My core thesis here is that if you have a lowel-level manager that is as competent at detecting werewolves, you will be more powerful if you instead promote those people to a higher level, so that you can expand and gain more territory.
Either it’s possible to produce people/systems that detect werewolves at scale, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, we have problems. If it is, you have a choice of how many of these people to use as lower-level managers versus how many to use for expansion. It definitely isn’t the case that you should use all of them for expansion, otherwise your existing territories become less useful/productive, and you lose control of them. The most competitive empire will create werewolf detectors at scale and use them for lower management in addition to expansion.
Part of my thesis is that, if you live in a civilization dominated by werewolves and you’re the first to implement anti-werewolf systems, you get a big lead, and you don’t have to worry about direct competitors (who also have anti-werewolf systems but who want to expand indefinitely/unsustainably) for a while; by then, you have a large lead.
My current guess is that many organizations already have anti-werewolf systems, but it’s a continuous anti-inductive process, and everyone is deploying their most powerful anti-werewolf social tech at the highest levels. (which consists of a small number of people. So, the typical observer notices “jeez, there are lots of werewolves around, why isn’t anyone doing anything about this?” but actually yes people are doing that, and they’re keeping their anti-werewolf tech illegible so that it’s hard for werewolves to adapt to it. This just isn’t much benefit to the average person.
I also assume anti-werewolf tech is only one of many things you need to succeed. If you were to develop a dramatic advance in anti-werewolf tech, it’d give you an edge, if you are also competent at other things. And the probably is that most of the things you need are anti-inductive – at least the werewolf tech, having a core product that is better than the competition. And many other good business practices are, if not anti-inductive, at least quite hard.
If it were possible to develop anti-werewolf tech that is robust to being fully public about how it works, I agree that’d be a huge advance. I’m personally skeptical that this will ever work as a silver bullet* though.
*(lol at accidental werewolf metaphor)
To be clear, I’m very glad you’re working on anti-werewolf tech, I think it’s one of the necessary things to have good guys working on, I just don’t expect it to translate into decisive strategic advantage.
Either it’s possible to produce people/systems that detect werewolves at scale, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, we have problems.
My prediction is that “we have problems”, and that the solutions will necessarily involve dealing with those problems for a very long time, the hard way.
(I’d also reword to “it’s either possible to produce werewolf detection at a scale and reliability that outpaces werewolf evolution, or it isn’t.” Which I think maps pretty cleanly to medicine – we discovered antibiotics, which was real powerful for awhile, but eventually runs the risk of stopping working)
To be clear, I’m very glad you’re working on anti-werewolf tech, I think it’s one of the necessary things to have good guys working on, I just don’t expect it to translate into decisive strategic advantage.
I agree, it’s necessary to reach at least the standard of mediocrity on other aspects of e.g. running a business, and often higher standards than that. My belief isn’t that anti-werewolf tech immediately causes you to win, so much as that it expands your computational ability to the point where you are in a much better position to compute and implement the path to victory, which itself has many object-level parts to it, and requires adjustment over time.
Nod. I think we may disagree upon some of the nuances of the ways reality-is-likely-to-turn out, but are in rough agreement on the broad strokes (and in any case I think I’ve run out of cached beliefs that are relevant to the conversation, and don’t expect to make progress in the immediate future on figuring out the details of those nuances).
Either it’s possible to produce people/systems that detect werewolves at scale, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, we have problems. If it is, you have a choice of how many of these people to use as lower-level managers versus how many to use for expansion. It definitely isn’t the case that you should use all of them for expansion, otherwise your existing territories become less useful/productive, and you lose control of them. The most competitive empire will create werewolf detectors at scale and use them for lower management in addition to expansion.
Part of my thesis is that, if you live in a civilization dominated by werewolves and you’re the first to implement anti-werewolf systems, you get a big lead, and you don’t have to worry about direct competitors (who also have anti-werewolf systems but who want to expand indefinitely/unsustainably) for a while; by then, you have a large lead.
My current guess is that many organizations already have anti-werewolf systems, but it’s a continuous anti-inductive process, and everyone is deploying their most powerful anti-werewolf social tech at the highest levels. (which consists of a small number of people. So, the typical observer notices “jeez, there are lots of werewolves around, why isn’t anyone doing anything about this?” but actually yes people are doing that, and they’re keeping their anti-werewolf tech illegible so that it’s hard for werewolves to adapt to it. This just isn’t much benefit to the average person.
I also assume anti-werewolf tech is only one of many things you need to succeed. If you were to develop a dramatic advance in anti-werewolf tech, it’d give you an edge, if you are also competent at other things. And the probably is that most of the things you need are anti-inductive – at least the werewolf tech, having a core product that is better than the competition. And many other good business practices are, if not anti-inductive, at least quite hard.
If it were possible to develop anti-werewolf tech that is robust to being fully public about how it works, I agree that’d be a huge advance. I’m personally skeptical that this will ever work as a silver bullet* though.
*(lol at accidental werewolf metaphor)
To be clear, I’m very glad you’re working on anti-werewolf tech, I think it’s one of the necessary things to have good guys working on, I just don’t expect it to translate into decisive strategic advantage.
Or to put another way:
My prediction is that “we have problems”, and that the solutions will necessarily involve dealing with those problems for a very long time, the hard way.
(I’d also reword to “it’s either possible to produce werewolf detection at a scale and reliability that outpaces werewolf evolution, or it isn’t.” Which I think maps pretty cleanly to medicine – we discovered antibiotics, which was real powerful for awhile, but eventually runs the risk of stopping working)
I agree, it’s necessary to reach at least the standard of mediocrity on other aspects of e.g. running a business, and often higher standards than that. My belief isn’t that anti-werewolf tech immediately causes you to win, so much as that it expands your computational ability to the point where you are in a much better position to compute and implement the path to victory, which itself has many object-level parts to it, and requires adjustment over time.
Nod. I think we may disagree upon some of the nuances of the ways reality-is-likely-to-turn out, but are in rough agreement on the broad strokes (and in any case I think I’ve run out of cached beliefs that are relevant to the conversation, and don’t expect to make progress in the immediate future on figuring out the details of those nuances).