I ended up chatting with Habryka (who had originally inspired this post, and now wasn’t sure he agreed with it).
One key additional point here is “gee, doing anything at all is really goddamn hard, and you might not want people to feel any additional disincentive from doing anything, including building monopolies.”
There’s the frustrating “consider reversing all advice you hear, because you maybe filter yourself to hear advice that reinforces your own biases” thingy. I think I endorse the specific phrasings used in this post (which I think were properly caveated). But, I wouldn’t want the takeaway to be people being too overly worried about ensuring they have competitors when they themselves haven’t gotten off the ground.
There’s an additional confusing issue where...
it’s really bad if a mediocre organization is a monopoly, or if organizations stretch beyond their capacity.
it… actually can be good if a highly competent organization does a lot of vertical integration.
And the problem is that figuring out “am I competent or not?” is one off the hardest things you can try to figure out.
Note: I don’t think objectively figuring out “am I competent or not?” is that hard of a question. It’s just one that the people who are incompetent will very likely get wrong in a highly predictable direction, so building norms that start with “if you think you are competent do X, if you don’t do Y” are hard to make work.
I ended up chatting with Habryka (who had originally inspired this post, and now wasn’t sure he agreed with it).
One key additional point here is “gee, doing anything at all is really goddamn hard, and you might not want people to feel any additional disincentive from doing anything, including building monopolies.”
There’s the frustrating “consider reversing all advice you hear, because you maybe filter yourself to hear advice that reinforces your own biases” thingy. I think I endorse the specific phrasings used in this post (which I think were properly caveated). But, I wouldn’t want the takeaway to be people being too overly worried about ensuring they have competitors when they themselves haven’t gotten off the ground.
There’s an additional confusing issue where...
it’s really bad if a mediocre organization is a monopoly, or if organizations stretch beyond their capacity.
it… actually can be good if a highly competent organization does a lot of vertical integration.
And the problem is that figuring out “am I competent or not?” is one off the hardest things you can try to figure out.
Note: I don’t think objectively figuring out “am I competent or not?” is that hard of a question. It’s just one that the people who are incompetent will very likely get wrong in a highly predictable direction, so building norms that start with “if you think you are competent do X, if you don’t do Y” are hard to make work.