Political games can, at best, get stuff from other people. The good stuff—the real power—is the stuff which other people don’t have to offer in the first place. The stuff which nobody is currently capable of doing/making.
Yep.
I think this generalizes to competition against people in general? As in, if you find yourself in a situation where you’re competing neck-to-neck with others, with a real possibility of losing, without an unsurpassable lead on them, you should stop that (if you can) and do something else.
Some examples:
Business. Various standard advice (I believe shared by Graham, Thiel, and Spolsky[1]) regarding building a major business is to start by monopolizing some extremely niche market in which no real competitor exists. Once you’ve eaten that market, you incrementally expand your niche, always shying away from domains with real competitors until you can crush them (i. e., until they stop being real competitors).
Physical fights. The best way to deal with someone attacking you is not to be there to begin with (e. g., earn money and move to a safer country/city). Failing that, make yourself urgently not-there by running away (and get good at that, e. g. practice sprinting + parkour). Failing that, bring a (metaphorical or real) gun to a knife fight. “Learn martial arts”, on the other hand, is not a good approach.
War. Maneuver warfare, where you achieve strategic victory by a sequence of precisely planned, decidedly “unfair” tactical operations, is dramatically preferable to direct WW1-style positional-warfare slugfests.
The post provides plenty of social-conflict examples.
In some way, the point may be obvious. Fair fights against comparably powerful opponents are, by definition, challenging, and also anti-inductive. They drain both sides’ resources, force races to the bottom and tons of other negative-sum dynamics, etc. You want either an overwhelming asymmetric advantage, or a fight to which no-one else will show up.
At least, no-one intelligent. Picking a “fight” with Nature, or abstract concepts, is fine. Indeed, those are the kinds of fights you should be picking. Generally speaking, you want to be doing things where success comes from spending ~all of your time thinking about some object-level problem, and ~none of your time keeping tabs on your human adversaries.
Some caveats/clarifications:
The object-level problem may still involve reasoning about agents, about systems containing people, etc., and even planning against them. What you don’t want are symmetric agentic competitors which are doing basically the same thing as you (for appropriate values of “symmetric” and “same thing”). In other words: you want to be the only live player on the board.
You’d of course still be “technically” in various kinds of competitions: competing in a job market, fighting a war. That’s fine, as long as it’s not a real competition from your perspective.
Obviously you may not always have this option available. (Good business ideas may take time to develop, and you need to eat in the meantime. Same for e. g. climbing out of poverty and moving to a safer city.)
Exercise for the reader: evaluate various alignment plans through these lens, and consider how a non-loser’s alignment plan ought to look like (and how it ought not to look).
Yep.
I think this generalizes to competition against people in general? As in, if you find yourself in a situation where you’re competing neck-to-neck with others, with a real possibility of losing, without an unsurpassable lead on them, you should stop that (if you can) and do something else.
Some examples:
Business. Various standard advice (I believe shared by Graham, Thiel, and Spolsky[1]) regarding building a major business is to start by monopolizing some extremely niche market in which no real competitor exists. Once you’ve eaten that market, you incrementally expand your niche, always shying away from domains with real competitors until you can crush them (i. e., until they stop being real competitors).
Physical fights. The best way to deal with someone attacking you is not to be there to begin with (e. g., earn money and move to a safer country/city). Failing that, make yourself urgently not-there by running away (and get good at that, e. g. practice sprinting + parkour). Failing that, bring a (metaphorical or real) gun to a knife fight. “Learn martial arts”, on the other hand, is not a good approach.
War. Maneuver warfare, where you achieve strategic victory by a sequence of precisely planned, decidedly “unfair” tactical operations, is dramatically preferable to direct WW1-style positional-warfare slugfests.
The post provides plenty of social-conflict examples.
In some way, the point may be obvious. Fair fights against comparably powerful opponents are, by definition, challenging, and also anti-inductive. They drain both sides’ resources, force races to the bottom and tons of other negative-sum dynamics, etc. You want either an overwhelming asymmetric advantage, or a fight to which no-one else will show up.
At least, no-one intelligent. Picking a “fight” with Nature, or abstract concepts, is fine. Indeed, those are the kinds of fights you should be picking. Generally speaking, you want to be doing things where success comes from spending ~all of your time thinking about some object-level problem, and ~none of your time keeping tabs on your human adversaries.
Some caveats/clarifications:
The object-level problem may still involve reasoning about agents, about systems containing people, etc., and even planning against them. What you don’t want are symmetric agentic competitors which are doing basically the same thing as you (for appropriate values of “symmetric” and “same thing”). In other words: you want to be the only live player on the board.
You’d of course still be “technically” in various kinds of competitions: competing in a job market, fighting a war. That’s fine, as long as it’s not a real competition from your perspective.
Obviously you may not always have this option available. (Good business ideas may take time to develop, and you need to eat in the meantime. Same for e. g. climbing out of poverty and moving to a safer city.)
Exercise for the reader: evaluate various alignment plans through these lens, and consider how a non-loser’s alignment plan ought to look like (and how it ought not to look).
Not gonna track down exact sources, sorry.