Posted by
glen ropella on
Aug 17, 2013; 9:45pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/How-Laura-Poitras-Helped-Snowden-Spill-His-Secrets-NYTimes-com-tp7583618p7583662.html
On 08/16/2013 04:00 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> I'd say stability and trustworthiness are different things. Stability
> arises almost necessarily because there are different individuals
> competing for power within the organization. [...]
>
> Once a structure like this becomes stable, the the organization can
> become immune from the truth. No one in the lower ranks has an
> incentive any more to rock the boat -- everything becomes about internal
> political signaling. There is no reason to be trustworthy in any
> universal sense because the incentives for survival within the
> organization follow a different set of rules.
I'm not convinced of the difference between stability and
trustworthiness. I suppose it depends on what one means by "trust". I
trust people like Penrose to behave in Penrosian ways. And I trust the
Washington Post to behave in Wapovian ways. That's what I mean by
trust. The point being that if I hear something from, say Rush
Limbaugh, I should be able to make a fast estimation of that thing. I
expect it to be Limbaugh-like. So, to me, trust is less about some
universal Truth according to a grand unified theory of the universe.
It's more about model-ability.
> In the case of the NSA, a concern is what manager has any incentive to
> enforce their supposed no-US-persons rules? If, as a set of upper
> level managers, they all come to believe the only important thing is
> showing how signals intelligence can catch violent Islamic extremists,
> and that will justify a steadily growing budget, then they just need to
> design a plausible-but-weak-self-enforcement mechanism that have no real
> teeth.
I agree to some extent. But you're ignoring the fact that these people
often do have lives outside their work. And those lives often
interfere, cognitively, with their more robot-like optimization methods
within their work. Of course, as more and more of us _linearize_ and
self-select our interactions via tools like facebook, or on-line dating,
etc., then those less linear parts of their lives will have less chance
to interfere.
--
⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella
I have gazed beyond today
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