So first off… I’d forgotten this existed. That’s obviously a negative indication in terms of how much it guided my thinking over the past two years! It also meant I got to see it with fresh eyes two years later.
I think the central point the post thinks it is making is that, extending on the original econ paper, search effectiveness can rapidly become impossible to improve by expanding size of one’s search, if those you are searching understand they are in competition. To improve results further, one must instead improve average quality in the search pool and/or improve one’s search method, which can be done in various ways, especially by making it unattractive to compete without being high quality, to get into a place where it is in everyone’s interest to play things straight.
Also, one more example of having a fixed and known decision algorithm leading to others engaging in destructive behaviors. That’s one of several points here that foreshadow the post on Blackmail, which can be considered almost the proposed future post (“Possible Bad Outcomes are Very Bad”).
I get the feeling, now, that in addition to all that, this is ‘burying the lede’ or at least leaving out a large aspect of the interesting things this post is pointing towards. Instead of modeling how one might search, perhaps a more impactful question is how one behaves when one expects life to put you into a series of such competitions, and what it means then to “take risk / embrace variance” in that context, and what conditions make one willing to play the meritocratic game. And how these dynamics can make people increasingly move towards cheating slash investing in deception or rent seeking, rather than seeking to provide value and show they can provide value, because they lose the ability to win such search competitions, especially if the mechanisms to discover and enter become corrupted, or political insiders reliably get the inside track. A much broader critique is implied that was never explored.
I also noticed several people saying the post was hard to grok. As the author, I found it easy to reconnect with and re-grok, but that isn’t much evidence. Long post is already long, and a lot of the statements seem like requests to go slower and make this longer, rather than to tighten and improve quality, although others seemed to be terminology issues one could fix.
So first off… I’d forgotten this existed. That’s obviously a negative indication in terms of how much it guided my thinking over the past two years! It also meant I got to see it with fresh eyes two years later.
I think the central point the post thinks it is making is that, extending on the original econ paper, search effectiveness can rapidly become impossible to improve by expanding size of one’s search, if those you are searching understand they are in competition. To improve results further, one must instead improve average quality in the search pool and/or improve one’s search method, which can be done in various ways, especially by making it unattractive to compete without being high quality, to get into a place where it is in everyone’s interest to play things straight.
Also, one more example of having a fixed and known decision algorithm leading to others engaging in destructive behaviors. That’s one of several points here that foreshadow the post on Blackmail, which can be considered almost the proposed future post (“Possible Bad Outcomes are Very Bad”).
I get the feeling, now, that in addition to all that, this is ‘burying the lede’ or at least leaving out a large aspect of the interesting things this post is pointing towards. Instead of modeling how one might search, perhaps a more impactful question is how one behaves when one expects life to put you into a series of such competitions, and what it means then to “take risk / embrace variance” in that context, and what conditions make one willing to play the meritocratic game. And how these dynamics can make people increasingly move towards cheating slash investing in deception or rent seeking, rather than seeking to provide value and show they can provide value, because they lose the ability to win such search competitions, especially if the mechanisms to discover and enter become corrupted, or political insiders reliably get the inside track. A much broader critique is implied that was never explored.
I also noticed several people saying the post was hard to grok. As the author, I found it easy to reconnect with and re-grok, but that isn’t much evidence. Long post is already long, and a lot of the statements seem like requests to go slower and make this longer, rather than to tighten and improve quality, although others seemed to be terminology issues one could fix.