(These posts are chronicling my understanding of the basic laws of strategy. They are by no means complete, but an amalgamation of what I’ve read on the subject.)

Lets keep going with this chess analogy, shall we? The strategic world is like the chessboard. Your resources are your pieces – what you’re using to try to get to your goal. Resources come in a few basic flavors:

Knowledge – Information about the terrain, about your opponent, about your goal. The function of knowledge is to prune your choice of possibilities, helping you to choose the best path to take from a sea of mediocre or countereffective ones. The more you know about the situation you face, the better your strategy gets. If you were somehow blessed with perfect information, your job would be easy. You’d simply have to solve your problem in the same way you would a differential equation – plug in all the variables and come up with the right answer.

Time – Every second you spend is both A) one less second you have in your life to accomplish your goal and B) one more second for your enemies to impede you. The world moves quickly, and time is constantly being drained away from us. The person who gets the most back in return for the time spent has a decisive advantage. The quicker you move, the closer your goal gets, and the more your opponents have to work to keep up with you.

Space – In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi said ” “When the fight comes, always endeavour to chase the enemy around to your left side. Chase him towards awkward places, and try to keep him with his back to awkward places. When the enemy gets into an inconvenient position, do not let him look around, but conscientiously chase him around and pin him down. In houses, chase the enemy into the thresholds, lintels, doors, verandas, pillars, and so on, again not letting him see his situation.” He knew the value of having space, and of denying it to your opponent. The more space you have, the less you’re constrained, and the more you can see. Having space means always having a place to move, never being surrounded or forced to choose between two bad options.

Materiel – everything physical and consumable is materiel. This means money, and everything that money can buy – food, weapons, gold, vehicles, chess pieces, etc. It is important, but it tends to be overvalued – it is not always as useful as it seems. Materiel tends to be a ‘price of admission’ in conflicts. You generally need a certain amount to be able to compete, but it alone is no guarantee for victory.

Allies – Just because everyone is a possible enemy doesn’t mean that they’re not able to help you (whether they intend to or not). Whenever someone’s goals align with your own, you’ll be able to do things together that you’d be unable to seperately. Having allies means having access to their resources in addition to your own, and correspondingly all the actions that they’re able to take. You also have new possibilities opened up by combining your resources. A man with a boat and a man with a motor can cross the water many times faster together than either can on their own.

Yourself – This encompassess many things like your intelligence, charisma, reputation, health, perception, presence of mind, talent – essentially, all the personal and physical traits that you’re able to leverage to help achieve your goals (though reputation may deserve its own section, I’ll leave it here for now). This resource is the most important of all – properly using your positive traits will let you acquire all the others. And save death or severe injury, they can never be taken from you.

Vespene Gas – Wait, I’m thinking of something else. Nevermind.

Everything you do in pursuit of your goal will require one or more of these resources. The more you collect, and the better able you are to exploit them, the greater your success. Remember, resources are scarce – don’t waste them.

(These posts are chronicling my understanding of the basic laws of strategy. They are by no means complete, but an amalgamation of what I’ve read on the subject.)

So strategy is about winning then – getting what you want.

To do this, we need to define the world that all conflicts operate in, abstracted away from their specific situations. To this end we’ll lay out the basic axioms of the strategic world. (Yay for more axioms!)

Axiom 1: Actions require resources. This is almost a tautology – a resource can be defined as anything that increases your capacity for action. Everything you do has a cost, be it in time, money, space, willpower, etc. To reach your goal, you’ll need to acquire resources, and the more resources you acquire, the more possible actions you’ll be able to take in getting there. Consider chess – you can’t mate your opponents king without using moves and sacrificing pieces.

Axiom 2: Situations change constantly. The world is in constant flux. Events are constantly occuring, actions are constantly being taken which change the landscape you’re operating in. What’s true today may not be true tomorrow, or even in another hour, depending on the area in question. While you’re moving towards your goal, everyone else is moving towards theirs. Like a chessboard, the positions of the pieces are ever shifting.

