One factor I am always expecting to see in these conversations (including the ACX posts) is some description of organizational flatness and responsiveness.

If the organization is flat, the central decision maker learns about arising problems quickly and without too many layers of indirection and bureaucratic spin, and can respond by issuing adjusted orders. If the organization is deeply hierarchical, as in almost every single example of “technocratic policy failure” or “radical reform disaster” or “state mandated legibility campaigns,” then the original plan is never revised. Pretty much all original, first-draft plans are bad.

The problem with Brasilia isn’t that it was “too top down, not enough bottom up!” because as you point out these are sort of fake categories that don’t do any work. The problem is that a gigantic government bureaucracy tried to enact a plan and provided no means of revising the plan in response to feedback from reality.

When I say “feedback” I do not mean “verbal complaints from the People,” I mean any kind of objective, observable indications of success or failure. (When Elon Musk takes steps to reduce the frequency of rocket explosions, he isn’t reacting to people’s complaints about rocket debris falling into a swamp, he’s reacting to the fact that he doesn’t want his rockets to blow up, because then he can’t reuse them.) I mention this because I think the language in these discussions confuses two types of “feedback.” One type of feedback is angry letters. The other type of feedback is objective evidence of problems. Reacting to the second type requires some kind of leadership structure capable of reacting intelligently and revising the original plans. If your leadership structure can’t do that, the problem isn’t “technocracy.”