(It’s also the case, as some readers have pointed out in the comments below, that certain problems cannot be solved by isolated thought alone, and require feedback loops or regular contact with the territory. For monks working on such problems, it is less that they sequester themselves completely for thousands of days at a time and more that, during those thousands of days, none can make demands of them.)
The claim is not that just giving people resources and letting them think is sufficient; the objections you raise in your last paragraph seem true and correct to me (e.g. there’s an incentive thing to be solved, among other problems) but it wasn’t so much that I intend the worst possible answer to those objections as that the above essay didn’t speak to them at all. =P
(Didn’t speak to e.g. how do you select 1,000 and 10,000 and 100,000-day monks, how do you sort them to their respective problems, how do you motivate and evaluate them, etc.)
How much work was “culture of Duncans” supposed to be doinng?
In particular, I kind of read it as “we can assume (among other things) common knowledge that everyone is basically cooperative with everyone else”. So people don’t become 10,000 day monks just because they want to be supported while they doss around. Is that intended?
If Duncans don’t all basically cooperate with other Duncans, or if it’s supposed to be more like “a culture where Duncans have a lot of institutional power but a lot of the population isn’t a Duncan”, I become a lot more skeptical, while acknowledging that if you do think it would work in that sort of situation, you’ve probably thought of the same objections I have.
Yeah, this was intended to be addressed by:
The claim is not that just giving people resources and letting them think is sufficient; the objections you raise in your last paragraph seem true and correct to me (e.g. there’s an incentive thing to be solved, among other problems) but it wasn’t so much that I intend the worst possible answer to those objections as that the above essay didn’t speak to them at all. =P
(Didn’t speak to e.g. how do you select 1,000 and 10,000 and 100,000-day monks, how do you sort them to their respective problems, how do you motivate and evaluate them, etc.)
How much work was “culture of Duncans” supposed to be doinng?
In particular, I kind of read it as “we can assume (among other things) common knowledge that everyone is basically cooperative with everyone else”. So people don’t become 10,000 day monks just because they want to be supported while they doss around. Is that intended?
If Duncans don’t all basically cooperate with other Duncans, or if it’s supposed to be more like “a culture where Duncans have a lot of institutional power but a lot of the population isn’t a Duncan”, I become a lot more skeptical, while acknowledging that if you do think it would work in that sort of situation, you’ve probably thought of the same objections I have.
A lot of the work was being done by “culture of Duncans.”
All of that is double-clickable/expandable, but it’s hard to expand all of it for any single essay; that’s why so many essays. =)