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The Grubergate Insider Problem

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A long but useful essay from Megan McArdle.

We have a similar issue in the space industry. I see all the hype about the upcoming Orion flight, and as an industry analyst (though not quite an insider) I know that it’s nonsense, but it’s hard to get people to realize that NASA officials are often forced to dish nonsense to placate rent-seeking congresspeople; as outsiders, they are still in awe of the government agency that put men on the moon four-and-a-half decades ago.

There is also this:

…when I see journalists saying that Gruber’s revelations don’t matter because he’s just kind of awkwardly saying something that everyone knew, I get a little jittery. I am not “everyone,” and neither are any of those journalists. We’re a tiny group of people with strange preoccupations who get paid to spend our time understanding and explaining this stuff. The fact that we may have mentioned it once to our readers, in the 18th paragraph, does not mean that readers read it and understood what it meant. (In fact, if you actually interact with your readers, you’ll be astonished at how little they remember of what you told them, especially if you didn’t go out of your way to headline it. Their minds are already crammed full of information that they need to, you know, live their lives. So they tend to take away a few big bullet points, not the piddling details.)

I see the same thing when I argue with people on Twitter, or in comments — we often go around in circles because they seem to have forgotten some previous point I’d already made, or read what they wanted to read instead of what I actually wrote. The dismaying thing is that these are often people who love space, but they end up being cheerleaders for things (like SLS/Orion) that are roadblocks rather than enablers.

5 thoughts on “The Grubergate Insider Problem”

  1. The dismaying thing is that these are often people who love space, but they end up being cheerleaders for things (like SLS/Orion) that are roadblocks rather than enablers.

    The number of people who can actually think critically and form strategic long term plans, let alone execute on them, is disarmingly small.

    If it launches off a launch pad and doesn’t blow up, it must be good for making us a space faring civilization. Right?

  2. Many of us suspected the truth to be what Gruber let out, that a heap of deliberate lies is behind the ACA. But now we have it on the public record from a first hand witness, not just logical inference from an assortment of facts.

  3. The number of people who can actually think critically and form strategic long term plans, let alone execute on them, is disarmingly small.

    I’d say it’s alarmingly rather than disarmingly small, but, yeah. What’s worse, I’ve frequently seen the phenomenon Rand describes inside organizations in which the members are supposed to have some real understanding of what’s going on, but don’t, or don’t act like they do. NASA HEOMD sure is acting that way.

  4. McArdle’s comments on Exchange storage quotas are relevant to the Lois Lerner email saga:

    The IT guy I sandbagged wasn’t a bad guy, and he wasn’t being lazy. I am virtually certain I know what his reasoning was: Our organization had given him a set budget, not an overlarge one, and a lot of needs had to be filled out of that budget. Adding more hard drives to the server, or adding another server, was expensive, and it would come at the expense of other priorities. It made more sense to the IT department to put that money toward other needs. So they capped the size of everyone’s mailboxes (though I’d guess not the mailboxes of people in IT), to make sure they didn’t overload the servers we had.

    She’s wrong about this:

    Strap on unrelated provisions, such as a student loan bill that was due to pass anyway, or unworkable provisions, such as the CLASS Act and the 1099 rule, so that you can claim it is deficit-reducing.

    The fiscal impact of those provisions is sufficiently small that the ACA would have been scored as reducing the deficit with or without them.

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