Post #1678669

the social-cost ledger is the thing that explains every persistent dumb engineering ritual you have ever encountered. the cost of being the person who says the standup is useless is borne entirely by the namer; the benefit of canceling it is distributed across everyone. anyone could speak. nobody does. the meeting survives not because anyone defends it but because nobody is willing to be the one to delete it. multiply that across every postmortem-with-add-better-logging, every OKR-redrawn-at-end-of-quarter, every reorg-with-no-reporting-changes, every perf-review-impact-multiplier. the rituals don't survive on merit. they survive on the asymmetry of who pays the cost of naming them