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Idiocracy: The Coming Devolution Of The Politicized Technocratic State…
Posted on 2/24/24 at 7:09 am
Posted on 2/24/24 at 7:09 am
Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis...
At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.
While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems….All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
From Meritocracy to Diversity
The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.
By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.
The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power…
The American System Is Cracking
…The U.S. has embraced a novel question: what happens when the men who built the complex systems our society relies on cease contributing and are replaced by people who were chosen for reasons other than competency?
The answer is clear: catastrophic normal accidents will happen with increasing regularity. While each failure is officially seen as a separate issue to be fixed with small patches, the reality is that the whole system is seeing failures at an accelerating rate, which will lead in turn to the failure of other systems.
In the case of the Camp Fire that killed 85 people, PG&E fired its CEO, filed Chapter 11, and restructured. The system’s response has been to turn off the electricity and raise wildfire insurance premiums. This has resulted in very little reflection. The more recent coronavirus pandemic was another teachable moment. What started just three years ago with a novel respiratory virus has caused a financial crisis, a bubble, soaring inflation, and now a banking crisis in rapid succession.
Patching the specific failure mode is simultaneously too slow and induces unexpected consequences. Cascading failures overwhelm the capabilities of the system to react. 20 years ago, a software bug caused a poorly-managed local outage that led to a blackout that knocked out power to 55 million people and caused 100 deaths. Utilities were able to restore power to all 55 million people in only four days. It is unclear if they could do the same today.
U.S. cities would look very different if they remained without power for even two weeks, especially if other obstructions unfolded. What if emergency supplies sat on trains immobilized by fuel shortages due to the aforementioned pipeline shutdown? The preference for diversity over competency has made our system of systems dangerously fragile.
The path of least resistance will be the devolution of complex systems and the reduction in the quality of life that entails. For the typical resident in a second-tier city in Mexico, Brazil, or South Africa, power outages are not uncommon, tap water is probably not safe to drink, and hospital-associated infections are common and often fatal. Absent a step change in the quality of American governance and a renewed culture of excellence, they prefigure the country’s future.
Given the damage already done to competence and morale combined with the natural exodus of baby boomers with decades worth of tacit knowledge, the biggest challenge of the coming decades might simply be maintaining the systems we have today. Americans living today are the inheritors of systems that created the highest standard of living in human history. Rather than protecting the competency that made those systems possible, the modern preference for diversity has attenuated meritocratic evaluation at all levels of American society.
5
Posted on 2/24/24 at 7:13 am to Toomer Deplorable
Yep, technocracy is our future. Been saying this for years.
Posted on 2/24/24 at 7:13 am to Toomer Deplorable
quote:
Americans living today are the inheritors of systems that created the highest standard of living in human history.
That would be the credit system, which the immigration replacement is desperately trying to kill.
Posted on 2/24/24 at 7:45 am to Toomer Deplorable
Left unmentioned is the fact that average IQ is falling as the US becomes less white. Majority-minority America will struggle to maintain the society built by 85% white America.
This post was edited on 2/24/24 at 12:37 pm
Posted on 2/24/24 at 7:07 pm to RogerTheShrubber
quote:
Yep, technocracy is our future.
DEI=DIE.
Posted on 2/24/24 at 8:16 pm to Epaminondas
quote:
IQ
IQ ableism is a microaggression.
‘Most qualified person should get the job’ is microaggression: Academics say guidance on eliminating subtle forms of discrimination undermines a culture of free inquiry
….Guidance from the University of Glasgow and the engineering department of Imperial College London states that saying “the most qualified person should get the job” is an example of a microaggression.
Glasgow’s guidance, which forms part of the university’s anti-racism campaign, suggests that the statement would be wrong because it asserts “that race does not play a role in life successes”.
Other examples of microaggressions listed by the university include saying that “everyone can succeed if they work hard enough”. The university states that possible implications of the statement could include suggesting that someone only got a job because of quotas, or that they cannot make a valuable contribution.
Meanwhile, the University of Edinburgh states that microaggressions often take the form of “questioning an individual’s lived experience” or “denying individual prejudice”.
