Candidate politicians should be tested on both subjects.

Just imagine ...

edit to add: At least the turnover rate isn’t due to them accidentally falling out windows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_National_Intelligence#Lists_of_personnel

I will say, one thing that the recent political evolutions have brought home which, in principle, doesn't surrpise me, but in practice just breaks my brain, is how freaking complex getting •anything• done in this world is. At every scale.

(My community is trying to get some additonal kit to deal with the recent drought conditions, & you'd think we were negotiating the UN charter )

I worked in a medium sized organization, and for a while I had *the* role that should have been responsible for knowing who was doing what relevant work in my area of responsibility. I was not able to develop said list.

or the whole system is "people"

we've been making shit overly complicated since the day we first invented shitting.

i mean instead of developing a single government we invited thousands of variations. none of which report to eachother and most of which fight.

and that statement works at the world level AND the city level for most cities.

we are like ants running on fungal software and working to cross purposes

Since the problem touched many areas and teams that would need to contribute or participate, I set out to codify the problem in careful prose, and to write a detailed threat model. The time eventually came to review with a senior principal engineer, and on first read through, he said “I think this needs to be privileged and confidential”

So now, this work that was for a wide audience was no longer accessible by that audience

At least the execs were aware that my area was not the quick and easy solution to the problem they’d assumed it was

@Tarbh

Aside from clearance, there is also need-to-know. I frequently encountered situations toward the end of my career when I would try to refer someone to something I'd written years before in a different role that I myself no longer had access to.

@cstross

The unspoken implication here is that ANYONE knew. The people we took over from certainly didn't.

Srsly, I've heard anecdotes about folks tasked with writing reports that were then classified so high they weren't allowed to read them—or then to amend them where found to be factually incorrect.