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Originally Posted by karl262
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Reposting the Perun-video for extra visibility, and because I want to talk about it a bit more.
My dad had engineer friends in the Soviet Union / Russia at the time of the Soviet breakup, and friends who were generally involved in Finnish-Russian relations and so I heard some stories about the transition from Soviet to post-Soviet.
A story that really stuck to me was about statisticians.
In the early stages of that transition, there was an idea that the western nations could help the Russian government to transform itself into a more modern western one, a government capable of ruling a nation with a properly functioning independent market economy. Part of that project included Finnish statisticians helping their Russian colleagues to produce stats / information relevant to governing a market economy.
The way I heard it, a major issue that turned up was that it was extremely hard to get Russian statisticians to understand that statistics should or could be accurate and based on facts with as little bias as possible. This was just beyond them. They had trouble in just wrapping their heads around the idea that accurate statistics were possible, that it's possible to get reliable data of and that it's okay to turn that data into unflattering reports about the state of reality. Frankly they didn't even want to do that. These were people who had gotten to their positions in their current organizations by being essentially good liars, and they were working in a system that was built from top to bottom by corrupt liars to serve corrupt liars. There was nothing in it for them to start serving accurate information, and it would just make everyone look bad.
This was when I knew that Russia is borderline impossible to govern smartly, and nothing has changed my opinion on this in the following 30 years. Every good decision begins with good information, and without a system to produce good information, it doesn't matter much who's making the decisions.
Of course Putin has probably managed to make the situation even worse by going all Darth Vader on people who displease him. If back in the late Soviet days the punishment for being an honest patriot who wanted to actually do his job well was getting sidelined when it came to promiotions, under Putin's rule the punishment for honesty has often been death.
To make things even worse, the punishment for actual competency has very often also been death, because competent military leaders tend to become popular with their troops and thus a potential threat to Putin. Likewise anyone developing a reputation for competency in the government has been at risk of acute defenestration, because once again competent people tend to become popular with people and once again a threat to Putin. No on can seem more competent or even as competent as Darth Putin, because that could be a threat.
So competent smart people learn to just stay away from the military and positions of power in the government.
So you couldn't replace all the corrupt liars even if you wanted to.