Copypasta from normiechat about rule by exception, software, etc.

Anyway, the concept of boilerplate in the abstract is sort of interesting as a study of human nature.
Same with robotic signatures.
What is it about humans that we keep finding ourselves in this situation?
It’s like this comic again:

I had the thought earlier today that you can’t have a trial that’s both fair and speedy, but we’re promised both by law.
And we go through record numbers of these trials.
Humans have some really strange ideas about their own faculties of judgment.
“We need to have a human on site to use his judgment but if he deviates from process by gum we’ll send him to prison and I think we all know what happens in prison hurr hurr hurr.”
tl;dr- Buncha weirdos, people.
4/10.

The pattern I’m getting at is the confused relationship between human judgment, trust, and automated processes.
Basically people want to trust other people but don’t, so they try to trust a process instead, but automated processes don’t run themselves and need an eye on them in case they break, so they bring in a person, and you have the trust thing again.
The prison thing was just a nod to how this means most jobs are catch-22s. “How dare you do your job?” vs. “How dare you not get your work done?”
When I was in sales my big complaint was that you had to sell according to the process, which was tracked, but the process didn’t work. So you could do a sales process that worked and get fired for noncompliance, or do the process that didn’t work and get fired for not producing.
As you can imagine, turnover was 100% every four years among new salespeople. I never saw a single person be successful in that system.

In software the catch-22 is security access, competence, cost, and trust.
It’s easier to understand if we imagine a military example.
Let’s say the army wants software for managing troop movements, but they want to do it cheap.
If you want cheap, competent programmers you have to brain-drain people from poor countries. And yes, that’s neocolonialism if you care about that kind of thing, but it’s what we do.
Problem: they all need top secret clearance, which would make them targets to become foreign intelligence assets. So now you need competent people to watch over their shoulders and design elaborate security systems, which means more programmers.
Not to mention the trouble of filtering out competent third worlders from the average, because if they were all competent their countries wouldn’t be shitholes. So you’re looking for diamonds in the rough, in bulk.

If anyone from a non-shithole were competent and worked for cheap, then you can’t trust them because they’re stealing from you. In the army example it means the guy is working for a foreign intelligence agency, in a Google example he’s stealing your IP and selling it to Russian hacking groups.
Effectively the employer is looking for a mass supply of unicorns.
This is a feature of individualistic capitalism in general. Here’s another example:

There are approximately 40 million black people in the US, and therefore approximately 55,447 of these with IQs of 130 or better who would be happy to go to Harvard. Divide that by an average lifespan and you’ve got enough per year to maintain a smart freshman class each year. And this is not even counting Nigerians with student visas (there are really orders of magnitude more people in this country, and the world, than we remember sometimes). This is an advantage Harvard holds over less prestigious universities, because the strategy doesn’t scale (and actually begins to fail catastrophically at about the tenth-place college).

https://aeolipera.wordpress.com/2018/10/18/statistical-comment-for-isteve/

(For the math-hesitant, 55,000 means about 500-1,000 very smart blacks entering college each year, meaning 250 go to Harvard, 200 to MIT, 150 to Yale, 100 to Caltech…the supply runs out fast..) In other words, Harvard can pull it off but the University of Michigan is going to be admitting blacks with 105ish IQs to keep up with racial equity mandates. But Harvard makes the rules, so they can just say “this is what the best colleges do, don’t you want to be the best?” So the UofM is stuck pretending their dumbass blacks are smart, and everybody secretly hopes they don’t get the affirmative action surgeon.
Basically individualistic capitalism means telling the 99% to become the 1% and not addressing systemic failures caused by all these catch-22s…which is not a good plan.
“Become a unicorn, overcome all obstacles” is good personal advice but not how you organize hundreds of millions of very normal, very average people. You want some UX design on their way through the school->work->breed pipeline.