Axiom 3: Everyone is a potential enemy. Unless you’re trying to survive in the wild, the impediments to your success will always be other people. No one else is trying to achieve the exact samethings as you are. No one shares your exact goals. As such, everyone has the potential to thwart your plans, even through seemingly innocuous actions like being in the wrong place at the wrong time or demanding your attention.

The world of strategy, then, is a bustling, chaotic one. You have to make your way through a constantly shifting mass of people. Some of them, blind to your presence, will simply get in your way. And some, for whatever reason, will work specifically to thwart you. Strategy teaches the best methods of defeating or circumventing whatever people and situations come between you and your goal.

The essence of conflict is fairly simple. It’s based on two axioms.

1) Everyone is trying to get what they want.
2) Not everyone can.

That’s it.

They both should be obvious. All humans (and every other lifeform) DO is try to get what they want. It’s virtually what defines the term ‘alive’ – something with desire and intent. And because we live in a world where all resources are limited, not everyone is going to be able to. Every conflict boils down to a group of agents who have contradicting goals. Because we live a society, where an individual’s goals are always a little bit different than everyone elses, conflicts happen constantly. Life, like chess, is a zero-sum game. For one person to win, someone, somewhere has to lose.

The upside to this is that even though they happen constantly, they happen consistently. Conflicts all operate under the same set of principles. Two people arguing about which restaurant to go to are in the same effective situation as two people trying to kill each other – they’re all trying to achieve their goals, but are being blocked by a person with contradicting ones. Because we’re all living in the same world, we’re all playing by the same set of rules. Like chess, getting what you want is a skill that can be learned.

This what strategy teaches. It’s not about succeeding in conflicts or defeating your enemy – though it does teach you that as well. Those are simply means to a greater end. At it’s core, strategy is really about getting what you want. It’s the science of the win.

Decision theory is the study of the methods used to reach optimal decisions. It’s according to Wisegeek, “an interdisciplinary area of study that concerns mathematicians, statisticians, economists, philosophers, managers, politicians, psychologists and anyone else interested in analyses of decisions and their consequences.”

That said, if you’re not trying to build an AI, decision theory is generally a pretty useless pursuit. To see why, we have to look at the two main branches of decision theory (normative decision theory – the method that should be used to optimize expected utility), evidential and causal.

Briefly, evidential decision theory states that you should act purely on the basis of whichever decision gives you the most expected utility. It’s powered by evidence, hence its name. For example, if the last 10 times you ate meat you got a horrible stomachache, all available evidence suggests that if you eat meat again, you will get a stomachache again. Therefore to maximize your utility (in this case by minimizing your intestinal pain), you should avoid eating meat. Evidential decision theory is correlational. It doesn’t posit any sort of cause and effect relationship between eating meat and getting sick, it just notes the correlation.

Causal decision theory (as you might have guessed), does posit a cause and effect relationship. It states that you should take actions that will directly cause you to maximize your utility. For the preceding stomachache problem, causal decision theory posits that eating meat causes your stomachache, and thus you should avoid eating meat to avoid a stomachache.

I know I know, it seems extremely fucking pedantic. And generally it is, because 999 times out of 1000 both types of normative decision theory get you to the same answer. However, that 1 time out of 1000, the situation gets messy – causal and evidential give different answers. And it’s in messy situations where we learn something. Enter Newcomb’s Problem.

Newcomb’s problem is formulated as follows: a mysterious benefactor offers you two boxes, Box A and Box B. Box B definitely contains $1000. Box A either contains $1,000,000 or $0. You are given the option of either taking Box A, or taking both Box A and B. Some time ago, the mysterious benefactor ran an extremely accurate simulation about which you will choose, and has filled the Box A with $1,000,000 if and only if the simulation predicts you will only take Box A. If it predicts you will take both boxes, Box A is empty. This simulation has been correct for the last 999 times it has been run. The benefactor then leaves you with the already-full boxes (he put the money in as soon as he completed the simulation), and departs.

