| Friday,
June 9, 2006 A spokesperson speaks:
Subject: Give the teacher unions a break already
jerryp@jerrypournelle.com
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>April 3, 2006 ...
>Over in mail we have another example of
Pournelle's Iron Law of
>Bureaucracy at work. I have written the basic description of the Iron
>Law so many times that I want to put it down with its own title so I
>can refer to it in future:
>Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states
that in any bureaucratic
>organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to
>further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for
>the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who
>work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who
>work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron
>Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always
>gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules
>under which the organization functions.
They say that the rain falls on the just and unjust
alike. Perhaps the bureaucratic organization member of the first type (the
goal directed one) feels that the "protection" offered by their
bureaucracy-directed peers is similar to the rain in this respect. Perhaps
they see the bureaucrats' protection, including protection offered to the
incompetent or otherwise unworthy, as part of what makes their own
contributions possible. Perhaps there are people outside of their
organization who also feel this way.
My own take on such glaringly obvious phenomena as
your iron law is not generally to advance yet another iron law that
empirically demonstrates that humyn nature is inherently--fill in the blank
with whatever adjective satisfies the requirements of one's own
ideology--selfish, violent, bureaucratic, oligarchic, territorial,
irrational, rational, economic, least-resistance, hierarchical, unequal,
etc. My own take on the obvious is that a teaching organization is a "group
entity" (which is to say an entity that is not an individual humyn being, or
organism) or what I tend to call an "institution." The board of education
that they try to bargain with collectively is also an institution. So are
competing (or enemy) institutions such as Mr. Whipple's infamous "Channel
One" media organization or Mr. Edison's infamous charter schools. The battle
lines between the individual and institutional realms knows no "sectors."
Just as self defense provides an exception to the rule
that Violence is Bad, economic self defense in the form of attempted
cartelization provides an exception to the rule that "free" markets are
inherently good. Success at cartelization or the getting of "market power"
is said by adherents to (neo)classical and (neo)liberal doctrines is
theoretically impossible, anyway, so what are the free market
fundamentalists afraid of, anyway? The labor movement as a whole is a case
study in failure. The teacher unions are one of a small and shrinking number
of such dominoes still standing. Their union is being busted successfully
every day by smiling salescritters selling privatization packages to school
boards all over America. So, instead of being run by institutions called
school boards or teacher unions, the kids depend on for-profit or
for-prophet institutions that have agendas that go well beyond misguided
attempts at market power. As institutions, they're every bit as inherently
bureaucratic and oligarchic as the ones they replace.
If you want an education, start studying. For things
you can't learn from books, find some people. The trick, of course, is
persuading them (given the Tanstaafl and therefore Evil universe we live in)
that sharing their knowledge with you is something they can afford to do.
People of the "growth is good" religion claim that
what people can afford depends on how much wealth they have. I am of the
belief that it depends a lot more an how little scarcity they have. If the
badness of scarcity didn't trump the goodness of wealth, the American (or
general humyn) status quo we see today would not be possible. Specifically,
Americans wouldn't fear the Pink Slip, or the nominally even worse
Termination With Cause.
The problem is Power (hierarchy, territorialism,
inequality and/or scarcity, in short the phenomenon of "dominance") itself,
not some bureaucratic tendency in humyn nature. Create a post-scarcity
non-economy in which people have the luxury of being able to afford (there
goes that word again) to treat their colleagues and fellow humyn beings in
general as EQUALS, and your bureaucracy problem should evaporate without a
single shot being fired. Bureaucracy is caused by the fact that some people
have more Power (usually in the form of wealth, which Is Power) than others,
not the fact that some people choose to expheriment with collective as well
as individual strategies for living effectively in spite of the existence of
Power.
