Star Ford

In my quest to figure out how to make groups of people achieve something big (companies, government, or anything), this diagram packs in many of the main points. There are two versions shown so you can see how it applies to projects of different kinds.

Here’s one for engineering projects:

The general idea is that you step through the project left to right, and the flow over time goes in the triangle shape through each of the milestones, shown as green dots. It starts as a generic or broad thing (A), then goes down through planning milestones (B, C) at increasing levels of granularity, then goes to the back room or the construction site where the project is implemented (X), then comes back up at decreasing levels of granularity (3, 2, 1) for review and approval milestones. The granularity can also be called depth of scope.

Read the rest of this entry »

One way children learn is acting out surface words and gestures of what the parents do: “look at me, I’m driving!” says the toddler who turns a purple steering wheel and flips levers at random. Adults generally will confirm he actually is driving, even though if he were, the gearbox would be shredded and the car would be upside down in a ditch, but the need for it to be real is a real need. In a healthy progression, the preschool wood kitchen setup becomes the ez-bake oven and then a real oven, and the purple car becomes a go cart and then a real car.

But in the world of politics they are still playing “look at me, I’m driving!” – that is, using the words of the other side (the adults) but not connecting to the gearbox. I first noticed this with “My body, my choice” which used to be about abortion – a private matter, and changed to be used about mask mandates – a public matter. The people who claimed that phrase for masks were so clearly grabbing words from the social ether that seemed to be well supported, and using them for a non-parallel case. With abortion, the words summarize a true justification, and they apply not only to abortion access but to women’s bodies in general. When co-opted for masks, it is transparent how they don’t believe those words in general, but are happy to confuse people with them to support policies that allow people to infect other people. “Your body, my choice” would have been a more accurate slogan.

Here are other things actually said by the toddler king or the jesters of his court recently (with a parenthetical note about what the words meant originally to adults and what they have been applied to now):

• “Taking a long term perspective” (was about getting through a short hard time for a reward later; now about justifying a hard time for some for an immediate reward for others)
• “Hiring based on merit, not based on the color of the skin” (was a justification for expanding the eligible applicant pool; now a justification for shrinking it)
• “Antisemitism” (was referring to bias against a religion and culture; now refers to protests against war)
• “Accountability” (used to imply “to Congress” or “to the public”; now implies “to the king”)
• “Our country” (perhaps always indicated white supremacy?)

There are new phrases daily now – just listen any time someone says we are doing ___ because ___… whether it is “efficiency”, “respecting women”, “the working class” etc, it is nearly always lifted from how liberals talk, but separated from the original substance and applied as surface words over some opposite or malicious deed that has a mere hair of similarity to the source. Their need for it to be real is real, just like “look at me, I’m driving!”, yet they never got to the ez-bake phase of development.

Normally when we talk about projection, it takes the form of a negative accusation of the other side. A Republican’s loudest accusation is often a public admission of guilt, such as blaming Democrats for running a sex trafficking operation, when the main people found to actually be doing that are Republicans. This is most famously about taboo subjects, but mundane things are the subjects of daily accusations: “they tanked the economy”, or “they weaponized the Justice Department” is an admission of doing those things.

This projection of positives is the reverse: instead of the bad thing being projected to the enemy, it’s the enemy’s good thing being projected onto oneself. For some reason we are still pretending to use a language where words mean things, and because the public seems to tricked by that every time, they keep doing it.

Perhaps the root reason why they so rarely invent their own words to describe their new concepts, and usually recycle liberals’ words, is because they feel guilt about what they are doing? In 1984, the terms in Newspeak were invented by the regime, but that is not parallel to what is happening now, when there are few new words, but the old ones can mean the opposite of their old meanings.

They have come up with some terms for dubious legal “theories” like the unitary executive, Christian nationalism, and most of what is in Project 2025. The Christian nationalism term is interesting because it falls on an edge between (1) those who understand it as an unpopular phrase and thus deny they are that thing, when they are covertly working for that outcome, and (2) those who understand it as a popular phrase and thus say it publicly. The disagreement among Republican leaders seems to be only over how much to lie about it, rather than about the substance.

