Ah, good point. This brings to mind Operation Overlord, which suffered badly from this flaw: a summary of that chapter of Supplying War by Van Creveld is here, if you are interested.
I suppose the obvious example is that more money is effectively a universal advantage. Naively it appears to me that ‘assume the problem is solved because we spent huge sums of money on it’ is a more common failure mode than ‘set an impossibly specific goal’, though.
Consider something like growing fruit trees. It takes mostly the same steps to get a new crop of citrus trees as pear trees in terms of planting, watering, fertilizing; but pear trees take up to 7 years to fruit whereas citrus trees usually do so in 2. I therefore expect backchaining not to vary much depending only on time. By contrast, a campaign for President of the United States takes about as long to plan and execute as a pear tree does to fruit. However, it involves many, many more and different kinds of steps. I expect backchaining to vary radically, despite the similar amount of time. It seems like describing goals far in the future is really a heuristic for the number of steps required, and possibly also for the availability of information. On reflection, probably more so the latter. Is there a way to distinguish these?
Ah, good point. This brings to mind Operation Overlord, which suffered badly from this flaw: a summary of that chapter of Supplying War by Van Creveld is here, if you are interested.
I suppose the obvious example is that more money is effectively a universal advantage. Naively it appears to me that ‘assume the problem is solved because we spent huge sums of money on it’ is a more common failure mode than ‘set an impossibly specific goal’, though.
Consider something like growing fruit trees. It takes mostly the same steps to get a new crop of citrus trees as pear trees in terms of planting, watering, fertilizing; but pear trees take up to 7 years to fruit whereas citrus trees usually do so in 2. I therefore expect backchaining not to vary much depending only on time. By contrast, a campaign for President of the United States takes about as long to plan and execute as a pear tree does to fruit. However, it involves many, many more and different kinds of steps. I expect backchaining to vary radically, despite the similar amount of time. It seems like describing goals far in the future is really a heuristic for the number of steps required, and possibly also for the availability of information. On reflection, probably more so the latter. Is there a way to distinguish these?