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Samo Burja floats a simple idea inspired by Musk's Twitter takeover: Fire 80%, hire back 10%:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dg_bQcswbeM?si=k0QiBLWgyM47iMVr&t=299
There's more detailed discussion in that podcast, but to give my layman take:
After the initial twitter purge there were fires to put out, but it seems rehiring back the 10% that revealed themselves to be load-bearing was enough to keep things alive, basically as they were before. Perhaps a critical employee would refuse out of spite and take their severance, but I'd guess that sort of person has a lot of overlap with the sort of person who was wasting space/actively harmful anyways.
No, running a tech firms is simpler & requires less political savvy. But he provides the model. I've spoken about this to liberals/centrists who'd normally dismiss me as a libertarian nutjob for wanting to gut the FDA, but being able to point to X at least provides a salient real-life example of the sky not falling. Maybe Musk could spearhead it somehow, he seems to have learned the friend/enemy rule of politics & can bring visibility to this strategy.
The right man for each job remains important: Elon probably tanked Twitter's stock value, whether X is better than Twitter is a matter of taste. He cared more about his free-speech agenda, which is what we got. There's no libertarian panacea where you gut an institution and things just become better off naturally, and the wrong person with the wrong priorities might keep all the wrong people.
The right man for the job is, of course, Peter Thiel. Or people in that network, perhaps there's a shadowy cabal of live players assembled around Samo Burja's "Analysis" firm. Or more realistically, the sort of disgruntled ex-FDA-insiders you might hear on a tech-right podcast:
https://www.fromthenew.world/p/richard-bruns-inside-the-fda
I say "tech-right" not to be partisan, more to describe this: people with the autism to know and care what actually works (like EAs), but enough cynicism & familiarity with how institutions work to not be eaten alive immediately (like the OpenAI fiasco).
Thinking a few thousand people from a little internet bubble I know about would ever get near the halls of power seemed like a childish/schitzo pipe-dream, maybe it is. But after the JD Vance pick, things look a bit different.
However, personnel are policy. A lot of the more destructive bureaucratic policies come from (and are enabled by) having too many people, and they get auto-immune diseases just like activist organizations do as the incentives for both are the same (where they have to become more extreme to justify themselves/their budgets).
Which is why purges of those offices are, traditionally, near-total. While it's true that an office full of wrong people if purged will still remain mostly composed of wrong people afterwards, it takes a much smaller amount of right people to prevent wrongness from being tolerated in the organization (it's easier to get to 50/50 right/wrong when there are only 10 right people to find vs. needing 100 or 1000 to balance them out- the purpose of reviving 10% of the organization afterwards is to figure out who the John Galts were, and John Galts tend to be right by virtue of being John Galt anyway- it's the human equivalent of the "if you don't know what a system does, turn it off and see who starts screaming" tech cost-cutting practice). Offices do still tend into wrongness over time if not properly managed (Conquest's Second Law: any organization not devoted to being right becomes wrong over time), but a small office is still easier to reform than a large one.
I think you can just call them "men" (different from "boys" who only have the autism, and are unable or unwilling to defend the power their works leak; the 20th century, great as it was, is more or less defined by this childishness).
Ty, I will use this. I've argued before that if autism is an "extreme case of the male brain", and on-the-spectrum just means "kind of autistic", then isn't on-the-spectrum just... male? But someone wrote a piece debunking the extreme male brain theory, since instead of the high-T male traits that theory predicts, autists show lower-T traits, more likely play video games and dress-up... This all makes sense.
Still, my point stands: where are the maximum-T great men? Playing it safe, getting high in Austin, defending their irrelevant works. It's going to take at least some boyish idealism to want to tilt at the windmills of the US government. I predict more of this in our future.
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