But what makes the barnacles stick to the whale?

Yesterday I wrote the following:

“There’s an idea I think wrongly associated with the right that our civilization is falling apart because we’ve accreted too much bullshit. Too many processes, forms, best practices, special procedures, liability reduction strategies, niche expertise, etc. Each barnacle means little perhaps, but in total the load is killing the whale.

Energy-sapping barnacles stick because even though they’re all harmful, the difficulties and risks involved in throwing each one off individually are not worth the cost. Consider a practice that’s (fortunately) slowly become less popular: companies drug-testing low-level employees by making them pee in a bottle- it doesn’t really help anyone, but it lingers because who wants to be the first to give it up and take that risk? Who wants to throw social and signaling capital into being the company that wouldn’t drug test its employees? Some barnacles are pushed off, doubtless (drug testing seems mostly gone), but the whale acquires new ones faster than it loses old barnacles. For an example of a more current barnacle, consider the practice of holding a bajillion interviews even for low-level jobs. It became popular during a tight job market, and a cadre of hiring experts profited from it. Now the job market isn’t tight and the practice is likely actively harmful, but no one wants to risk getting rid of it and make the humiliating concession that they can’t afford to be as picky as they used to be. Bullshit harmful practices like this accumulate faster than they’re scrapped and are hard to get rid of for a million reasons.

So long as one recognizes that this isn’t just a government thing- that, in many ways, the corporate world is worse- it becomes apparent that there’s nothing rightwing about noticing this phenomenon. It may even be a major driver in the fall of empires. I don’t have much to say about it, except that I think it’s an idea that the left should take more seriously, and theorize as part of capitalism.”

I thought a good follow-up would be to list some of the many factors that, in my experience, make the barnacles so difficult to detach from the whale and generate so many barnacles in the first place:

1. “It only takes a minute": Administration processes are often hideously complex, and end up costing a lot of money. My experience working in a hospital gave me some insight into why. Management sticks in a bunch of sub-processes which add little, but give them some nugget of data or something like that which they never really use much. Individually, each of these things is quick. Cumulatively each of these things takes a long time. However, management is loathe to remove anything from the process because for each component “it only takes a minute”. Hence barnacles accumulate.

2. Futile attempts to control tail risk: There was a store I went into once where all the power points had been sealed up so they couldn’t be used. I asked the owner why, he responded that he’d read that someone in the US had sued a store after sticking their finger in a power socket, he didn’t want the same thing to happen to him, so he’d sealed up all the power sockets. Leaving aside that it’s questionable whether this even happened (a lot of stories about absurd litigation are made up), the problem with the proprietor's thinking, it seems to me, is the implicit premise that this problem is escapable. There’s a tail risk that someone will sue you for some strange reason. Trying to anticipate and prevent every possible cause is futile. You should just accept it and recognize only some tail risks can be prevented. Humans don’t like this though, so they stick on barnacles to try to manage their sense of risk. Now see that there is another layer here- even if you, personally, grasp that trying to control all forms tail risk is futile, you’re still locked into doing it for the sake of internal and external appearances (albeit hopefully not to the degree of sealing up your power sockets)

3. Witch risk: Scott Alexander once used the metaphor of a principled community refusing to crack down on witches, and all the witches moving there. This has stuck with me. Imagine that a nation is in the midst of a witch hunt. Now imagine that witches are rare, but real, there are, say 50 of them in this country of ten million. Witches do substantial harm, but the hunt for them causes vastly more. Witch hunting policy is decided on a municipality-by-municipality basis. Now one municipality decides to suspend the witch hunt, ensuring all witches move there, causing a disaster for the town. Thus we observe even though the witch hunt, overall, does more harm than good, still canceling the witch hunt in this town is ruinious. Many barnacles designed to block bad actors are locked in by Witch Risk, even if overall they are efficiency-reducing.

4. Experts and specialists lock in work for themselves: E.g. hiring experts lobbying to add more interview layers as mentioned above.

5. Knowledge asymmetry: Related to the above. The people who work with the barnacle benefit from it, but they’re the only people who know enough about the barnacle to know it isn’t necessary.

6. “It’s too much to think about”: Just thinking about what getting rid of the barnacle would entail, considering how it would change other practices, etc. just seems too much.

7. Technological and process inertia: The barnacle has become linked to other things we do, and removing it would subsequently take resources (company software often offers the best cases of this).

8. Dangerous temperaments: Here’s a powerful factor that protects barnacles. Imagine some fellow (it’s almost certainly a fellow) who says something like “For too long, business has been clogged down with barnacles, I’m going to build a company that does nothing without good reason. I’m going to cut all the red tape. I’m going to…” Likely this fellow won’t get beyond ranting about the great business he’s going to create. If he does, likely his business will explode. The kind of person obsessed with combatting red tape often ends up being a wrecker, and this is to the benefit of red tape. Lots of things that look like barnacles aren’t, or are barnacles, but need to be removed with care. The problem with barnacles isn’t (primarily) stupidity or lack of will, real factors lock them in.

9. The barnacle makes management feel important, thus they fight to preserve and expand: The classic case of this, as discussed by David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, is flunkies that make management feel good about themselves.

10. Signaling: Signalling concerns can take many forms, here’s one: removing the barnacle would be surprising. People won’t know what to make of it. At least some people will dislike it. It will be the talk of the town. You may not even be certain that talk would be bad but why risk it? Do you really want to be talked about primarily in relation to removing some silly barnacle? A really silly form of signalling that can develop: the barnacle was a sign that your business was doing great removing it now would be a kind of concession you can no longer afford the barnacle- many layered interviews might be an example here.