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"The Empire Will Strike Back But in case there is any doubt that the battle for controlling the administrative state is not yet won, consider the opinion in the census case written by the four liberals on the Court. They would have disallowed the citizenship status question whatever the sincerity of the administration's reasons. They argued that it was arbitrary and capricious, despite the fact that the exact same question had been included before and that similar questions are included by many other nations. Crucial to their reasoning was the creation of a technocratic baseline for "reasonableness"-a standard that would elevate the judgement of the career civil servants who believed that the cost of reducing responses outweighed the benefits of getting a more accurate account of immigration status. This is a truly radical view, one that would further embolden the career bureaucracy by requiring political appointees to provide special reasons to override the decisions of their subordinates."

Any entity or system that we call 'living' will eventually die. This holds at any scale, from cellular level to ecosystems, and even our socio-economic, financial and technological domains. To understand why, it is best to look at a such a system as a infrastructure for a specific saturation process. Large organisms/systems are actually huge ensembles of interacting (and saturating) sub-processes, but here we just consider the 'top-level' saturation process. (At a high, technical abstraction level, this is always the saturation-process of entropy production, and the system is some local maximum of this, but you can read about this in our other publications).

The systems we use to encode expertise tend to depend on relatively slow processes of collective computation and don't typically work as measures of an individual's actual extra-institutional networks or their ability to respond to novelty. Organizations and metrics tuned to slow and stable periods that favor efficiency and specialization tend to suppress generalists and improvisation.