Things sometimes get bad. Once things get sufficiently bad that no one can deviate from short-term selfish actions or be a different type of person without being wiped out, things are no longer stable. People cheat on long term investments, including various combinations of things such as having and raising children, maintaining infrastructure and defending norms. The seed corn gets eaten. Eventually, usually when some random new threat inevitably emerges, the order collapses, and things start again. The rise and fall of civilizations.
I’m wondering if you’re thinking of https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cycles/ . I think that was what made me realize things worked this way, and it was indeed a big update on the standard narrative. I still haven’t decided whether this is just a quirk of systems that have certain agriculture-related dynamics, or a more profound insight about systems in general. I look forward to reading more of what you have to say about this.
I think my answer (not yet written up) to why things aren’t worse has something to do with competitions on different time scales—if you have more than zero slack, you want to devote a small amount of your budget to R&D, and then you’ll win a long-run competition against a company that doesn’t do this. Integrate all the different possible timescales and this gets so confusing that maybe the result barely looks like competition at all. I’ve been having trouble writing this up and am interested in seeing if you’re thinking something similar. Again, really looking forward to reading more.
I was not thinking of that particular example/implementation of the concept, there are definitely differences, but the two have a lot in common. Related pieces of the same puzzle, I’m assuming.
My central answer to why things aren’t worse should be clear in post three, which is that competition is very imperfect—and Mazes are a case where suddenly that imperfection is stripped away and you instead have super-perfect competition, and suddenly things are in fact really bad.
We also both have a key place in the model for time scales and shocks, where anyone who runs too close to the edge becomes fragile.
Intuitively, there’s also after the fact R&D to keep up with your competitor’s improvements (implementation) which is distinct from before the fact R&D (what’s a good idea + how do we do it).
I’m wondering if you’re thinking of https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cycles/ . I think that was what made me realize things worked this way, and it was indeed a big update on the standard narrative. I still haven’t decided whether this is just a quirk of systems that have certain agriculture-related dynamics, or a more profound insight about systems in general. I look forward to reading more of what you have to say about this.
I think my answer (not yet written up) to why things aren’t worse has something to do with competitions on different time scales—if you have more than zero slack, you want to devote a small amount of your budget to R&D, and then you’ll win a long-run competition against a company that doesn’t do this. Integrate all the different possible timescales and this gets so confusing that maybe the result barely looks like competition at all. I’ve been having trouble writing this up and am interested in seeing if you’re thinking something similar. Again, really looking forward to reading more.
I was not thinking of that particular example/implementation of the concept, there are definitely differences, but the two have a lot in common. Related pieces of the same puzzle, I’m assuming.
My central answer to why things aren’t worse should be clear in post three, which is that competition is very imperfect—and Mazes are a case where suddenly that imperfection is stripped away and you instead have super-perfect competition, and suddenly things are in fact really bad.
We also both have a key place in the model for time scales and shocks, where anyone who runs too close to the edge becomes fragile.
Intuitively, there’s also after the fact R&D to keep up with your competitor’s improvements (implementation) which is distinct from before the fact R&D (what’s a good idea + how do we do it).