The two arguments for which choice to make are as follows.

Evidential: The evidence overwhelmingly supports taking only Box A. If the simulation is correct (and it has been the last 999 times), Box A will contain $1,000,000 only if it’s the only box we take. If we take both, the simulation will have predicted it, and Box A will be empty, and we will only have the $1000 contained in Box B. Taking only Box A maximizes our utility by maximizing the amount of money we get.

Causal: Whatever we decide now, the boxes are already full and sealed. Our decision can have no effect on what’s actually inside the box because there’s no possible causation – the boxes were filled before we got here. Causation does not work backwards – our decision now cannot have an effect on an action taken in the past. No matter what we pick, the amount of money in Box A is unchanged. Therefore, we’ll be $1000 richer if we take both boxes, regardless of what’s inside box A.

Causal and Evidential give two different answers! So which one’s right?

That question, unfortunately, is extremely difficult. Thousands of man-hours have been spent arguing about it, and entire fields of study have essentially been built up around it. Answers to Newcomb’s Problem vary depending on the exact formulation (ie: the amounts of money in the boxes, whether it’s possible to lose money, if the boxes are transparent, etc.) It seems wrong to make a decision without some sort of possible causation, but it seems equally wrong to take $1000 over $1,000,000. The problem is of the sort where it’s immediately obvious to everyone who sees it what the answer is – unfortunately, each answer is obviouslly correct to half the people, and each side just regards the other side as being intentionally obtuse.

My own opinion (heavily influenced by Gary Drescher’s book “Good and Real”) is that the apparent paradox results from a confused formulation of “causation”. Causal decision theorists seem to think that there’s no effect their actions can have on the box, but their actions ALREADY had their effects – in a mechanical, deterministic universe, the outcome was exactly the same whether you look at the universe after the boxes are opened, before they are opened, or right when the simulation is run. Thinking that the current moment in time is somehow special is simply your intuition leading you astray. (This opinion is not particularly well formed – I’m having difficulty verbalizing exactly what my thoughts regarding the apparent confusion are).

I rather enjoyed this bit from a website describing a new theory of music:

“If you succeeded in developing a complete theory of music, you would be able to use that theory to compose strong original music, which you could then sell, and use the proceeds to purchase a luxury yacht. Be suspicious of anyone claiming to completely understand what music is who does not own a luxury yacht.”

The Luxury Yacht Test (LYT) can in fact be applied to any sort of grandiose, suspect claim. That guy at work who’s always talking about how smart he is? Where’s his luxury yacht? Girl claiming she’s beautiful enough to be a model? Why no luxury yacht? Internet nutjob who claims to have discovered a unified theory of everything? Unless he’s updating his website from aboard a 40 ft schooner, I’m not buyin’ it.

Confront the person in question with these claims though, and their defense mechanisms will kick in, marshalling all available cognitive dissonance to fight back with. If you’ve ever spent time on the internet, you’ve probably had a discussion similar to the following:

Idiot: “Yeah, I got a 1600 on my SATs. I almost went to MIT actually, but I couldn’t afford it.”
You: “I find it hard to believe a person who scored like that couldn’t get any sort of scholarship”
Idiot: “Well, my grades were pretty bad because I was so bored in class – I was so far ahead of everyone else”
You: “If you were so far ahead why didn’t you recognize how important your high school grades were? And if you’re so smart why do you work at a bowling alley?”
Idiot: “I like this job. I don’t need alot of money or stuff to be happy. Maybe someday you’ll figure that out”
You: “True, but a person who was smart enough would be able to make a ton of money and then live out the rest of their life in leisure, or in devotion to a cause. Money gives you alot more options. All your ‘intelligence’ seems to have brought you is a life of servitude, which makes it a strange thing to brag about.”
Idiot: “I once threw a football over those mountains”

~fin

Stories like the one above remind me of the story of Carl Sagan and the man with the dragon in his garage:

“Show me,” you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle–but no dragon.
“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.
“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely. “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.”
You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.
“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floates in the air.”
Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.
“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”

In both cases, the people involved have to perform some fast footwork to keep their stories appearing to match reality. And in both cases, the claims are utterly useless. What difference does it make if there’s a dragon in your garage if there’s no way to detect it? What does it matter how smart you are if you haven’t done anything successful?

