at least this one is fucked up in new ways.
I realize that I constructed this post badly. The first two points (about DOGE and SV culture) were the most interesting, but I didn't excerpt anything from that section because it's fairly straightforward.
It's not news that DOGE is a badly implemented effort to apply the Silicon Valley start-up approach to the federal government. Mike Masnick wrote a great piece on this in January. But it is still notable that the first five of these features of the DOGE approach are all explicitly recommended in Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh's book on Silicon Valley's secret ingredient, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies, while the sixth was the observed practice of Uber, Paypal and other Silicon Valley unicorns that blitzscaled their way to success.
Overall, part of what I found interesting about the post was that it was another look at the ways in which the negative aspects of the tech industry (and, arguably, geek culture in general) have grown over time. I still remember, in the 90s thinking that SV had problems but I found a lot of the dot com companies endearing (in part because they were so connected to the early internet which I appreciated), but this makes clear that some of the patterns of behavior that worked well for small, scrappy tech companies do not scale well or translate across domains.
Maybe it's not new ways. Just rich people wanting serfs and using new words for it.
humans object to being hired and fired in response to temporary fluctuations in demand
The latest tech innovation seems to be mass layoffs when company income is rising.
That's probably my fault for turning off Copilot on every computer I can.
For a while the points about employee requirements (health care, insurance, retirement accounts) made people think that SV could be recruited to the cause of a social safety net. Unfortunately SV doesn't want capitalism, they want feudalism. Anything that gives employees a more secure life, even if it takes the burden off them as employers, makes their employees less desperate and more willing to quit shitty working conditions.
Probably we'll have AI-based air traffic controllers before too long. I bet they'll be really good at dealing with most normal situations.
DOGE is a badly implemented effort to apply the Silicon Valley start-up approach to the federal government.
I don't buy this. I think it was the approach of a really bad consultant. Is there anything Doge did that couldn't be a Dilbert joke?
I wonder how DOGE would have ended up if Vivek hadn't been booted. Same way or twice as bad?
https://www.ft.com/content/085430ab-27fe-46fc-a798-1059649d3b32
Doge's accounting was found to be riddled with duplicates and inflated estimates. Of the $170bn that it currently claims to have saved, the best documented portion is the $31.8bn of savings from 10,248 itemised contract cancellations and amendments. Even this number, however, is both opaque and overstated. The FT has been able to match the claimed saving to an underlying contract modification in only around 6,700 cases.Et many cetera. Bad consultants.
[...]
Even among the fully itemised items, which claim to be worth $18.2bn, the numbers are overstated. Around $840mn came from 253 contracts where Doge itself lists the contract as "expired". Doge also claimed a further $289mn of savings stemming from 322 contracts whose period of operation had been scheduled to end prior to Doge's involvement.
I think we can also cash in our predictions. Whether there's been a 'rupture' we can debate, but Musk is definitely out of DC.
Did DOGE have even a single forensic accountant working for it?
I agree with 10. Has anyone seen anything remotely like an "algorithms-plus-data approach to governance" anywhere near Trump, or indeed DOGE? Instead we've seen:
- personalistic rule based on whim, prejudice, and outright corruption
- blundering around looking for trigger words
- decisions mostly based on aesthetics and vibes
I suppose "IF private jet given: THEN favours" is an algorithm of sorts, but only in the smartass sense in which literally any step-by-step ruleset is an algorithm.
In fact, and I've said this before, the doge experience is much closer to late liberal lion William Proxmire's Golden Fleece awards than anything computer. That was all about:
- looking for public spending items that could be ridiculed easily for boobies jokes reasons
- holding up the officials involved for public jeering
- doing this basically in order to cut a dash on the political stage and further one's ambitions and craving for attention
It did harm to a bunch of basically decent ideas and science projects and did precisely nothing to restrain the Reagan-era spending blowout on Pentagon projects, clientele gimmes etc, and interestingly it happened at a formative time for both Trump (he is observably obsessed with 1988-ish trade politics!) and Musk (he'd just emigrated to the US and he was in college!)