There is a genre of political video content where the creator deduces what the other side believes, because (1) the words the other side uses publicly, when parsed, do not yield any comprehension of their beliefs, and (2) the video creator has never met someone on the other side who can explain it. So they are left with deductions from a corpus of observed behavior, like how someone watching birds for long enough will deduce reasons for their behavior without access to a direct explanation from the birds. This genre is on both sides.

A three-line conversation online with a conservative youtuber went like this:

• Her video message: Democrats will never cheer for anything good that T**** does because all they want is to split the country. My prime example proving this is that he honored a child who had cancer, and Democrats didn’t even clap for that.
• My comment: I think the reasons Democrats didn’t clap is because T**** has cut funding for all cancer research so it seems strange to “honor” the child while taking actions that could kill him.
• Her comeback: Maybe so, but even if T**** found a cure for cancer, they still would say that was bad.

Her comeback boils down to “I concede that there is no evidence in this real world to support my point, but in this hypothetical other world, my point still stands.” The “point” was the projected accusation that the left is divisive. She went to the trouble to make a video saying that the other side is universally and permanently bad, which is the very definition of being “divisive”, but the message given in the video is that Democrats are the ones being divisive.

The three-line conversation illustrates in a dense fashion how the only objectivity is that some language and gestures can indicate good things (honoring a cancer victim, being united) and other language and gestures can indicate a bad thing (being divisive, disrespecting women). We cling hopelessly to the shared culture of which words describe good and bad things, but that’s the only shared agreement. With regard to the actions that those words are pasted onto, we seem to lack an agreement on whether they happened at all. This may explain why the public falls for lies over and over: we humans need unity and shared understanding, so if we can only find it in language abstractions, we will cling to it at that level.

Is predicting useful?

I’m writing this on the first week when the US regime has refused to obey court orders, aka. the constitutional crisis, so my mind goes into predictive modeling mode. I tend to accept facts quickly and then am ready for the next step. The hardest fact to accept was after my divorce, I wasn’t going to have my child full time. I took a walk and went through all the feelings and then I was done accepting it. Today’s fact is we no longer live in a semi-democracy; this is easier to accept knowing that billions of other people also don’t live in one, and some of them are doing ok. It’s even more palatable if you think in terms of the democracy score (where North Korea is zero and Iceland is 100), we just went from 75 to 50 or so, considering we were not that great before and that state and local governments are still intact.

As I learned from transportation modeling, we can guess future behavior only in a comparative manner; what actually will happen is so difficult to predict that it is not useful. In the case of transport, you can set up a model that says, say, investing 10B in system A results in a 2% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, while investing the same amount in system B results in a 7% reduction. All we know from that analysis is that system B is significantly better than A, but the 7% figure is not a real number. If we look back at predictive studies in transport compared to what happened in reality, they are generally completely wrong because of the caveat “all other things being equal”, which means the study only compared two alternatives and made assumptions about everything else being static. All other things are actually dynamic, and planning efforts seem to often get this wrong; it’s a persistent mental trap that plagues any discussion of the future.

In the most general sense, when making predictions that inform policy choices, we have the known starting point and several diverging lines on the graph, which often will diverge so fast and be based on so many variables that even the near future is impossible to predict. It’s tempting then to scrap this whole method of thinking, but the comparative aspect is still valuable: if the regime does action A versus action B (all other things being assumed to be static), the results can be predicted comparatively, not quantitatively.

We can ask the likelihood of choices many actors will make in response to the actions of the regime and get a collection of comparative predictions. I’ve often been wrong about behavioral predictions because I underestimate the needs of the majority of people to (1) win, regardless of the prize, and (2) adopt the same beliefs as the side that appears to be winning, regardless of the content of the belief system. My mistake was to assume people do most things for money, power, love, or principles, but I now think they do most things because of a subconscious social current in the absence of an independent thought.

Beyond the fairly obvious prediction that many people will suffer and die from the damage done in the first few weeks of the regime, I want to look at the choices to be made and the opportunities for better outcomes, and how the confluence of factors (mainly technology, inequality, and the cult) might affect what choices are made.

