Brian Potter: belief

Transcript context

…What was the thought process behind designing this thing? Because Scott Alexander had a good blog post about The Line where he said, presumably, the line is designed to take up less space and to use less fuel because you can just use the same transportation across the line. But the only thing that Saudi Arabia has is space and fuel. So what is the thought process behind this construction project? I get the sense that a lot of committees have some amount of success in building big, impressive, physical construction projects that are an attraction just by virtue of their size and impressiveness. A huge amount of stuff in Dubai is something in this category. Then they have that giant clock tower in Jeddah that is similar to the biggest giant clock building and one of the biggest buildings in the world or something like that. I think, on some level, they're expecting that you would just see a return just from building something that's really impressive and the biggest thing on some particular axis or whatever. So to some extent, I think they're just optimizing for big and impressive and maybe not diving into it more than that. There's this theory that I think about every so often. It's called the garbage can theory of organizational decision-making, which is that, basically, the choices that organizations make are not the result of any particular recent process. They are the result of whenever a problem comes up, they reach into the garbage can of potential solutions. Then whatever they pull out of the garbage can, that's the decision that they end up going with, regardless of how much sense it makes. It was a theory that was invented by academics to describe decision-making in academia. I think about that a lot, especially with reference to big bureaucracies and governments.You can just imagine the draining process of how these decisions evolve. You can just imagine any random decision being made, especially when there's such a disconnect between the decision-makers and technical knowledge. Yeah. Tell me about your eBay arbitrage with designer clothes.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.