It is well known, that power changes people. Greater responsibility forces people to think about things, they didn't have to think about before. If you become a leader of a team, you become a decision maker, but should you really be one? We can think of an organization as a complicated piece of machinery, where everyone should know their place and tasks to carry on, and only one person can decide in which direction the clockwork is going. There is only one problem with this way of thinking. It requires a leader to know how to deal with every possible obstacle and how to chose the best way all the time. For those, who think it is possible, you are naive. If you want a proof, study computing complexity.
During my college I studied how to process natural languages, for example how to tag words in a sentence with different parts of speech (verbs, nouns and so long). Since many words may be used in different ways and generally the part of speech depends on a context the word was used in. The problem is as hard as problem of answering question, since many tags depend on semantics of the sentences. I mention it, because I remember a fact about this problem, that explains, why I strongly believe, that people can organize better, that in a leader - soldiers way. There was conducted an experiment with number of Americans, in which they had to tag words in a text with parts of speech. The task is quite hard for contextual languages as English, so people on average were able to successfully tag only 96% (if I remember correctly) of the words, but if the people were able to cooperate, they easily obtained 100% score. Efficiency of groups is largely studied subject by sociologist around the world, but actually is not a topic I would like to discuss in details. I only try to convince the reader, that dominating a decision process by a leader of a group is a straight way to failure.
Let's go back to the subject of my refutation. Leaders are quite commonly identified with a group and every mistake of a group will be noted on their account, every complaint will address to them. Since they have to adapt to this role in some way, they will change their way of thinking. It is quite natural, but it also brings a lot of possible problems. Usually leaders have greater knowledge of carried tasks than their subordinates and it is easier for them to fall into the trap of thinking they always know better than any of them, but it is vital to remember, that usually group know much more, than one person can. Yet this superiority feeling is way too common in organizations, companies and what is bothering me the most in politics and governments.
Superiority feeling of politics may manifest itself in many ways, but one the most annoying way is tendency to over-regulate the people's life in pursuit of some greater goal, like safety or stability. They see a problem and come up with a law, that is specifically meant to fight this one problem with great confidence, that adding another law will make a world/country a better place. Ideally I would force every new law to be scientifically tested for it's benefits, but obviously it can not be done. Yet this over-confidence of politicians is sometimes incredibly annoying, especially if they barely consult it with anyone.
Here comes another example from computer science. Once upon a time there was a programmer, who thought he can create a perfect computer poker player, by adding new rule for every situation, in which it behaved badly. After ten years of refining his algorithm, he has massively failed and his automatic player had lost with everyone. With this I would like to support a thesis, that even roman law system, that every countries adapted, is quite failing. I don't mean here the actual acts of the roman law, but more abstract regulation system based on simple rules. It became vast and complicated, and yet it fails every day, so in order to make it work, our rules based law system is converting into precedence and authority based system. The thesis might be bold, but it just help me to express my feelings towards politicians confidence in supporting new rule in order to fight a a social problem.
At this point I want to express my disagreement with newly proposed laws for fighting easy access for children to pornography in Australia, Poland and I don't know where else. I hope the intentions are genuine, but it is still a very poor idea, and very dangerous one. Tendencies to rule over internet in democratic countries are worrisome and I hope it is only because of this over-confidence in rules to solve social problems.
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