Communications

In the olden days of media (that is, prior to the current post-truth era), there was not a critical distinction between reporting on what powerful people said and what they did, because while people have always lied about their motives and plans, they could not get away with lies about reality as much as now. In post-truth, media continues to report on what powerful people say, as if it has value, despite it having so little bearing on what actually happens. In its worst form, it sanewashes non-syntactic ramblings into a policy position, applying paint to a sheet of air.

If journalism were up to me, I would (1) report on what happened with money, policy, and non-negotiable facts like someone’s death, (2) calculate who benefits from what happened, (3) predict the outcome of the event or policy, and (4) derive the reasons for the action based on all this. I would not report on what powerful people say at all, outside of what can be verified. The Week and The Economist are pretty good at this, but most outlets are not. For example, (1) the king fired many Independent Investigators. (2) Those who intend to defraud the government will benefit. (3) A higher level of waste and fraud can be expected. (4) The action was possibly done to clear the way for the expected crime spree. There is no need to “balance” this with what the king says about it, which is naturally a diversion or the opposite of the actual news.

By contrast, most of the news starts with what the powerful person said their reasons were for doing something, then maybe balances it with other perspectives. Headlines like “In a cost savings strategy, T**** did X, Y, Z… But will it work?” are brain-muddling because they pre-suppose stated intention as fact. Because news is so stuck in this way, the regime’s strategy to “say stuff” is working very well. The media (and public in general?) seem to doubt that this is even a coup at all because they are looking at things from a word perspective, with a belief framework that the words play into, then looking at actions afterwards, and sometimes even thinking the worst actions are “mistakes” because those actions are not rational strategies to complete the stated goals. Example: “Downsizing accidentally includes nuclear safety personnel”. Maybe the journalist who wrote that didn’t know the reason why such a dangerous move was made, and I don’t either, but that lack of understanding is no reason to sanewash the story by adding unverifiable claims to make it make sense.

So my first prediction is about journalism and media, the distribution of belief systems, and what comes after post-truth. Given the rise of podcast-format sources like Meidas Touch (which has more views than some network news, even though it is only a few years old), it is safe to predict a continued exponential decline in the old media, which cannot seem to adapt to post-truth. Without actual journalism on the ground, the living-room podcasters will have fewer sources to draw from and may tend towards post-truth themselves. Another trend is that the cost of a 24-hour AI-directed stream of your own personal echo chamber is declining to the point where that can make more money from inducing product purchases than it costs, so it seems more likely that media sources will hyper-schism to the point where there are unique sources for each consumer. Tech empires will create platforms allowing anyone to buy the attention of others in a market, but without having to create the content at all. The era to follow post-truth needs a separate name so let it be the jello-brain era. If many people choose the jello path, they will be a monolithic army controlled by the platform, with weapons (and voting power, if that is still a thing).

There is an argument though that post-truth has the quality of a financial bubble that might pop before too many people turn to jello. Bubble-pop cycles are closer to exponential growth, then hitting a wall and resetting. But, it could also be an S-curve, which doesn’t end in a pop. Intuitively (and I have no way to get data on this), we may be slightly past the inflection point of the post-truth adoption S-curve. Post-truth could probably reach about 80% adoption in the political sphere, but would be limited to much less than that otherwise, since you can’t do practical things like build a house on reality-defying ideology. When people are living in poverty or under the threat of a police state, they may be less inclined to post-truth; i.e. “s*** gets real.”

On the other hand, under duress, people rationalize a lot; in the extreme, incest victims may say “my parents love me”. If there is rampant and sudden poverty, servitude, and state killings, we may see a nationwide repression of it that prevents any meaningful counter-action.

I used to think things could “return” to normalcy, but ever since social media started, nothing has ever returned to stasis, and I don’t think it will; media will be completely different forever, and blocs will be defined along different lines than they traditionally were. People will always seek to know things, but the tools we will have to determine what is even happening will be themselves AI-driven and socially validated, closer to competing mythological systems than critical thinking. For each effort to create some unbiased source, there will be a multiplicity of efforts to bias it. We may essentially give up on the collective effort to agree on what is happening, and collective choices will be made in order to feed the mythological systems, while some individuals may try to remain in reality outside the collective.

