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mk  ·  3936 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Kartik Agaram: From Cognitive Biases to Institutional Decay

In regards to the 'glimmerings of a solution', I was left wondering about the imperfectness and bias in information gathering. That is, your data is only as good as your ability to gather and interpret it. Sometimes the very process of outlining a problem imposes a bias upon which data is gathered, and the importance given to what is gathered, and what is not.

Also, I wonder about issues of scale, and improper mapping. As a worst-case scenario, I can think of Chairman Mao being fed BS about how much collectivization was increasing crop yields. -I've read that crops were transplanted along railway lines that he was scheduled to travel on.

I do buy that institutional decay occurs by imperceptible creep. However, I don't know that well-informed deliberate steps have an advantage over a messier evolutionary process of smaller, less-educated ones, considering that as the scope of information increases, so do the scope of assumptions buttressing it.