Create a Full Alternative Stack is probably in the top 15 ideas I got from LW in 2020. Thinking through this as an option has helped me decide when and where to engage with “the establishment” in many areas (e.g. academia). Some parts of my life I work with the mazes whilst trying not getting too much of it on me, and some parts of my life I try to build alternative stacks. (Not the full version, I don’t have the time to fix all of civilization.) I give it +4.
Broader comment on the Mazes sequence as a whole:
The sequence is an extended meditation on a theme, exploring it from lots of perspective, about how large projects and large coordination efforts end up being eaten by Moloch. The specific perspective reminds me a bit of The Screwtape Letters. In The Screwtape Letters, the two devils are focused on causing people to be immoral. The explicit optimization for vices and personal flaws helps highlight (to me) what it looks like when I’m doing something really stupid or harmful within myself.
Similarly, this sequence explores the perspective of large groups of people who live to game a large company, not to actually achieve the goals of the company. What that culture looks like, what is rewarded, what it feels like to be in it.
I’ve executed some of these strategies in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever lived the life of the soulless middle-manager stereotyped by the sequence, but I see elements of it in myself, and I’m grateful to the sequence for helping me identify those cognitive patterns.
Something the sequence really conveys, is not just that individuals can try to game a company, but that a whole company’s culture can change such that gaming-behavior is expected and rewarded. It contains a lot of detail about what that culture looks and feels like.
The sequence (including the essay “Motive Ambiguity”) has led me see how in such an environment groups of people can end up optimizing for the opposite of their stated purpose.
The sequence doesn’t hold together as a whole to me. I don’t get the perfect or superperfect competition idea at the top. Some of the claims seem like a stretch or not really argued for, just completing the pattern when riffing on a theme. But I’m not going to review the weaknesses here, my goal is mostly to advocate for the best parts of it that I’d like to see score more highly in the book.
This post is one of my three picks from the sequence, along with The Road to Mazedom, and Protecting Large Projects Against Mazedom. (Also Motive Ambiguity which is not technically part of the sequence.)
Create a Full Alternative Stack is probably in the top 15 ideas I got from LW in 2020. Thinking through this as an option has helped me decide when and where to engage with “the establishment” in many areas (e.g. academia). Some parts of my life I work with the mazes whilst trying not getting too much of it on me, and some parts of my life I try to build alternative stacks. (Not the full version, I don’t have the time to fix all of civilization.) I give it +4.
Broader comment on the Mazes sequence as a whole:
This post is one of my three picks from the sequence, along with The Road to Mazedom, and Protecting Large Projects Against Mazedom. (Also Motive Ambiguity which is not technically part of the sequence.)
(This review is taken from my post Ben Pace’s Controversial Picks for the 2020 Review.)