The link is great if by great you mean "thinking so clearly about stuff I don't want to think about." Man, my powers of denial are severely tested.
Contra 18, DOGE has sacked huge numbers of workers and terminated huge numbers of grants based on keywords and algorithms. Proxmire gave pre-Fox News conservatives conversation points to grump about, DOGE is putting people out of work.
Contra 17, I think both the "trigger words" and "aesthetics and vibes" are really bad implementations of the data + algorithms approach. Maybe its my perspective as a biologist, but screening every grant and manuscript for the term "diversity" (because racism) and pulling funding/spiking manuscripts that mention biodiversity - how is that not governance by (the worst type of) data and algorithms?
I thought that the Golden Fleece awards were more of a 70s thing but, no, that pointless moron kept giving them out right up to 1987. This one is particularly egregious https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=3j41AAAAIBAJ&pg=7156,2843471 - he thought it was a ludicrous waste of time and money to get measurements of airline cabin crew bodies, and he thought it was funny because it allowed him to talk about ladies' bottoms.
This sort of thing, which I came across while looking for Golden Fleece awards https://time.com/archive/6598097/the-winds-of-reform/ shows the through-line between idiots like Pierre Sprey and DOGE today. Why are we wasting money on M1s when we could buy three times as many proven and reliable M60s? Why are we wasting money on Mavericks when we could just use cheap 30mm shells to kill tanks instead? Why are we wasting money on TOW missiles when you could just use a recoilless rifle? Just completely unserious.
The article's by Walter Isaacson, by the way, who has zero actual military experience, but - and this is an amazing unbeatable royal flush of a CV - studied PPE at Oxford, wrote for the National Lampoon, and wrote the authorised biographies of Henry Kissinger, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk.
" personalistic rule based on whim, prejudice, and outright corruption
- blundering around looking for trigger words"
Maybe they were just using a beta version of the newly released Afrikaner Grok.
For starters, Doge is the antithesis of Congressional oversight and that's what Proxmire was doing. Also, Doge isn't doing stuff primarily for attention. It is systematic destruction of government capacity. The banned analogy is that Proxmire is a pushy editor and Musk is a book burner.
Contra 18, DOGE has sacked huge numbers of workers and terminated huge numbers of grants based on keywords and algorithms. Proxmire gave pre-Fox News conservatives conversation points to grump about, DOGE is putting people out of work.
Proxmire's Golden Fleece Awards was more than just a conversation point exercise. It actually got a lot of grants cancelled.
Here's an article https://washingtonmonthly.com/2013/08/01/against-the-golden-fleece-award/
"While some of the projects he highlighted and stopped truly were stupid, the Golden Fleece Award did more harm than good: it halted legitimate research for political purposes, and worse, engendered widespread suspicion and hostility towards the notion of government spending on science, even when it represents only the tiniest portions of the overall budget."
Here's the "Taxpayers for Common Sense":
"Through the Golden Fleece Award, Senator Proxmire fought for American taxpayers by focusing public attention on budgetary waste in every branch of government. A number of the programs or projects he targeted were curtailed, modified or canceled, helping to save American taxpayers millions of dollars."
DOGE is bigger and has done more damage, but it's a difference of degree, not of kind.
I'm really surprised that you didn't know this - it should be quite embarrassing for you.
No, Moby is right in 23, this is very much a difference in kind. Proxmire got a few cherry picked grants canceled. Doge is destroying entire departments in an outright attack on US state capacity. This list is hardly complete and I suspect doesn't begin to scratch the surface but it does indicate the scale of the destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_federal_agencies_targeted_by_DOGE
For one, entire programs at the NIH have been gutted, like the National Cancer Advisory Board, the National Cancer Institute, etc. We're just not studying cancer and its treatments in the US anymore.
26.last that's hardly anywhere near what Proxmire did.
Just to spell it out for you, when Proxmire's influence caused a grant or program to be modified or canceled that did not affect the ability of the grant funding department or program to award new grants in the future.
Because, you know, the funding and the personnel were still intact.
