Protecting Large Projects Against Mazedom is all key advice that seemed unintuitive to me when I was getting started doing things in the world, but now all the advice seems imperative to me. I’ve learned a bunch of this by doing it “the hard way” I guess. I give this post +4.
Broader comment on the Mazes sequence as a whole:
The sequence is an extended meditation on a theme, exploring it from lots of perspective, about how large projects and large coordination efforts end up being eaten by Moloch. The specific perspective reminds me a bit of The Screwtape Letters. In The Screwtape Letters, the two devils are focused on causing people to be immoral. The explicit optimization for vices and personal flaws helps highlight (to me) what it looks like when I’m doing something really stupid or harmful within myself.
Similarly, this sequence explores the perspective of large groups of people who live to game a large company, not to actually achieve the goals of the company. What that culture looks like, what is rewarded, what it feels like to be in it.
I’ve executed some of these strategies in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever lived the life of the soulless middle-manager stereotyped by the sequence, but I see elements of it in myself, and I’m grateful to the sequence for helping me identify those cognitive patterns.
Something the sequence really conveys, is not just that individuals can try to game a company, but that a whole company’s culture can change such that gaming-behavior is expected and rewarded. It contains a lot of detail about what that culture looks and feels like.
The sequence (including the essay “Motive Ambiguity”) has led me see how in such an environment groups of people can end up optimizing for the opposite of their stated purpose.
The sequence doesn’t hold together as a whole to me. I don’t get the perfect or superperfect competition idea at the top. Some of the claims seem like a stretch or not really argued for, just completing the pattern when riffing on a theme. But I’m not going to review the weaknesses here, my goal is mostly to advocate for the best parts of it that I’d like to see score more highly in the book.
This post is one of my three picks from the sequence, along with The Road to Mazedom, and Protecting Large Projects Against Mazedom. (Also Motive Ambiguity which is not technically part of the sequence.)
I think the ones I had the strongest negative reactions to were “Do Less Things and Be Smaller” and “Start Again”. I had a feeling of “I have no idea how to succeed if I have to do these things”, and now I’m like “succeeding at anything is generally easier with these things”.
Protecting Large Projects Against Mazedom is all key advice that seemed unintuitive to me when I was getting started doing things in the world, but now all the advice seems imperative to me. I’ve learned a bunch of this by doing it “the hard way” I guess. I give this post +4.
Broader comment on the Mazes sequence as a whole:
This post is one of my three picks from the sequence, along with The Road to Mazedom, and Protecting Large Projects Against Mazedom. (Also Motive Ambiguity which is not technically part of the sequence.)
(This review is taken from my post Ben Pace’s Controversial Picks for the 2020 Review.)
I’m curious which things seemed most surprising or unintuitive to you about this post when you first read it?
I think the ones I had the strongest negative reactions to were “Do Less Things and Be Smaller” and “Start Again”. I had a feeling of “I have no idea how to succeed if I have to do these things”, and now I’m like “succeeding at anything is generally easier with these things”.