Comment by nmeofthestate
5 days ago
Reading between the lines - actually, just reading the lines - it sounds like another organisation that got infested with the kind of people who are apt to ruin organisations, and perhaps an attempt it being made to fumigate it, and they don't like that.
Without knowing any details, I'm guessing what's happened is the inevitable result that befalls organizations as predicted by Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
And as Douglas Adams stated in the problem with ruling axiom, is that under no circumstance should you allow someone who gets themselves in a position to rule, rule.
> under no circumstance should you allow someone who gets themselves in a position to rule, rule.
Unfortunately the opposite is also true, as anyone who's served on a non-profit board with noncommital members knows.
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At least some greek states used to assign leadership in a lottery system designed in such a way partially to avoid the issues with this...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion
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They get in that position because nobody else wants to do it.
This law needs the addition of a third kind of person: one who is neither devoted to the goals of the organization nor the organization itself, but merely wishes to use the organization as a vehicle to push their own social and political beliefs (such as DEI).
I think this might just be a special case of Type II. By latching onto the latest hot issue (like the Linux Foundation getting into Vaccine Passports... or, less subtly, the Firefox organization rebranding as a "global crew of activists"), you get to collect donations from government and public grants related to the issue. And corporate donations, too, because your good "ESG score" transitively applies to your supporters.
They are devoted to themselves.
Funny given there was a heated discussion yesterday on the FFMPEG Assembly post[0]. I've been seeing similar heated conversations turn up more regularly. Honestly, I think this is a result of this Iron Law. Arguments between developers devoted to the goals of "the organization" vs those dedicated to "the organization", albeit a bit more abstracted.
Funny, we have similar views about Google search[1], and those days were much better
[0] https://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail4...
This is great, I've been looking for a way to express this vague notion I had about organizations. I was thinking along the lines of "nonprofits tend to become generic donation-seeking, rent-seeking entities, keeping their original goals only nominally" but the quote above is a less harsh way to put it.
As a NASA employee, I think this is extremely true. I would bet most of the second group doesn’t or even comprehend that they’re doing it.
I don't think you need to read between the lines. The lede is buried, but explicit:
> This is part of an overhaul dubbed Turing 2.0 under which the institute will focus on three key areas: health, the environment, and defence and security.
They're trying to make the organization into a defense subcontractor (with a few side-projects for image maintenance), and purging anyone who isn't interested in that mission.
I have friends who work there. This is absolutely the answer -- together with the government joint beyond hope that it will be the case that AI solves the UK's economic woes (without ever really understanding what it is)
Yes, we're pretty accustomed to these non-specific accusations of "toxicisity" at this point. It's code for "my pet projects and initiatives have been cut because they produce little of value."
There are plenty of anthropological, sociological, and philosophical arguments that this is inevitable for any organization. Once visionaries in any organization of any size are gone, the priorities of its members are proportionally dominated over time by simple self-preservation.
> Once visionaries in any organization of any size are gone, the priorities of its members are proportionally dominated over time by simple self-preservation.
This. It’s also nigh impossible for new visionaries to succeed in an organization because of that self-preservation of the existing ruling political class. Visionaries show loyalty to the org, not the people, and that makes them a prime target for harassment and cuts as a result.
Smart orgs keep visionaries in charge, but accountable.
And when they can't suppress visionaries within the organization, the ruling class finds other ways to preserve their power. Today the entrenched companies, organizations, and government bureaucracies collaborate to write the laws and regulations and pursue predatory competitive strategies that suppress new competitors and preserve their power.
There are always good reasons for why X law or Y regulation exists or why Z company is given preferences and even subsidies. But the visionaries are undermined all the same.
AKA academics.
A lot of academic researchers who couldn’t get jobs elsewhere ended up there.
The org is fundamentally dysfunctional according to an insider I spoke to. They blamed leadership.
They should have isolated it from academia - no hires from universities allowed, only hiring people who had previously worked in industry for the last few years.
You can get a lot of valuable work out of "unmanageable" academics if you figure out how to manage them. That's most of the secret of early Google's success. If we knew anything about the NSA it'd probably be how they work too.
Now this may be difficult in the UK because all jobs pay two quid a year, you have to live in a closet somewhere with a name like Pennyfarthing-upon-Longbottoms, and you can't get air conditioning without permission from the king.
The way you "manage" them is you water down their impact on the organization with a bunch of people who aren't academics.
Eh no not really. Google's early success came from PhD dropouts (Larry Page & Sergey Brin), combined with people like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat (formerly at DEC), and the lesser known but no less critical Eric Veach (formerly Pixar).
Those are the people behind the core innovations that made Google so powerful: PageRank, MapReduce, BigTable, the indexing pipeline, protobufs/Stubby, GFS, AdWords, AdSense and the use of ML in both (iirc Veach was a key reason the ads system worked so well).
So none of the names I associate with early Google were academics. They all came from industry.
Renaissance Technologies as well. One of the top quant trading firms, with a bit of a mythical aura around them, was specifically seeded with academics, and it also has an academic-style internal environment (vs other quant funds, which also hire academics but leave most of the culture at the door).
Also seeded with NSA talent, with a founder who worked in academia and codebreaking, just to make your comment even more relevant.
I’m sure exactly those words were said about Turin
Though its authenticity may be discredited in the modern AI era, many computer scientists still venerate the shroud of Turing.