Sublime

The bureaucratic approach, as we define it, seeks to minimize error and loss, and it prizes consensus above all else.

We try to be consistent with our social commitments and our sense of identity, both of which depend on and are shaped by our interactions with others.

If the social bureaucracy is going to change, it must first happen with a change in the universities. The new influx of students is there for two reasons. The first is to gain the knowledge and credentials they need to enter the technocracy. The second is to change the technocracy because its cultural assumptions are divergent to those of its oppon

Coordination: Some innovations are appealing only if people use them together.

But our economic progress has profoundly altered the position of the individual acting alone. We can no longer take care of our own needs. We have all become dependent on many others

Overspecialization can lead to collective tragedy even when every individual separately takes the most reasonable course of action.

Hobbes’s assumption that people are incapable of coexisting without authority implies that human online interactions on news sites would benefit from signage, structure and incentives to participate in a deliberative way.

Starting in the 1960s, the social and legal institutions of America were remade to try to eliminate unfair choices by people in positions of responsibility. The new legal structures reflected a deep distrust of human authority in even its more benign forms—a teacher’s authority in the classroom, or a manager’s judgments about who’s doing the job, o