Whether it matters or not, this comment comes after my
first visit to your site, so I am not "well read" in Pournelle. The
impression I have so far from cursory readings here is of YET ANOTHER SF
writer advancing the cause of the "libertarian" Right. If I had a penny for
every time some "libertarian" Rightist bopped me over the head with some
hackneyed cliché to the extent that nobody's holding a gun to my head
to keep going to my crappy temp job or sign some boilerplate (and therefore
Evil) $ell phone contract, or participate in some other private sector
exercise in "voluntarism" that I'd rather not, I'd be quite wealthy by now.
Yet the SF writing profession every few decades or so demonstrates its
redeeming value by producing the occasional LeGuin or Dick. Maybe you guys
need a union.
It is certainly interesting to see the profusion of
SF-blogs.
Lorraine Lee [mailto:n8chz@yahoo.ca]
To the extent that I understand what was said here,
it appears to be an apology for defending the lack of results in schools.
Telling parents who have little education that they
should set their children to becoming autodidacts like Abraham Lincoln might
be great advice for those with bright children, but for those of normal
intelligence and below it is a bit like telling them to win the lottery as a
remedy to poverty.
As to the "Libertarian Right", alas, my Libertarian
friends wish mightily that I were more so. My view is like Larry Niven's:
Libertarianism is a vector, not a destination, and for the moment it's the
right vector for the lot of us: we have far too much interference with
freedom in the name of bureaucracy. To that extent I am a part of the
Libertarian Right, I suppose, but they don't accept me, given my
conservative and reactionary tendencies...
It would probably come as a shock, but Possony and
I were working on "The Strategy of Progress", which defends bureaucracy for
certain purposes. Sometimes a bureaucracy is the only way to bring about
certain results. The problem is that education isn't one of those cases.
Public education requires a very great deal more attention from both public
and private authorities than a bureaucracy can possibly give it. Among other
things, public education requires that those in charge demand results, not
credentials. But that is another story for another time.
In addition to being an SF writer I am a former
aerospace operations research engineer, aviation psychologist, professor of political science,
deputy mayor, campaign manager, and science correspondent.
Alas, I do not entirely understand what you are
saying here.
And see below
============
18 Days of Reckless Computing.
http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/start.html?pg=6
---- Roland Dobbins
==========
Subject: More on Ghost
Jerry,
I've been trying Ghost 10 out to see how it does on my
main development machine. My current project is complex, spanning a USB 2
core in HDL, embedded firmware, Altera and Xilinx FPGA development S/W, a
Windows XP device driver, and a Win32 console application. Whew! Long story
short, stuff is scattered all over my hard drive, a 1TB 4 drive Raid 0
array. Not so easy to do a manual backup. At the end of a development day, I
tell Ghost to make a complete backup. I told Ghost to create a backup set
last week. No each day, what I see is that Ghost takes about 10 minutes to
scan my C and D drives and uses about 2 gigabytes total to save the
differences. I'm using a 500GB Maxtor One Touch III I bought at Fry's as the
backup drive. Ghost is disabled form auto-scanning. I have to manually tell
it to start. I also keep the Maxtor unplugged from the system and turned off
except when I'm using it. Too many Windows Applications just have to spin up
all the drives at odd times, especially Acrobat! Then you end up waiting
while the drives spin up!
So far so good.
Phil
==========
Re: Great Things
"I fear that the passion, the drive, the sheer force
of will to do great things has passed into history. Today we are focused
more on making a quick buck and what Brittney Spears is doing with her kid
than on Great Things. Are there truly momentous adventures left to us? And
do we have the will - both personal and societal - to pursue them?"
Truly momentous adventures? Does anyone who has ever
read your works need to ask, Jerry? Sure, there are great things left to do
– and the will to do them is being hijacked by bean-counters and
bureaucratic empire-builders.
