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Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

improvesomething.today

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Re: Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

#51

Post by edoceo »

grim_io wrote: post #50
didgetmaster wrote: post #20

People often attribute the government's inability to solve a problem even after throwing billions of dollars at it; as a sign of incompetence. While there is plenty of incompetence within government; I think the 'Preserve the Problem' response is mostly to blame. If we 'solved' crime, homelessness, drug use, poverty, etc.; then budgets would decrease and political power would diminish. Those in charge of solving the…

Big Pharma is trying to preserve cancer. Wake up sheeple!

Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patie...

Re: Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

#52

Post by edoceo »

wombatpm wrote: post #45
foolswisdom wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While preserving problems is undoubtedly a natural incentive, I think Hanlon's razor applies here. Just today I was reading Competent Bureaucracy - Rebuilding State Capacity ( https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d27... >) on the topic of agency structure promoting success (the author has done a nice amount of work in the past - e.g. https://www.statecapacitance.pub into this history of this topic…

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: every organization has two groups of people. The first group cares about the organization's main goal. The second group cares about the organization itself. Group two always wins, takes control, and writes the rules. So NGO’s go from combating homelessness to being the organization about homelessness. I sometimes think organizations should be set up with hard end dates. At which p…

Simply: the Bureaucracy exists to perpetuate the Bureaucracy.

Re: Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

#53

Post by ElevenLathe »

enos_feedler wrote: post #35
treis wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not quite that black and white. You have fixed amount of policing resources and it goes to the most impactful crimes. If crime goes down then they start caring about petty stuff. If it goes back up then they stop. This applies more directly to something like foster care. My state is going through a budget crisis and anecdatally the result is significantly fewer kids coming into and remaining in care. It moves at…

If this is true then a restructuring of the entire organizations might help. It seems the flaws are built in.

This is exactly what "defund the police" is (IMO) trying to say. The justice system (really it extends to the courts, the law itself, etc.) we have is corrupt. To really solve the problem that currently-existing policing purports to solve means scrapping it altogether and starting fresh, with fresh people, culture, goals, and processes.

Re: Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

#55

Post by cwmoore »

SoftTalker wrote: post #44
MattGrommes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious about even a hypothetical more detailed example of how some group would go about preserving a problem like homelessness, even unintentionally. I can't wrap my mind about how it would actually happen beyond simplistic sayings. I live in Portland, OR where we have a large homeless problem and I continually hear that the groups being given money to help are incentivized to keep homelessness high fo…

In the homelessness example, it's not so much that the programs and groups want to justify their continued existence (though that might be happening too). It's that the programs themselves incentivize more of the problem. When they give things to homeless people, such as food, shelter, clothes, social services, even needles and a "safe place" to get high in some cases, and often with few or no conditions, they make b…

Jail time is a sure spiral into unemployment and homelessness, privations, and more jailtime.

Re: Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

#56

Post by blharr »

dmitrygr wrote: post #24
have_faith wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone within the system genuinely feel threatened by the idea that something like "crime" can be "solved" to the point that they're avoiding solving too much crime? Same logic for the others.

A LOT of crime can be solved. A huge percentage of perps are multi-repeat perps. Putting them away permanently would solve a lot of crime. "75% to 83% of released prisoners are arrested for a new crime" https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/2018-update-prisone...

"Solved" (heavy quotes) because instiutionalizing dozens of millions of people with no improvement is a massive crime in and of itself.

That's like those stories of LLMs saying "I fixed the vulnerability in your app" by deleting the project entirely

Re: Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

#57

Post by metalman »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #9
metalman wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or perhaps thats the first response? in any case, as a hard core problem solver who is currently overwhelmed with problems I am bieng forced into no choice paragmatic responses. where I have lost any reserve capacity, deflect, move, deny a problem and get some rest, eat, shave the yak, before rejoining the fray with enough energy to perform is just part of the routine now. ie: triage or go under, which may be habit f…

Denying the problem exists is not the same. Denying that the problem is a “problem” would be. In the first case, the affected do nothing because there is no problem. In the second, it’s “not a problem” because they did a thing and moved it elsewhere.

the other possibility is that the problem is somebody elses, rendering it invisible and therefor potentialy usefull in it's own right

Re: Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

#58

Post by cwmoore »

wombatpm wrote: post #45
foolswisdom wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While preserving problems is undoubtedly a natural incentive, I think Hanlon's razor applies here. Just today I was reading Competent Bureaucracy - Rebuilding State Capacity ( https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d27... >) on the topic of agency structure promoting success (the author has done a nice amount of work in the past - e.g. https://www.statecapacitance.pub into this history of this topic…

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: every organization has two groups of people. The first group cares about the organization's main goal. The second group cares about the organization itself. Group two always wins, takes control, and writes the rules. So NGO’s go from combating homelessness to being the organization about homelessness. I sometimes think organizations should be set up with hard end dates. At which p…

I am not aware of any real tests of effectiveness of these organizations, but I am a huge proponent of progressive UBI so that the systems might actually serve people with chronic or recurring need and not simply being dragged along. What we do as a democracy is cede the status quo to paternalistically penalizing the poor out of contention, and is pretty ethically corrupted bh it’s own effectiveness.

Re: Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

#59

Post by jimnotgym »

0wis wrote: post #5

Nice article, interesting to keep an open mind. On "No. 0002. Preserving problems", it can happen to people too, no need for a complex system at the size of a company. I have often noticed recognized experts keeping the root of the problem unsolved because it was justifying their position. I may even have been subject of this curse. As an expert, you may know the root cause but have no incentive to solve it and it ca…

I often found the opposite can be be true, people can, for decades on end, be totally ignorant of what happens next door. When you show them the effect of their ignorance you often get something akin to the stages of grief. Definitely the anger, and with you in particular. The, 'I don't care whose fault it is, I'm not here to apportion blame' line only goes so far, especially since other managers and even the CEO might be very interested in apportioning blame. At least they are allies for the change that needs to happen

Re: Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)

#60

Post by [deleted] »

numeri wrote: post #49
skinfaxi wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, kind of obvious from the .gov right?

I read the comment you're replying to as saying, "in the US, but other countries may have different policies that result in lower recidivism, and that might change the conclusion; maybe people aren't inherently criminally insane, but can become useful members of society, if given a chance"

[deleted]
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