The LYT works because of the old saw, ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. Words by themselves are very weak evidence, and can’t be relied upon – actions on the other hand, are much harder to fake. If someone has managed to acquire a luxury yacht, it may not mean that they won the lottery, but it’s pretty strong evidence of SOMETHING.

Ultimately, the LYT is a heuristic for checking how well certain beliefs match up with reality – how well the map corresponds with the territory. It’s easy to apply it to the claims of others, but it works equally well when it’s applied to yourself. Anytime you start thinking you’re hot shit, ask yourself why it hasn’t resulted in nautical finery.

Humans, as a species, often fall prey to the narrative fallacy. Instead of seeing the world as it is – a complex series of interrelated events, where both the past and future are difficult to make sense of – we prefer to see it as a story, one where we are the main characters. It’s much more pleasant and much easier to imagine life this way, unrealistic as it is. But why are we so vulnerable to the power of the narrative?

What are the aspects of the narrative? First, there’s a protagonist – a story is ABOUT someone. And there’s antagonists, people working against the protagonist. All events are important – seemlingly minor things tend to foreshadow later events, or tell you major things about the characters. There’s a narrator to explain what’s going on. All events are part of a structure, culminating in the purpose, the point of the whole story. There’s a feeling of inevitability – things may look bad, but we know the protagonists will overcome, and WIN. And, of course, it’s always entertaining.

Contrast this to real life. Here, things are generally boring. Our lives are built up from a litany of mundane events – there’s no build up to an inevitable climax (unless you count death). Few things matter. You make decisions, and they change your life, but there’s no overarching sense of purpose, nothing you’re destined to overcome to end up on top. There’s no antagonists or villains, just people who want different things than you.

Unfortunately, this conflicts with some of our innermost desires. We want to feel important. We want to feel like what we do is leading to something of consequence. We want to have to overcome difficulties, but at the same time we don’t want to have to worry about the future – we want to know that everything is going to be ok. We want people to be either good or bad, with us or against us (it’s easier that way). We want to conquer our enemies.

What’s more, our brain seems designed to create something very similar to a narrative. We take in events from the world, throw out the ones that don’t matter, and extrapolate out the important ones to make predictions about the future. We’re wired to make sense of things in the form of stories. We look back into history, pick out the important parts, and tie them into a wonderful story that makes it seem inevitable (see hindsight bias).

So combine all those, and what do you get? From LessWrong:

“A candy bar is a superstimulus: it contains more concentrated sugar, salt, and fat than anything that exists in the ancestral environment. A candy bar matches taste buds that evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment, but it matches those taste buds much more strongly than anything that actually existed in the hunter-gatherer environment.”

The narrative acts the same way – hijacks our desires and our basic mental processes, combining them into something immensly appealing to our primitive brains. It’s why the lure of the narrative can be so difficult to resist.

I used to always get frustrated when I would come up with an idea I thought was good, fail to implement it (or start to implement it poorly), then see someone else accomplish it. It felt like stealing, like the fact that it had formed in my head gave me rights to it for all time.

I’ve since tried to turn this occurance more to my advantage. Instead of getting frustrated, I should feel excited; I should think what I had planned to do once that was completed, and then get started on it immediately. They’ve saved me time having to do it myself.

This sort of thinking required I dump my “I want to do it to make a shit ton of money and retire” desire. I’ve replaced that one with, I think, a better one. One that’s more adaptable to a changing world, that can be worked on one day at a time. And if I’m really lucky, the previous goal will follow from it.

