Recently I’ve become aware of how much that’s going on in commerce, industry and our institutions is a sort of cargo cult of competence.
I’d been noticing some of it — and being baffled — since the nineties by an odd devotion to “procedure” which bordered on “We do the thing the experts do/say to do” and results will be right.
This intruded into my attention first with the publishing establishment turning against cozies. That term is broadening, but back then cozies was “Mysteries with an amateur sleuth, whose scope is within a family or small group of normal people.” All of a sudden in the early nineties, they demanded the cozy follow police procedural rules.
To figure out how wrong this is, go watch Murder She Wrote. Not one thing she does is right from the perspective of “real” crime investigation. Because the rules tie closely to whether you can get evidence accepted in court, most of her “solutions” wouldn’t work. I do get that. I also get that the whole point of the amateur sleuth is to have the plucky person solve things by unorthodox methods.
Which Murder She Wrote qualifies as. However, if you look at more recent mystery series, even those with amateurs have them try to follow the proper “procedure.”
What annoyed me back then, though, was that you’d get lectures from the publishers with the rejection. Our person was supposed to show all respect to the police because “they’re the experts.” Also, Joe Blow who ran a diner was supposed to know all the rules of evidence, etc. Which you know dang well wouldn’t happen. (BTW the way the “but this is not admissible in court” was solved was by having the suspect confess and semi-often die in some way.)
Because that had annoyed me, I started paying attention to how many of the rules and “the way things are now supposed to be done” from certain products being shunned, certain bought, etc. was all according to some often misunderstood “expert” pronouncement, no real thought.
Then came the late nineties, the dot com boom, which I had a weird view of. At the time Dan was trying to jump jobs, and going to a lot of interviews, so I read up on an analyzed the companies he had interviews with. And I quickly realized a lot of the metrics by which a company was considered “solid” or a good prospect were bogus. It had things thrown in, by the rules, because studies showed it was better…. like “Has game room on site for employees” (Because employee happiness made the company more likely to succeed. Which is likely true, but happiness and playing a lot of computer games ON THE JOB are not the same.) Dan interviewed with this company in Denver that had both a gym and various games in the offices, and encouraged you to take unlimited mental health days, etc. They offered a slightly lower salary but a huge amount of stock. So we crawled over their internals before he turned it down, and not only did we conclude that their product/expectation of success was AT BEST optimistic, but we wondered if anyone ever worked, ever. However, they were doing everything by the book in what “experts” in business said should bring enormous success.
Dan turned it down and six months later they were gone. Most of the companies with that model vanished.
But the idea that if you just do things according to a certain set of rules, you’ll get the desired result didn’t.
It mostly prevails in fields that are either closed shop with little visibility from the outside, yes, including police investigations but also everything from medicine to law or in fields willfully trying to hide things from the public. And given that the things it’s based on are usually biased already… it becomes fraught. Take for instance government reporting aid to minorities, when the aid amounts to, say preferential hiring of minorities or the giving of welfare, both of which over time actually degrade conditions for minorities. However, studies will base on whether something is good for minorities or not based on whether such “benefits” are provided.
Police is interesting because I doubt the editors telling us we couldn’t have a bumbling policeman figure in a murder mystery because “they’re highly trained professionals” realize how much of that training is in “Follow the rules so we can’t be sued” and how many murders (over half on average) go unsolved.
In fact, in our hyper litigious society, in almost every profession, more than half the rules on how to do things are designed so the company/institution/whatever isn’t sued.
Oh, and an example of “If we calculate according to these rules we can’t go wrong.” Sometimes, because we get a feeling in our gut this is not our final destination (Also depends on where kids end up of course) I kill my lunch hour eating at the computer and looking up “The best places to live in x state.”
I’d give it way more credence, if half the reasons they think these places are better places to live weren’t insane, bogus, or outright counterproductive. For instance, they often tout “highly rated K-12 institutions” which is … maybe okay, but most of the rating is done by agencies that don’t care if Jimmy can’t read, provided he can tell you how many genders there are supposed to be today. Or “diversity” which gives a HUGE boost to “Sanctuary cities.” Which is great, if you really want Tren D’Aragua in your business, but I really don’t. Then there’s “Gives you money to buy your first house in town.” We accidentally went to one of those places a couple of weeks ago. Okay, it wasn’t accidental, but we could have gone to three or four other places, not necessarily that one. It was just on the way of us going elsewhere. We… Um…. we’d planned to spend the day there, just because it worked with our schedule, but we left after a couple of hours. It wasn’t just that there really wasn’t anything to do, the museums and such closing seemingly at random on the weekend. It was that the entire place was overlaid with a patina of dingy misery. But it is rated as one of the best places to live in the next state, just based on a bunch of abstract measures. Like, you know, diversity.
The proximate cause of this rant is reading a mystery where the main character just took a course to follow the rules and make investigations better. Only all the rules the author is applying actually make the investigation impossible.
The further cause is this feeling that everyone is following “rules” and “Procedures” which are based on some study that no one ever read and which is probably irreproducible, and in the process we’re losing real knowledge and real ability to do things.
At the end of this process are ivy league college presidents who probably can’t read so well, so they plagiarist well-sounding phrases for their required “publications.” And they’re hired for their “diversity” (which mostly means female and can tan, like all the other “diverse” people) not any competence, so that works. Until it doesn’t.
And that’s just the most visible thing crumbling. Right now, hidden from view, I bet you actual essential positions are being not done, because they are occupied by someone who was never taught to do them, except “follow procedure.”
There are places where procedures are essential. Either because you can’t afford to forget something inside a patient you just operated on, to name an instance, or because you need to instill confidence in the public. or both.
For instance, it would be nice that everyone voting is at the minimum a citizen and a resident in the area. For that kind of thing there should be procedures. You’d like to know your doctor was trained according to rigorous standards (which they kind of are, unless they’re imported, sometimes from countries where the standards are very different.) You’d like all the i s dotted and the t s crossed.
But when you start talking about “best practices” of management, or investment, or even investigation, you inevitably find a lot of chaff has fallen into the wheat.
And the people who have been trained to blindly follow the procedures and the rules can’t tell one from the other.
Brace, because things are quietly starting to fall apart everywhere, not helped by the strain being put on them from above by those who think they can remove the walls and the roof will still stand, or that Western Civilization will remain as long as you follow these simple procedures, utterly divorced from the reality and history of the thing.
Brace and learn.
Because we’re going to have to rebuild. And it’s going to hurt like a mother.
But it is what is it, if we want to retain civilization.
According To Hoyt 