If I read this and understood it 1 year ago, it would have saved me the painful process of discovering these patterns myself. This was a gaping hole in my world model. Something about being a student of history gave me a false sense of distance from these patterns. I thought I was living in a world where machiavellian environments would not be something I had to think about at all. Slowly, cracks formed and then all at once, that worldview shattered.
So, what do we do about this? It seems intuitively important to at least develop the ability to identify what kind of environment, political or driven by measurable impact, you’re looking at. This is especially difficult when that environment is systematically lying to you (in job postings, for example). And besides that, the same thing would be valuable to learn about all the people in your management chain at a corporation.
This is very validating and it gives me more thinking to do. Thank you for sharing this.
If you’re interested in mathematical bounds in AI systems and you haven’t seen it already check out https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9908043 Ultimate Physical Limits to Computation by Seth Loyd and related works. Online I’ve been jokingly saying “Intelligence has a speed of light.” Well, we know intelligence involves computation so there has to be some upper bound at some point. But until we define some notion of Atomic Standard Reasoning Unit of Inferential Distance, we don’t have a good way of talking about how much more efficient a computer like you and me are compared to Claude at natural language generation, for example.