I refer of course to the Great Leap Outwards. I don’t
have any kids and never will, but I would like to think that one of my
sister’s grandchildren or great-grandchildren will have a chance to walk the
snows of Enceladus, or wrestle a drill on some nameless asteroid loaded with
stuff more valuable than gold, or sail a boat on the lake in the first L5
colony, or…
Apart from being a good thing to do for reasons few
reading this will dispute (I hope), I submit that this would also help to
heal the ills of our society. A thought I have often seen stated: One of the
chief causes of our society’s problems is the lack of a frontier; a lack of
somewhere for our troublesome young men to risk getting themselves killed
in, a lack of somewhere to think that you might actually be helping to build
something worth building.
And one way the Great Black Yonder is better than
earlier frontiers; there are no troublesome native inhabitants that anyone
will have to kill, suppress or enslave in order to do it.
As for treasure, well, there is enough and to spare to
make everyone currently living a trillionaire many times over. Not that this
is the way things would turn out; instead, after a couple of hundred years,
if we wished, there would be enough for a trillion people (at least!) to
live in comfort.
Disband NASA, and let’s get started! We have wasted a
generation already!
Ian Campbell
Hurrah!
===========
Subject: Re: Climate change
In Harry Erwin's letter:
If climate change is real, here are some of the
consequences. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1790471,00.html>
> Being a farmer's son from Riverside, I know about
falling water tables. The "mining" of water in the American Southwest is not
sustainable.
This reminds me of a documentary I heard on the radio
a few years ago. IIRC, some of the highlights were: - that an early explorer
called the Canadian Prairies unliveable. - Studies of sediment on lake
bottoms in the prairies show the Dust Bowl of the 30's is the second mildest
draught of the last millennium. - The Saskatchewan River today has 1/6th the
flow it did in 1900, and the only reason there is a river in the summer is
glacial meltoff.
I can't find the name of original documentary on the
CBC site, but here is a more recent news story.
Looming drought on Prairies will be worse than Dust
Bowl days of 1930s: experts
http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2006/04/04/alberta-drought-20060404.html
Brian Moore
============
Dear Dr. Pournelle:
Perhaps you have achieved sufficient wisdom that you
can honestly and reasonably try to address a point raised by someone who
advances "humyn nature" into a discussion. Me, I'm pleased that MS Word's
spellcheck still puts a squiggly red line under "humyn." Of course, the
etymologies of "man" and "human" reach back to two entirely different
language families....
Anyway, I think what she meant to write (one sample
paragraph):
'My own take on such glaringly obvious phenomena as
your iron law is not generally to advance yet anothyr iron law that
empirically demonstrates that humyn nature is inhyrently--fill in the blank
with whatever adjective satisfies the requirements of one's own
ideology--selfish, violent, bureaucratic, oligarchic, territorial,
irrational, rational, economic, least-resistance, hierarchical, unequal,
etc. My own take on the obvious is that a teaching organization is a "group
entyty" (which is to say an entyty that is not an individual humyn being, or
organism) or what I tend to call an "instytution." The board of education
that they try to bargain with collectively is also an instytution. So are
competing (or enemy) instytutions such as Mr. Whipple's infamous "Channel
One" media organization or Mr. Edison's infamous charter schools. The battle
lines between the individual and instytutional realms knows no "sectors."'
With such vigorous proponents, I'm shocked that
unions, even teachyr unions, are losing public esteem.
But we can all agree that LeGuin and Dyck are very
good writers.
_ Christian J. Schulte
Deputy District Attorney
==========
Subject: Humyn nature
I confess I didn't quite follow every point in the
humyn nature essay. But I think I got the gist.
On the other hand, I think what you have said about
teacher's unions is clear and easy to follow. Teacher's unions are devoted
to getting the best possible deal for teachers; this is not the same thing
as delivering the best possible education for the students. So, you can be
in favor of giving the kids the best possible education, *or* you can be in
favor of giving the teachers the best possible deal; it's easy to say "the
latter ensures the former" but I don't buy it. If it's difficult to fire
incompetent teachers, how does that help the kids?
