Unmanageable

Posted 2 years, 6 months ago | Originally written on 11 Apr 2022

Some tasks are unmanageable. Their inherent complexity renders external accountability impossible because the level of understanding required is just as complex as carrying out the task as to make it too expensive to manage. Such a relationship requires trust from the manager and honesty from the executor. For example, scientific research is inherently unmanageable; the effort required to assess whether the research has been carried out to required standard can only be done by peer researchers in the same scientific domain. The flip side of this observation is that, given the opaqueness of much of scientific research, it is possible for a scientific domain to venture in a non-constructive direction because all peers are dishonest.