This echos an excellent post by Dan Luu that touches on problems you face when you build larger, less legible systems that force you to deal with normalization of deviance: https://danluu.com/wat/
The action items he recommends are:
Pay attention to weak signals
Resist the urge to be unreasonably optimistic
Teach employees how to conduct emotionally uncomfortable conversations
System operators need to feel safe in speaking up
Realize that oversight and monitoring are never-ending
Most of these go against what is considered normal or comfortable though:
It’s difficult to pay attention to weak signals when people build awful attention traps (eg. tiktok, youtube, etc.)
Uncomfortable conversations are uncomfortable. In certain cultures, it’s better to straight out lie rather than deliver bad news.
Few organizations have set up channels for upwards communication where front line employees can flag problems. It’s better to not rock the boat.
Constant oversight and monitoring are mentally and physically draining. These are also the easiest activities to cut from a budget because they’re not visible until an accident happens.
What the boy should have done is establish an organization (Wolf-Spotters) whose responsibility is monitoring for signs of wolves. This organization could be staffed by professional or volunteer observers. They need to do periodic trainings and live-action drills (perhaps using a wolf suit). To the fund this, the boy should have first created a PR campaign to make people aware of the cost of unspotted wolves (death), then use that to get support of some local politicians.
(It’s basically a fire department).
If the boy was open to using the dark arts, he could have executed a false flag wolf attack. That would incentivize local politicians to support his cause.
This gives me an idea… I wonder if there might be some way to use prediction markets to make safety, maintenance, monitoring etc short-term profitable for corporations (and maybe even governments), thereby incentivizing them to do it more and not cut costs?
The reason stuff like that gets cut when nothing is going on, is that it seems to be, in the short term, nothing but a drain of money, even though in the long term it’s saving money—so is there some way to make those long term gains available now so that they can be optimized for?
This echos an excellent post by Dan Luu that touches on problems you face when you build larger, less legible systems that force you to deal with normalization of deviance: https://danluu.com/wat/
The action items he recommends are:
Most of these go against what is considered normal or comfortable though:
It’s difficult to pay attention to weak signals when people build awful attention traps (eg. tiktok, youtube, etc.)
People are commonly [overconfident](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybYBCK9D7MZCcdArB/how-to-measure-anything#Step_2__Determine_what_you_know).
Uncomfortable conversations are uncomfortable. In certain cultures, it’s better to straight out lie rather than deliver bad news.
Few organizations have set up channels for upwards communication where front line employees can flag problems. It’s better to not rock the boat.
Constant oversight and monitoring are mentally and physically draining. These are also the easiest activities to cut from a budget because they’re not visible until an accident happens.
What the boy should have done is establish an organization (Wolf-Spotters) whose responsibility is monitoring for signs of wolves. This organization could be staffed by professional or volunteer observers. They need to do periodic trainings and live-action drills (perhaps using a wolf suit). To the fund this, the boy should have first created a PR campaign to make people aware of the cost of unspotted wolves (death), then use that to get support of some local politicians.
(It’s basically a fire department).
If the boy was open to using the dark arts, he could have executed a false flag wolf attack. That would incentivize local politicians to support his cause.
This gives me an idea… I wonder if there might be some way to use prediction markets to make safety, maintenance, monitoring etc short-term profitable for corporations (and maybe even governments), thereby incentivizing them to do it more and not cut costs?
The reason stuff like that gets cut when nothing is going on, is that it seems to be, in the short term, nothing but a drain of money, even though in the long term it’s saving money—so is there some way to make those long term gains available now so that they can be optimized for?