Holy smokes yes, finally someone who shares my exact views on vaccines and the origin of this virus. This phenomenon is also synonymous with Francis Fukuyama's "political decay", where the purpose of the institutions at their inception does not correspond to contemporary needs and the institution itself has become too stagnant to change itself in response.
Ivan Illych had some good ideas about institutionalisation and corruption; essentially that when something becomes institutionalised its own survival becomes a thing of and for itself rather than its original function; a parent or a doctor ought to strive to make themselves superfluous, otherwise it becomes either toxic or creating subscriptions. 😉
Great take a year ago, however I think Yarvin may underestimate and underappreciate the subversive moves made possible either by strategy or opportunity to take swift and decisive action with the constitutional laws of various countries. There's always the question how much is sheer coincidence, if any (and I find them to be less and less whenever money, business and power is concerned , especially in modern times - with money it's often the case that things are presented as a pure force of nature and we certainly know that's not so much the case at all, although there is still some room for organic spontaneity here and there that so far cannot so easily be directed inspite of nudging) and how much is pure strategy, nudging, because someone wants something to become the case. There's also the question how much nudging, then, is done with the (one or several) intentionality of something, but it leads to something else as a by-product unintended.
Jarvis eludes to similar points about the Manhatten-project that former PM advisor Dominic Cummings did in his extensive blog. The need for small teams of supreme intellectuals (Feynman, von Neumann tier) is paramount if a difficult challenge is to be overcome. Institutions predicated on extensive collaboration between large teams (like the EU) fail miserably due to the number of compromises that need to be made. Yarvin points to an alternative which is a top down monarchical authority capable of uniting a large team, however this doesn't always work. Philip Tetlock puts forward a good argument as for why top down leadership isn't always successful by alluding to the success of the Wehrmacht which possessed the mentality of decentralised decision making on the front lines to accelerate the rate of response to changes in plans, e.g. low ranked troops being able to hold top generals to scrutiny and pursue alternative methods of getting an objective done if real life circumstances deviated from predrawn plans - live updating if you will.
This can still be integrated into the top down approach wisely, for example tasking local jurisdictions with issuing x amount of vaccines by date y, giving them a rough outline of how it can by done, but letting them put together a small task force who can plan a response specific to the environment they are in, as a generalised approach will not be optimised perfectly.
