Curated. Beyond the immediate advice of “how to get stuff fast”, I think this expresses an important spirit of instrumental rationality: the willingness to not accept the standard way of doing things, to push back, and hunt for non-standard solutions until you succeed.
An element of this is not taking reality as irreducible but instead saying yes, 6-weeks delivery time can be broken down, and then you can optimize the parts, and then you can do better.
I also like that this advice doesn’t come down to “don’t take no for an answer” or “be pushy” which might be what you expect. It’s more “search the solution space better than most other people”.
And I think there’s a lot of good transfer of the underlying spirit here to other domains, e.g. solving medical problems and other stuff.
Curated. Beyond the immediate advice of “how to get stuff fast”, I think this expresses an important spirit of instrumental rationality: the willingness to not accept the standard way of doing things, to push back, and hunt for non-standard solutions until you succeed.
An element of this is not taking reality as irreducible but instead saying yes, 6-weeks delivery time can be broken down, and then you can optimize the parts, and then you can do better.
I also like that this advice doesn’t come down to “don’t take no for an answer” or “be pushy” which might be what you expect. It’s more “search the solution space better than most other people”.
And I think there’s a lot of good transfer of the underlying spirit here to other domains, e.g. solving medical problems and other stuff.