19 last: I think that's 'data and algorithms' in the trivial sense Alex identifies. If the NKVD could have ctrl+f'ed 'Mendelian genetics' or '[Polish surname]' they would have. They couldn't, so they couldn't move as quickly as Doge. Doge isn't distinguished by anything technological: it's distinguished by caprice and ignorance. AIHSHB, jesters at the mad king's court. This administration does not require theoretical subtley.
Nothing of the sort, I couldn't stand the guy and think his Golden Fleece stunt awards were a pernicious influence on our political culture. And while you can trace a line of rhetoric about government waste* from then to now, which by the way is not at all what you were arguing, it's just not anything like the wholesale destruction of state capacity that we're seeing now under DOGE.
*see also, and more importantly, Ronald Reagan.
The biggest anti-science things that DOGE is doing are literally across the board cuts that have nothing to do with the content of the science. The overhead cut applies to literally everything.
They're also cancelling things which mention DEI keywords, but that's actually small potatoes compared to the big cuts.
The actual fusion of SV and USG is Palantir: IT consulting with a pretentious name.
And while you can trace a line of rhetoric about government waste* from then to now, which by the way is not at all what you were arguing
Yep, as I said in comment 20.
19: I don't think Henry Farrell meant Ctrl-F/Ctrl-R find-and-replace when he said algorithm, or if he did, the category of "algorithms and data" includes literally everyone and everything since (the 18th century? the invention of writing?), and doesn't provide any additional understanding.
There's a difference between the opposition he wants to have - some sort of, ironically D-coded, wipe-clean automated technocracy - and the one he does have, vibes-and-visuals driven rule by personal whim and side deals with no particular technical sophistication.
36, meet 10: "cut an arbitrary xx% everything" is much more what you except from either e.g. George Osborne circa 2010 or Jack Welsh circa 1990.
Even if, in a meaningless and pedantic sense, it is an algorithm in the same way that "go through the list and do nothing to any of the items" is an algorithm.
Calling it "data + algorithms" is awfully fancy for what's amounting to "control -F and fire." We had that fun last year when university marcomm decided that we needed to scrub naughty words from the websites, like "bias" or "inclusive.". Of course there's no regard to context or meaning, so if you say "welcome diverse viewpoints" it would get changed to "multiple viewpoints", and I think philosophy's description of "global and inclusive" got changed to "through and welcoming.". And after we did all this we got a budget cut anyway so capitulating just means you do the stupid outcome to yourself.
The point is that the "algorithm" is a glorified fucking thesaurus. It struck me that "probationary" firings probably stemmed from someone thinking "probation is bad" and just searching for variations of it in personnel files.
Two things can be true: calling it AI makes it sounds like DOGE has some new capacity to find waste when they don't, and that they are genuinely novel with respect to destroying American institutions and science.
Cala! How goes the good fight?
I think the "reciprocal tariff" amounts that the Trump administration came up with for Liberation Day is an example of the administrations approach to algorithmic and data-driven governance. They took a poorly-selected dataset, fed it to ChatGPT, and asked it to come up with tariff levels to fit their policy goal.
A policy goal which, in itself, was insane - even if you believe that it's rational to aim for a trade surplus, deciding to achieve it by achieving a trade surplus with every other country individually is clearly bonkers.
oh goddamnit. I wrote a post and forgot to hit "post". Can anyone swing by my office and post it?
41.1: I have in my grant proposal something from quantum field theory that can either be called a "conformal inclusion" or a "conformal embedding" and can't remember which phrasing I used. It will be very annoying if it gets rejected for that reason.
44: you did! you saved your department, right?
I have chosen to interpret every place name ending "-ness" as an abstract noun.
For example, dungeness = the quality of being, or being like, a dungeon. "Despite the recent repainting, the cellar still possessed significant dungeness".
See also inverness, skegness, durness. "His comment was not completely idiotic, but it definitely betrayed a degree of durness."
I have a break in about 15 minutes. Sit tight and I'll swing by my office then.
Don't worry, no one needs to post in my absence.
I've heard it's a very nice office. Lots of light.
At the moment it's full of boxes, because I have to pack up all my stuff, rather than move it 15 feet away myself. Yes I'm annoyed by this.