Legal truth

When a court “finds” something is true, it is a social construction of truth that is meant to closely resemble a scientific truth, but always suffers from bias or mistakes or deceit. A big way this will get worse is that no evidence can be conclusive any more in a scientific way, such as DNA evidence, fingerprints, or video footage, because all evidence can now be manufactured. Today, it is still a significant project to plant false clues that cover up a crime, but it will become more routine for people leave a trail of evidence supporting their mythology, all day every day, as a way to prevent being found out for any crime they might commit. Jurors may see evidence with their own eyes but have no way to know if it is real.

By design, courts counteract concentrated power, but they are perhaps less immune to grassroots threats. We can expect a lot worse outcomes in the future due to direct mass political action against courts and jurors. It has risen along with post-truth and will continue to rise, possibly with no return to stasis. If a jury of peers finds someone guilty but the mythological system requires them to be innocent, certain people today will invent a story such as the court being planted with actors or they were bribed, and will then threaten violence against them. I think we might see the justifying story be omitted more in the future, and people will just go directly to violence without even pretending that they or anyone else is seeking legal truth.

Is there some future in which courts find a point between being the body that settles matters by a jury, and being sham displays of authoritarian power? Assuming there is no way to legally verify anything in the future due to a limitless supply of evidence of all possible things having happened, perhaps the courts will end up just finding compromises between opposing myths.

Limit of inequality

While we are on dystopian predictions, I often wonder how far inequality can go before some other force prevents it from going further. Kings who starved their subjects to death had no subjects, and were therefore no longer kings; therefore absolute power needs some calculated freedoms granted to maintain itself; therefore there is a limit to inequality. Of course we have had systematic slavery, Nazis and other instances of extreme power concentration, and I don’t see anything that is preventing that from happening at a global scale now, especially when tech-driven, so you don’t even need weapons now to do it. And it is completely unclear to me how long those steps will take. Hitler normalized genocide in a matter of months, but it’s taken decades to normalize oligarchy in the US. (I’m calling oligarchy “normalized” now because hardly anyone is calling for wealth limits; some people seem to think we can have unlimited wealth but simultaneously restrain those people from excessive power!)

Power psychology appears to be circular in the sense that the actions of the powerful are motivated by preserving their position, with no further goal – it’s not in the service of anything else. In the extreme, regicide is the only path away from the position. To preserve it, one has to keep everyone else in one of several categories: (1) co-oligarchs with whom one has a system of threats against to maintain parity, (2) loyalists with compartmentalized power, (3) machine-controlled idle subjects, (4) people who won’t do anything disruptive because they are “nice”, (5) exhausted workers, (6) prisoners, and (7) false insurgents, as in 1984. While we have no experience with machine-controlled humans on large scale yet, it’s sure to take a chunk of the population, who will have no jobs other than being ideological soldiers. It looks like the trend is that increasing numbers of people are neatly in one of these depowered categories. Unlike American slavery, it is not necessary that everyone works hard; overworking is one means to keep them from questioning authority, but personalized AI-streams and implants are other ways. Keeping everyone overly comfortable and slightly sick is another way. Since everyone claims to be a free thinker, it seems impossible to figure out how many people are actually captured in these categories today.

Opportunities

#1. Learning that there is no dragon. Here is an observation about the January 6th insurrection. It must have felt so heroic for the people involved to beat back the authorities, break through windows, and gain entrance to the halls of power! In myth, you first repel the outer guards, then in level 2, you fight ogres, then so on until level 10 when you slay the dragon. But in the anticlimactic reality, the halls of power are only the halls of a democratically run institution, pretty quiet with some nice wood trim. There is no lair, nothing else to breach because we were here all along. I’ve heard people say “I shouldn’t have to pay for that; the government should pay!” which exposes a belief that the dragon’s lair exists, that it is something other than us. I wasn’t alive when Jefferson was writing, but it seems people are actively miseducated about democracy more than ever. I feel like this turning point is an opportunity for many more people to re-experience the anticlimax of January 6th. As the mythical dragon is dismembered, people will feel their own local institutions being severed, and will understand the dragon is just us. As they stab at it, they will feel themselves being poked. This could ignite a resurgence of understanding and demanding democracy (because of the learning from the failure of self-poking), and it could depower the cult.