(everything I write is pretty much a first draft, but this is too rough to even call it that. I think there may be something of worth at the core of it though)

As far as I know, there’s no consensus on who the last person to know everything – to have all current human knowledge in their heads – was. I’ve heard Francis Bacon, Leonardo DaVinci, and a few other renaissance-men-types. Either way the capability has certainly been gone for several hundred years. There’s too many people doing too many different things for one person to be able to accumulate any more than a tiny fraction of the knowledge we, as a species, have produced. The age of the generalist is dying, and the age of the specialist is upon us.

“But wait, just yesterday you were extolling the virtues of diversifying your skills, so no one has your exact combination!” This is true for the center, where things or stable. But civilization advances on the fringes, where the known and the unknown become hard to tell apart. And slowly but surely the new knowledge from beyond the pale propogates through all aspects of society. The job you do today is vastly different from the same job 50 or 100 years ago. We have new knowledge and new tools to do them with.

To manage this exponential increase in knowledge, we construct systems to do much of the mental heavy lifting and paper shuffling. Instead of building shoes by hand, we build assembly lines to build shoes for us. Instead of having to do tedious and complex math, we use spreadsheets to do the math for us. That can’t stop it of course – we’re still going way too fast. Soon the systems themselves will be so complex and interconnected that people will face the same problem we have today – not being able to learn everything about them. They’ll get so massive that we’ll need to construct meta-systems to help us understand the systems. And the cycle keeps repeating, constructing system upon system due to the hard limits of the human mind. Slowly but surely we add a few floors to the hierarchy of existence.

The Pareto Principle is the observance that for many events, 80% of the effects will be produced by 20% of the causes. A few examples:

-80% of the land in Italy is owned by 20% of the population
-80% of web traffic is concentrated in 20% of websites
-80% of scholarly articles will appear in 20% of journals

Something interesting about the Pareto Principle is that it’s scale invariant. Suppose 80% of the wealth is controlled by 20% of the people. Within that 20%, 80% of the wealth in THAT group will still be controlled by 20% of the new group. It doesn’t matter what portion of the group you look at, the 80/20 split still holds.

A popular formulation of the rule is “20% of the work will get you 80% of the results”. It’s not quite as well-supported mathematically, but there’s enough anecdotal evidence to make it a decent heuristic. For example, approximately 20% of your customers will be responsible for 80% of your sales. Or fixing 20% of your software bugs will eliminate 80% of your software crashes. Tim Ferris takes this principle to the extreme in his book “The 4-Hour Workweek“, advocating only spending your time on that top 20%. Even Cal Newport’s advice, “Do less, do better, know why” can be seen as a form of this – efficiently investing your time to get maximum returns from it.

The most interesting application of this though, is in Scott Adams’ formulation for success. He says that there are esentially two ways to be successful: 1) Be in the top 99% of something, or 2) Be in the top 75% of two or more things. Because (in theory) it only takes you 20% of the time to be 80% skilled in something, you should be able to acquire 2 or 3 skills in the same (or less) amount of time it would take you to master one. Since other people are unlikely to have your particular combination, you’ll be able to do things few others can do by combining your talents.

(To be continued if I think of something to say that couldn’t be found by 30 seconds of googling)

Two facts that are becoming harder and harder to reconcile:

1) My writings, to really be worth anything, are going to need alot more focused effort to improve them.

2) My ideas, to really be worth anything, are going to need more alot foundational learning (philosophy, neuroscience, mathematics, etc.) that will take time to acquire.

I seem to have stumbled upon two simultaneous, contradictory goals. Do I scale back my writing and focus on well-researched pieces? Do I plow on with whatever rambled thoughts come tumbling off of my head first, sorting out the good from the bad later? Do I switch focus, writing about more subjective topics while I play a long game of catch-up with the stuff I need to know?

It’s not clear, past midnight, what the answer is. But that may be the fault of drowsiness. (As may be the lack of a proper conclusion)