Communication as a constraint (along with transportation as a constraint), strikes me as important, but it seems like this pushes the question to “Why didn’t anyone figure out how to control something that’s more than a couple weeks away by courier?”
I suspect that, as Gwern suggests, making copies of oneself is sufficient to solve this, at least for a major outlier like Napoleon. So maybe another version of the answer is something like “Nobody solved the principle-agent problem well enough to get by on communication slower than a couple weeks”. But it still isn’t clear to me why that’s the characteristic time scale? (I don’t actually know what the time scale is, by the way, I just did five minutes of Googling to find estimates for courier time across the Mongol and Roman Empires)
Communication as a constraint (along with transportation as a constraint), strikes me as important, but it seems like this pushes the question to “Why didn’t anyone figure out how to control something that’s more than a couple weeks away by courier?”
I suspect that, as Gwern suggests, making copies of oneself is sufficient to solve this, at least for a major outlier like Napoleon. So maybe another version of the answer is something like “Nobody solved the principle-agent problem well enough to get by on communication slower than a couple weeks”. But it still isn’t clear to me why that’s the characteristic time scale? (I don’t actually know what the time scale is, by the way, I just did five minutes of Googling to find estimates for courier time across the Mongol and Roman Empires)