Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sl-1 2610 days ago
Seconded. This essay made me re-think what our problems are and what kind of dynamics those problems exhibit.
1 comments

I feel the same way about the Inadequate Equilibria book https://equilibriabook.com/toc/ (free-to-read). In many ways, it's a different look into the very same problems, with more depth and less egregore/meme engineering.
Yep, Inadequate Equilibria is also a gem. I'd say that compared to MoM, it is more down-to-earth and about how to navigate the problem field and how to find the cases where one can make a difference.

I also feel that as an engineer it is really easy to forget to see the context of a problem. Often technical solutions can be really shitty, but still work because of the context. And installing better solutions won't work if the context does not allow it (or makes it too pricey). Often the shittiest solutions are cemented in use by difficult webs of dependencies that are hard to change. Examples of this kind of systems would be social media platforms (cemented by network effects) and payment systems (technically PITA, but hard to compete with).

Why do people keep recommending this book? It's someone trying to reason by metaphor with thermodynamics instead of just doing the basic game theory.

Mind you, I have never found Yudkowsky's thought anything but imprecise and wandering.