Examples cited by the university include saying of a third person: “I’m sure they didn’t mean anything by that”, or denying that a person is a racist.
Newcastle University describes microaggressions as “the everyday slights, indignities, put downs and insults that people of colour, women, people from LGBTQIA+ communities or those who are marginalised, experience in their day-to-day interactions with people”.
It lists examples such as a white person telling a black person “white people get killed by the police too”, when discussing police brutality.
The microaggression statements from universities were uncovered by the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), a group of academics worried about the erosion of free speech on campus.
At least five universities have issued guidance or training courses on how to eliminate “microaggression”, which are defined as subtle or indirect forms of discrimination.
Dr Edward Skidelsky, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Exeter, who is director of the CAF, said: “By campaigning against questioning and denial, these universities are advocating an uncritical acceptance of statements in the various, undefined areas that their microaggression guides refer to. The effect, again, is to undermine a culture of free inquiry.
“Universities must not campaign against the expression of lawful beliefs. They must not take official positions. They must not outlaw ‘questioning’ and ‘denial’. They must not undermine free inquiry.”
Chris McGovern, the chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “It would seem that the woke virus has infected universities in a major way. It is cowardly. Universities are supposed to show their intelligence and reason and they are disapplying their intelligence and reason in order to pursue the woke agenda.”
Posted on 2/24/24 at 8:57 pm to Toomer Deplorable
quote:
Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis... At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen. While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems….All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
What he said.
Posted on 2/25/24 at 7:35 am to Bass Tiger
quote:
As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
Fanni Willis is the face of this collapse. Of course, politically motivated prosecutors are nothing new and certainly are not a novelty in our nation’s criminal justice system.
Yet that such a simmering ignoramus like Fani Willis has been granted a law degree is an utter embarrassment to the legal profession in this nation. Indeed, that such a mendacious, stupid and frankly repulsive person could rise to such a high profile position of power in our justice system only underscores the pernicious threat that DEI poses to continued Liberty in this nation.
X
Fani Willis Is an Embarrassment to Black People. She's the Proof That DEI Only Hurts Us….
…As a Black woman and working professional, I've never been a huge fan of affirmative action and the recent rise of critical theory, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives has only bolstered my resistance. While it may seem necessary to some in order to right the wrongs of the past, I can sum up why these measures are an unmitigated disaster for hard-working Black Americans in two words:
Fani Willis.
Willis is the prosecutor in one of the nation's major cities and most high profile cases against former President Donald Trump. Her position and the historic nature of the case she is prosecuting put her in an elite class most Black people will never even dream of reaching. One would expect such a person to be polished and classy, and able to remain so even while responding to an uncomfortable barrage of questions on the witness stand.
Willis is an elected official, but to even be in a position to run for one of the highest offices in her state means she has passed through elite job after elite job. She has received degrees, awards, and accolades.
How on earth, then, does such an "accomplished" woman sound like a freshman college student while participating in the trial of the century? Her foul demeanor and childish expressions only serve to magnify the grotesque consequences diversity hiring has for Black America in general.
Diversity-first hiring does the opposite of what I'm sure we all hope it really could do. It does not even the playing field. Instead, it puts all of Black America behind, left once again to prove to the elites in charge that we are more than our skin color.
I was deeply ashamed and discouraged to watch Willis' performance on the witness stand. As many inroads as I have tried to make in my own industry for Black content creators, I am doomed to be haunted by the inherent distrust sown by diversity-first practices.
It isn't fair of others to cast those aspersions on me simply because of my skin color, but that's just how it is. I must deal with the world the way it is, not the way I wish it would be.
Shame on Fani Willis and every corrupt person who allowed her to take the path of least resistance just to fill a quota. You've doomed us all.
This post was edited on 2/25/24 at 7:54 am
Posted on 2/25/24 at 7:43 am to Toomer Deplorable
Eisenhower warned about this in his farewell address. It was more remembered for his warning about the military industrial complex, but technocrats were the root cause of his worry.
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