“No single word carries much weight and what matters is how they behave and what they can get done” is really not game-1. Game-1 is all about efficient denotative communication so that you don’t have to personally inspect what’s going on, and can use the map instead of directly inspecting the territory. You’re describing a situation in which people can privately model objective reality, not one in which words help much with this by default. There’s mutual knowledge in some circumstances about how Game-4 is being played with these words, but generally with deniability. The near-universal conflation of Game-1 with many participants not being confused about Game-4 is part of this mechanism.
“I’m the director of a 150-person research group at X fortune-500 company” is a much more specific descriptor of both the size and genre of someone’s territory/fiefdom, but in practice doesn’t strongly indicate that an enterprise of that size has genuine research needs such that a 150-person research group is functionally necessary. So you can’t make strong inferences about competence to coordinate research from that description, only competence at playing the game (assuming it’s not a somewhat more legible lie).
By contrast, you would be able to make those strong inferences about a nonfinancialized enterprise in a tightly competitive field.
“No single word carries much weight and what matters is how they behave and what they can get done” is really not game-1. Game-1 is all about efficient denotative communication so that you don’t have to personally inspect what’s going on, and can use the map instead of directly inspecting the territory.
Wow. I really missed that. I suspect because I I don’t see how anyone can claim that sort of game-1 is possible outside of technical topics (which STILL take many thousands of words to communicate concepts) or very small groups of high-trust shared-context participants (where the thousands of words are implicit). I guess I start in game-2, and I don’t see much difference between games 2-4.
Language, and especially common short words and phrases, just doesn’t carry that kind of precision. More generally, language is just as subject to Goodhart’s Law as any other knowledge proxy.
To some extent “technical” might be the word for a domain where Game-1 is stably dominant. There are technical subjects, political subjects, and subjects somewhere in between. If so, then “this is only possible in technical domains” is a truism, and the question is whether we can make other important domains technical. Economics was in a sense an attempt to make politics, or a large part of politics technical. Philosophy was an attempt to make a different part of politics that touched civic religion and origin myths into a technical subject.
I think that armies under severe short-term performance pressure can use Game-1 within their domains, even though there’s a lot of managing humans involved. Preserving Game-1 under conditions of local abundance is harder. It was known to be a major unsolved problem as early as the writing of Plato’s Republic.
I think I’d filter my “technical” requirement a bit further. Not “only possible in technical domains”, but “only possible for those parts of technical domains for which jargon and terms of art have been developed and accepted”. Technical domains that are changing or being explored require a lot of words and interactive probing before any sort of terse communication is possible.
Even armies and trained emergency workers are very limited in the types of information they can transfer quickly and correctly, and that’s AFTER a whole lot of training and preparation so that most commands are subroutine triggers, not idea transfers.
I sympathize with the desire to “make important domains technical”, but I suspect it’s a mix of levels that is ultimately incoherent. In domains where there is a natural feedback loop to precision, it’ll happen by itself. In domains where the feedback loops _don’t_ favor precision and territory-matching, it won’t and can’t. One could claim that is the difference between an “important” domain and one that isn’t, but one would be falling for the very same problem we’re discussing: the word “important” doesn’t mean the same thing to each of us.
Note that small groups of shared-context individuals _CAN_ have technical discussions on topics that are otherwise imprecise and socially constructed. It’s just impossible for larger or more heterogeneous groups to do so.
“No single word carries much weight and what matters is how they behave and what they can get done” is really not game-1. Game-1 is all about efficient denotative communication so that you don’t have to personally inspect what’s going on, and can use the map instead of directly inspecting the territory. You’re describing a situation in which people can privately model objective reality, not one in which words help much with this by default. There’s mutual knowledge in some circumstances about how Game-4 is being played with these words, but generally with deniability. The near-universal conflation of Game-1 with many participants not being confused about Game-4 is part of this mechanism.
“I’m the director of a 150-person research group at X fortune-500 company” is a much more specific descriptor of both the size and genre of someone’s territory/fiefdom, but in practice doesn’t strongly indicate that an enterprise of that size has genuine research needs such that a 150-person research group is functionally necessary. So you can’t make strong inferences about competence to coordinate research from that description, only competence at playing the game (assuming it’s not a somewhat more legible lie).
By contrast, you would be able to make those strong inferences about a nonfinancialized enterprise in a tightly competitive field.
Wow. I really missed that. I suspect because I I don’t see how anyone can claim that sort of game-1 is possible outside of technical topics (which STILL take many thousands of words to communicate concepts) or very small groups of high-trust shared-context participants (where the thousands of words are implicit). I guess I start in game-2, and I don’t see much difference between games 2-4.
Language, and especially common short words and phrases, just doesn’t carry that kind of precision. More generally, language is just as subject to Goodhart’s Law as any other knowledge proxy.
To some extent “technical” might be the word for a domain where Game-1 is stably dominant. There are technical subjects, political subjects, and subjects somewhere in between. If so, then “this is only possible in technical domains” is a truism, and the question is whether we can make other important domains technical. Economics was in a sense an attempt to make politics, or a large part of politics technical. Philosophy was an attempt to make a different part of politics that touched civic religion and origin myths into a technical subject.
I think that armies under severe short-term performance pressure can use Game-1 within their domains, even though there’s a lot of managing humans involved. Preserving Game-1 under conditions of local abundance is harder. It was known to be a major unsolved problem as early as the writing of Plato’s Republic.
I think I’d filter my “technical” requirement a bit further. Not “only possible in technical domains”, but “only possible for those parts of technical domains for which jargon and terms of art have been developed and accepted”. Technical domains that are changing or being explored require a lot of words and interactive probing before any sort of terse communication is possible.
Even armies and trained emergency workers are very limited in the types of information they can transfer quickly and correctly, and that’s AFTER a whole lot of training and preparation so that most commands are subroutine triggers, not idea transfers.
I sympathize with the desire to “make important domains technical”, but I suspect it’s a mix of levels that is ultimately incoherent. In domains where there is a natural feedback loop to precision, it’ll happen by itself. In domains where the feedback loops _don’t_ favor precision and territory-matching, it won’t and can’t. One could claim that is the difference between an “important” domain and one that isn’t, but one would be falling for the very same problem we’re discussing: the word “important” doesn’t mean the same thing to each of us.
Note that small groups of shared-context individuals _CAN_ have technical discussions on topics that are otherwise imprecise and socially constructed. It’s just impossible for larger or more heterogeneous groups to do so.