Oh, I didn’t realize it was such a huge difference! Almost half of the sequences omitted. Wow. I guess I can write a quick program to diff and thus answer my original question.
Was there any discussion about how and why R:A-Z made the selections it did?
Do you have any recommendations for particularly good sequences or posts that R:A-Z omitted, from the ~430 that I’ve apparently missed?
This seems like a simulator in the same way the human imagination is a simulator. I could mentally simulate a few chess moves after the ones you prompted. After a while (probably a short while) I’d start losing track of things and start making bad moves. Eventually I’d probably make illegal moves, or maybe just write random move-like character strings if I was given some motivation for doing so and thought I could get away with it.
In my experience, these are aligned quite often, and a good organization/team/manager’s job is keeping them aligned. This involves lots of culture-building, vigilance around goodharting, and recurring check-ins and reevaluations to make sure the layer under you is properly aligned. Some of the most effective things I’ve noticed are rituals like OKR planning and wide-review councils, and having a performance evaluation culture that tries to uphold objective standards.
And of course, the level after this you describe, where people are basically pretending to work, is something effective organizations try to weed out ruthlessly. I’m sure it exists, but competitive pressures are against it persisting for long.
My direct experience is as an increasingly-senior software engineer at Google. It leads me to be much more optimistic about corporations’ abilities to be effective than this article. I truly believe that the things have been set up such that that what gets me and my teammates good ratings or promotions, are actually valuable.