#2. Resilience. Likewise, as programs are slashed, the fragility of having so much complexity in the economy will be exposed, and it could result in a better realignment of that complexity. This is about the fragile gigantic machine that encompasses the financial system, airlines, shipping, and so on. It depends on so many components in a cross-dependent way, that a stoppage at one chip factory, or GPS failing, or some other single event could cascade to so much damage. There have been many people studying the problem and slowly applying improvements, but the public will to focus on it and comprehensively make it resilient has been lacking. Maybe now we will collectively see that problem for what it is.

#3. Rebuilding with efficiency. On a similar note, there is fraud and waste in government, but I have a different take on it than the spins from right and left on that topic that are in the news. The right-spin is that a giant percent of expenses are going to completely off-the-wall things like environmental justice monitoring in Bolivia. They call anything “crazy” that they haven’t heard of, and make the mistake of looking at the one crazy-sounding expense in isolation, not looking at comprehensive budgets, and not realizing the world is a big place where millions of things can happen at once. As of this writing, DOGE has only “exposed” “waste” by listing things that sound crazy to some people, but are actually Congressionally mandated spending, the result of debating priorities. The left-spin is that everything was fine, or maybe that there is always a little waste and fraud that can’t be helped and that’s why we have audits. But I think it runs much deeper than that and is baked into processes, and this turning point is an opportunity to correct. For example, in transport, billions are routinely spent in ways that don’t solve problems, but we could have a more outcome-informed process for budgeting those projects. In health, we have laws supporting a system that is not a transparent market, but we could have consumer-protection laws that enforce a transparent market, which could save billions, even trillions.

Waste and complexity can be looked at more generally as the self-justifying aspect of large systems. Part of their complexity is devoted to justifying the complexity, so they can’t get leaner. It’s like if you have a leaky old house that has failing systems and you keep having to spot-fix things, preventing you from saving money, and the fixes keep being layered on. But then one day it burns down and the insurance money pays for a better house that has none of the problems. The burn and rebuild strategy is being talked about, but really what’s happening is just the burn part; the rebuild will be a necessity if we regain democratic control, and it could be an opportunity to build better at that point.

#4 Going local. Another opportunity is to rebuild at a lower level of government. In particular for the Department of Education, the ax appears to be aimed at the funding of student loans, equalizing grants, and perhaps at publicly funded education in general. Or it may be aimed more at the anti-racism effect of the work of the department in general. So far, it is hard to tell because if we ignore what powerful people say (which is not news, nor is it predictive), we only have a few actions to base understanding on, which don’t reveal the intent well. In any case, the rebuild strategy could be at a more local level. In some places that could yield rampant white supremacy and ineffective education, but it might be an opportunity to do much better in other places.

As an aside, federalism turned out to be a blessing in the case of this coup, because taking the federal government does not automatically include all the other governments; the coup has to be repeated many times to be universally successful.

#5. Fighting for real things. What happens with the fringe left – the people who compete for oppression points and self-trigger and make it your fault? I predicted that the transgender movement would cause the last election to swing right, which turned out to be a main reason given in polls for voting Republican. While the 60s activists were fighting for more clearly-defined rights, the current fringe seems to act (unwittingly?) as a tool to drive people to support the opposite extreme, and by that reasoning, they are the false insurgents from 1984. The opportunity now is to sever them from movement for equality so we can focus on the actual need for equality.

#6. Calculated disobedience. A final opportunity is disobedience – including the whole range from organized civil disobedience to chaos. The US has a culture of disorder, which makes it unlike Nazi Germany or North Korea. That aspect of US culture has not actually stemmed concentration of power and wealth so far, but perhaps it makes it take longer or limits the effectiveness of the concentrated power. I wonder why I would even pay taxes this April, knowing the auditing workforce of the IRS could be missing, and knowing who is controlling the money I would give them. If I skipped tax season, it would be just cheating, but if many people did it publicly, it could be a force. Mass public disobedience may be practiced by state and local governments, schools, and other institutions, meaning it could be both an establishmentarian and anti-establishmentarian response.