As for libertarian thinking: I consider myself a
libertarian. As you say, it's a vector, or in my favorite analogy it's a
train you can ride. Very few people in America today would want to ride that
train all the way to the end of the line, but I'd like to see them ride it
as far as they will go.
Anyway, the libertarian observation on the schools is:
state-run schools are run on tax dollars, thus giving parents the choice of
paying *twice* for schools, and sending their kids to a private school; or
paying just once, and sending their kids to a public school. This makes it
much more difficult for private schools to compete with public schools. If
you rode the train all the way to the end of the line, there would be no
government-run schools; all schools would be private and competing with each
other. If you only ride the train part way, you might have the government
collect tax dollars but then issue vouchers good at any school; this would
at least put all schools on an equal footing to compete. If you ride the
train even less, you might keep the public schools open but issue vouchers
to any parents who want them, and see what happens.
If you want the kids to get the best education
possible, the best thing is to get the schools competing with each other for
students. The best teachers will be in demand; the incompetent teachers will
find it harder to keep a job. This all sounds good to me.
-- Steve R. Hastings
"Vita est"
steve@hastings.org http://www.blarg.net/~steveha
==
Jerry,
If Libertarianism a vector, then of necessity,
bureaucracy is a vector. The problem becomes that both are the (vector) sums
of a number of component vectors.
In the case of libertarianism, some of those component
vectors are racial equality/egalitarianism, religious freedom, freedom of
consumption (ranging from the choice between vegetariansm and beef
consumption, to freedom regarding narcotic chemicals including alcohol,
tobacco, and marijuana), and economic freedom including tax freedom. The
fallacy of libertarianism, and in particularly of currently organized
libertarianism, is that some of the component vectors are pursued to excess
at the expense of a unified whole (e.g. the drug legalization issue), while
others have been co-opted by wholly non-libertarian influences (e.g.
egalitarianism pursued to the politically correct extent of banning not only
obvious racism, but even complaints that the political correction process
itself is anti-libertarian in form and execution).
In the case of bureaucracy, the Iron Law clearly
delineates two of the most obvious component vectors: pursuit of the
objectives for which the bureaucracy was formed, and pursuit of the
bureaucracy as a structure in its own right. The principle that the Iron Law
enunciates is that in most bureaucracies, the second component will
eventually become the dominant component, and in extreme cases may become
the sole component, at which cases the first component will attain zero
magnitude, or even go negative (the bureaucracy operates contrary to the
objectives of the bureaucracy).
The fact that Public Education has reached the stage
where the bureaucratic component is so dominant that the objective component
is in many locations (an important distinction) net negative or
significantly overdampted is not necessarily a fallacy of the bureaucratic
approach in this case, but it is true that the dismantling of the
bureaucracy (viz. "retirement of the system at the end of the system
lifecycle," to apply a more control-theory oriented terminology) is more
likely to achieve the ostensible objective of the bureaucracy than the
identification and application of appropriate controls to the bureaucracy to
assure that teaching can proceed effectively.
And this is probably as much double speak as your
correspondent's missive.
JW
==
“Underpaid Teachers” Richly Rewarded.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2006/06/06/
underpaid-teachers-richly-rewarded/
--- Roland Dobbins
==
Subject: "humyn"
Jerry:
When I skimmed Lorraine Lee's dissolute and decadent
diatribe (I seldom read anything that screwed up in depth) my impression was
that she was something akin to a distaff version of Rand's Wesley Mouch. A
search for occurances of "humyn" would seem to confirm that taxonomy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humyn
That tells me all I care or need to know about Lee.
And the idea that such a creature has any connection, however remote, to the
task of teaching children pretty much sums up the essential condition (as
well as the genesis of that condition) of public school education today.
-Scott
Which pretty well states the point I was trying to
make in posting that letter. I didn't do it to ridicule Ms. Lee; but alas,
the view she states is not uncommon.
Or, being more succinct: you can't make this stuff
up.
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