Assuming this is an accurate summary, I feel skeptical about “the deal is that The People At The Top are Adaptation Executors”. It just… seems like it must be pretty hard to get to the top without having some kind of longterm planning going on (even if it’s purely manipulative)
The main issue here is that the people in question (heads of the FDA and CDC) are not really The People At The Top. They are bureaucrats promoted to the highest levels of the bureaucracy, and their attitudes and failures are those of career bureaucrats, not successful sociopaths (in the sense of Rao’s “Gervais Principle”).
It just… seems like it must be pretty hard to get to the top without having some kind of longterm planning going on (even if it’s purely manipulative)
I think I would bet against the quoted sentence, though I’m uncertain. The crux for me is whether the optimization-force that causes a single person to end up “at the top” (while many others don’t) is mostly that person’s own optimization-force (vs a set of preferences/flinches/optimization-bits distributed in many others, or in the organization as a whole, or similar).
(This overlaps with jaspax’s comment; but I wanted to state the more general version of the hypothesis.)
I don’t have a very strong guess here. I can imagine the world where being fully adaptation executer outcompetes deliberate strategy. It seems plausible that, at lower levels, adaptation-execution outcompetes strategy because people’s deliberate strategies just aren’t as good as copy-the-neighbors social wisdom.
But, to end up at the very top (even of a career bureaucrat ladder), you have to outcompete all the other people who were copying the neighbors / adaptation executing (I’m currently lumping these strategies together, not sure if that seems fair). It seems to me like this should require some kind of deliberate optimization, of some sort.
The crux for me is whether the optimization-force that causes a single person to end up “at the top” (while many others don’t) is mostly that person’s own optimization-force (vs a set of preferences/flinches/optimization-bits distributed in many others, or in the organization as a whole, or similar).
This phrasing feels overly strong – a world where 65% of the variance is distributed flinches/optimization but 35% personal optimization seems like the sort of world that might exist, in which personal optimization plays a significant role in who ends up at the top.
(Note that I’m basically arguing “the case for ‘there is some kind of deliberate optimization pressure at the top of bureaucracies’ seems higher than Zvi thinks it is”, not making any claims about “this seems most likely how it is”, or “the optimization at the top is altruistic.”)
One relevant question is how many smart, strategic, long-term optimizers exist. (In politics, vs. in business, or in academia, etc.)
E.g., if 1 in 3 people think this way at the start of their careers, that’s very different than if 1 in 1000 do, or 1 in 15. The rarer this way of thinking is, the more powerful it needs to be in order to overcome base rates.
I was also trying to think about the numbers, it felt important but I didn’t get anywhere with it. Where to start? Should I assume a base rate of 1 in a 1,000 people being strategic? More? Less?
I think that one natural way that you get to the top without being long-term strategic and being able to model reality, is nepotism. Some companies are literally handed down father-to-son, so the son doesn’t actually need to show great competence at the task. The Clinton families and the Bush families are also examples. There is some strategy here, but it isn’t strategy that’s closely connected to being competent at the job or even modeling reality that much (other than the social reality within the family).
Assuming this is an accurate summary, I feel skeptical about “the deal is that The People At The Top are Adaptation Executors”. It just… seems like it must be pretty hard to get to the top without having some kind of longterm planning going on (even if it’s purely manipulative)
The main issue here is that the people in question (heads of the FDA and CDC) are not really The People At The Top. They are bureaucrats promoted to the highest levels of the bureaucracy, and their attitudes and failures are those of career bureaucrats, not successful sociopaths (in the sense of Rao’s “Gervais Principle”).
I think I would bet against the quoted sentence, though I’m uncertain. The crux for me is whether the optimization-force that causes a single person to end up “at the top” (while many others don’t) is mostly that person’s own optimization-force (vs a set of preferences/flinches/optimization-bits distributed in many others, or in the organization as a whole, or similar).
(This overlaps with jaspax’s comment; but I wanted to state the more general version of the hypothesis.)
See also Kaj’s FB post from this morning.
(Now also on LW.)
I don’t have a very strong guess here. I can imagine the world where being fully adaptation executer outcompetes deliberate strategy. It seems plausible that, at lower levels, adaptation-execution outcompetes strategy because people’s deliberate strategies just aren’t as good as copy-the-neighbors social wisdom.
But, to end up at the very top (even of a career bureaucrat ladder), you have to outcompete all the other people who were copying the neighbors / adaptation executing (I’m currently lumping these strategies together, not sure if that seems fair). It seems to me like this should require some kind of deliberate optimization, of some sort.
This phrasing feels overly strong – a world where 65% of the variance is distributed flinches/optimization but 35% personal optimization seems like the sort of world that might exist, in which personal optimization plays a significant role in who ends up at the top.
(Note that I’m basically arguing “the case for ‘there is some kind of deliberate optimization pressure at the top of bureaucracies’ seems higher than Zvi thinks it is”, not making any claims about “this seems most likely how it is”, or “the optimization at the top is altruistic.”)
One relevant question is how many smart, strategic, long-term optimizers exist. (In politics, vs. in business, or in academia, etc.)
E.g., if 1 in 3 people think this way at the start of their careers, that’s very different than if 1 in 1000 do, or 1 in 15. The rarer this way of thinking is, the more powerful it needs to be in order to overcome base rates.
I was also trying to think about the numbers, it felt important but I didn’t get anywhere with it. Where to start? Should I assume a base rate of 1 in a 1,000 people being strategic? More? Less?
I think that one natural way that you get to the top without being long-term strategic and being able to model reality, is nepotism. Some companies are literally handed down father-to-son, so the son doesn’t actually need to show great competence at the task. The Clinton families and the Bush families are also examples. There is some strategy here, but it isn’t strategy that’s closely connected to being competent at the job or even modeling reality that much (other than the social reality within the family).