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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I don't think the romance is with the state, I think it is with leadership and organizations. Further, it seems the evidence favors the romance: large organizations with charismatic leaders accomplish a tremendous amount.

Where are the weak states that have won wars and therefor kept themselves in existence? Where are the "democratically run" large corporations outperforming their more orderly brethren because they better exploit the pushing of decision making further towards the edges than the center? Where are the great railroads and oil companies that evolved with a laissez faire attitude from the top?

Some of us think we are individuals, perhaps that is the bias we need to overcome in order to understand humanity. The evidence seems to be that we are not THAT much smarter than chimps or bonobos or whales. What we are is insanely better communicators, both through language and through the apparent instict to trade that Ridley talks about in the Rational Optimist. Our left arm and our right arm don't develop separate theories of individualtiy until the corpus collosum is cut. But what of the group mind? We have a strong connection between or right and left brains, we have a weaker connection to a myriad of other brains on the planet through talk, writing, radio, and internet. While our individual brain is not yet mechanized, we have been mechanically aiding our group brain starting with writing and accounting on clay tablets and going up from there.

Perhaps some part of the group brain needs to organize the efforts of the other prarts. Perhaps other parts LIKE to be organized and have even evolved to like it since it creates a more effective group brain which has been incredibly valuable in natural selection as well as in building collosea and getting to North America and later, to the Moon.

Maybe the love of leaders is a feature to be managed, and not at all a bug.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

My experience teaching at a business school has been that the sort of education necessary to become good at this sort of social science is antithetical to the self-image of business students. Science is "theoretical," for geeks, and not for square-jawed straight-talking "leaders". Internal accountability is fine, but thinking of business plans or relevant parts of business plans in terms of serious on-going empirical research about the social environment, either taken from other sources or generated in house, is not a good fit with the culture of MBAs.

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