How much of your knowledge of game theory, FDT, and prediction markets/forecasting can you bring?
You wouldn’t need to start with respect. People are much better at writing now than they were 100 years ago, on an instant-gratification basis. Plus, the Hobbit was 1937, I, Robot was the 1950s, Dune was 1965, so you’d be inspired by HPMOR and Three Body Problem and Hyperion while all your competitors would be running off of Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare. Not to mention real stuff like the Sequences, and the Extropian list, and what actually went down with the people involved in AI alignment from 2016-2023.
In 1904, the world’s best behavioral economist was Sigmund Freud. Most people would quickly notice what they’re capable of, after having nothing to do in their spare time but read Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare.
Write an awesome book about German greatness, optimize for maximizing troop morale, but explain things well enough that most German officers can understand it. If you depict the French and British as sufficiently stupid and crude, it will probably never occur to a single British or French person to plagiarize it and use it for their own side’s propaganda. It would probably get translated word-for-word and get super popular in Britain and France anyway.
I don’t really see how you lose; you have a cultural renaissance, an economic boom, and a coordination takeoff in your pocket, and you have substantial degrees of freedom to convert it into German Nationalism that’s an order of magnitude memetically stronger than the original WW1.
The risk comes from Britain and France getting their own cultural renaissance, and that’s actually a pretty easy fix; just insult the French and British every single time you write something, and that will probably be enough.
I think it’s definitely possible that it increases defection rates and/or decreases morale among the officers, or that it completely bounces off most of the troops or increases defection rates there. Especially because you can’t test it on officers and measure effectiveness in the environment of long trench wars, where nihilism ran rampant, because that environment wouldn’t exist until it was far too late to use it as a testing environment.
But propaganda and war recruitment was generally pretty inferior to what exists today, e.g. the world’s best psychologist was Sigmund Freud and behavioral economics was ~a century away. They were far worse than most people today at writing really good books that are easy to read and that anyone could enjoy, and the contemporary advances in propaganda that they did have resulted in massive and unprecedented scaling in nationalism and war capabilities, even though what they had at the time was vastly less effective than what we’re used to today.
How much of your knowledge of game theory, FDT, and prediction markets/forecasting can you bring?
You wouldn’t need to start with respect. People are much better at writing now than they were 100 years ago, on an instant-gratification basis. Plus, the Hobbit was 1937, I, Robot was the 1950s, Dune was 1965, so you’d be inspired by HPMOR and Three Body Problem and Hyperion while all your competitors would be running off of Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare. Not to mention real stuff like the Sequences, and the Extropian list, and what actually went down with the people involved in AI alignment from 2016-2023.
In 1904, the world’s best behavioral economist was Sigmund Freud. Most people would quickly notice what they’re capable of, after having nothing to do in their spare time but read Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare.
Write an awesome book about German greatness, optimize for maximizing troop morale, but explain things well enough that most German officers can understand it. If you depict the French and British as sufficiently stupid and crude, it will probably never occur to a single British or French person to plagiarize it and use it for their own side’s propaganda. It would probably get translated word-for-word and get super popular in Britain and France anyway.
But I don’t see an actionable plan to winning here?
I don’t really see how you lose; you have a cultural renaissance, an economic boom, and a coordination takeoff in your pocket, and you have substantial degrees of freedom to convert it into German Nationalism that’s an order of magnitude memetically stronger than the original WW1.
The risk comes from Britain and France getting their own cultural renaissance, and that’s actually a pretty easy fix; just insult the French and British every single time you write something, and that will probably be enough.
I think you have a nerdy novel society and a loss of WWI for the same reasons it was lost in our timeline
I think it’s definitely possible that it increases defection rates and/or decreases morale among the officers, or that it completely bounces off most of the troops or increases defection rates there. Especially because you can’t test it on officers and measure effectiveness in the environment of long trench wars, where nihilism ran rampant, because that environment wouldn’t exist until it was far too late to use it as a testing environment.
But propaganda and war recruitment was generally pretty inferior to what exists today, e.g. the world’s best psychologist was Sigmund Freud and behavioral economics was ~a century away. They were far worse than most people today at writing really good books that are easy to read and that anyone could enjoy, and the contemporary advances in propaganda that they did have resulted in massive and unprecedented scaling in nationalism and war capabilities, even though what they had at the time was vastly less effective than what we’re used to today.
I’m struggling to see why fun books would make any difference. Germany didn’t lose because it ran out of light reading material.
As for troop morale and so on, I don’t think that was a decisive element as by the time it started to matter, defeat was already overdetermined.
In other words, I think Germany would have lost WWI even with infinite morale.
Sure you can bring decision theory knowledge. All I’m disallowing is something like bringing back exact plans for a nuke.