> I had an intuition for their needs and the things that they would complain about, and those intuitions controlled me
This is such an important insight. When a bureaucrat has accumulated a decade of scar tissue, they internalize boundaries which they can not fully articulate, much less provide specific evidence for, much less reason about the fuzzy edges of. That can become an enormous constraint on someone else trying to change the system.
It is not a moral judgment on those bureaucrats, and I think it is pretty similar to how many people have to learn and question the boundaries of acceptable behavior that they culturally inherit from their parents.
> I had an intuition for their needs and the things that they would complain about, and those intuitions controlled me
This is such an important insight. When a bureaucrat has accumulated a decade of scar tissue, they internalize boundaries which they can not fully articulate, much less provide specific evidence for, much less reason about the fuzzy edges of. That can become an enormous constraint on someone else trying to change the system.
It is not a moral judgment on those bureaucrats, and I think it is pretty similar to how many people have to learn and question the boundaries of acceptable behavior that they culturally inherit from their parents.