![]() If the steps along the way are all seen to be verboten to tread on, where every single sword swing has to be a killer swing, we end up in this dumb game of jousts. We don't need to have an opinion every single step of the way. Sometimes you just need to let someone try something, and then you can jump in and criticise. The best thing to do is to just check if it'll have some drastic downsides, and if not to just try it. His idea of boring tunnels under cities to have single cars go single file in them seems lunacy.īut I also know that asking Elon to defend his reasons, his ethics and his business plan at the same time is unworkable. If you're a CEO, being constantly bothered during the decision making process seems a great way to lose your thought and get frustrated.įor instance, I think hyperloop is really cool and completely and utterly impractical. And as much of a blessing as this is, it's also a curse. The difference today is the ability to be instantaneously aware of every single utterance of every single conversation, in real time. I'm sure if we had enough parchments to pore over or hieroglyphics to decipher we'd see "this pharaoh is a moron, dams kill crocodiles" arguments there too.īut it seems to happen more today, because we've all become greedy algorithms. We can see politicians and businessmen get pilloried, and completely unjust public witch hunts in pretty much every era we care to look at. Part of the reason is that this is just a change in scale, not a change in scope. Whatever issue gets the limelight put on it becomes the next nexus. Whatever gets public attention gets pilloried. The same thing applies to Apple when they decided to scan your phone for child abuse pics, or Facebook when they thought Instagram for kids was a good idea, or Amazon after they went through the trouble of trying to figure out where to have their second HQ Under the Secret Congress theory this should've happened, but for the fact that it suddenly had a spotlight put on it.Īnd when a spotlight is put on it we act as downside minimising Musashis, trying to win with every cut, and become greedy algorithms.īut this is in no way purely steeped just in politics. The Secret Congress theory suggests that since it's not something that could've been immediately cast in highly partisan lights, it should've passed through under the radar. It should've been innocuous, plenty of bipartisan support even at one point in time. ![]() Not every move can or should be about not losing anything.Īnd yet this is also exactly what we seem to be doing in most public settings. Sometimes it should be about setting up the move several steps down. ![]() Not every action should be about cutting. That's also what the application of Musashi to other parts of life gets wrong. Its the inability to understand that occasionally you need to do non-optimal steps now to get to an optimal outcome later. They excel in local stepwise optimisation, to the detriment of achieving the global goal. Greedy algorithms are not great to work with. It's that we're acting as greedy algorithms, who try to optimise not just the goal but every single step towards achieving it. This pattern shows a broader heuristic to how certain actions get classified as highly partisan. So ACA gets called Obamacare it gets shot down even though it's copied from Mitt Romney's plan. Republicans won't want to pass anything that's seen as too Democratic, and vice versa. His argument is that coding problems as highly partisan is what gets them into trouble. While everyone else is fighting over crazy complicated theories that are hugely inflammatory around immigration or urban crime or green new deal or facemasks, here a few folks get together quietly and get real work done. ![]() The belaboured metaphor aside, this makes hell of a lot of sense. He exemplifies this as an instance of "pulling the rope sideways", as Robin Hanson suggested to make the highest impact move. Progress in these areas, if it happens, will tend to come from a handful of members on different sides of the aisle getting interested in the topic and working quietly with other members to make deals to make it happen Let's start with Matt Yglesias' idea of Secret Congress. Whether it's true or not that this is somehow atypical, historically speaking, it does make me think that letting information free-flow around the world at light speed could have some downsides. It's about as common a consensus as exists today.Īnd the reason to a large extent seems to be that they effectively trade in sensationalism over any kind of journalistic integrity to the "truth". And those that haven't yet wish they could. Those who've reduced wish they could reduce more. Those who have stopped like that they've stopped. One of the few things that almost everyone I know agrees on is that reading the news has become a chore.
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