Thank you. The best thing I've read this year, easily.
However, halfway the post instead of going all metaphysical and try to create a garden, isn't the logical conclusion that individual gains in the rat race trump any grand plan you might have? Is it about the balance between being the best rat and finding a community to create a garden? If you garden by yourself, isn't that just being a rat with extra steps?
After some more thought, I think the detour that is required before this gets all grand strategy is looking more in depth at the ratting strategy.
All the examples quickly settle on a static state, skipping the inertia of the dynamic state that precedes it. And it is in that dynamic state that the rats manage to get their gains.
There are many steps between "Tim decides not to use the purifier in his fish farm" and "So many people don't use their purifiers so that Tim doesn't have any gains anymore". That takes s long time, and after that it's something else. Because it's not the purifier that sets Tim appart, but his attitude.
I think this is a general trap, where the static state makes something look obvious one way, but the trick is in the dynamics of inertias, and the time it takes to reach the static state.
Don't know if I could pick a superlative example from that blog, but the post about telling someone to put their iron in the car so they can stop worrying about it being left on really stuck with me.
Great blogger, and I've only read a handful of what he's written. Most of it not lifechanging, but entertaining. e.g. silicon valley house party posts.
It's not particularly original, but is a convenient single name to corral existing ideas about intractable lose-lose scenarios:
Prisoner's Dilemma, but at the societal level. Defaulting is the logical move for the one-shot game, but it does not produce overall benefit, and is not best in the repeated game.
Local optimizations, under imperfect knowledge. Small local maxima can halt progress. Eventually Goodhart's Law takes over, incentives break down, then shortcuts, grift and corruption come to dominate. Self-preservation and expansion of elites or bureaucracies are always hidden objectives.
Destructive patterns such as: Bait and Switch strategies, like Enshittification of business; Divide and Conquer applied by those with power to keep power.
"Strange game. The only way to win is not to play."
Ultimately these all boil down to coordination problems. The touted solution is to encourage transparency, rationality and cooperation. But bottom-up never gets successful momentum, people don't agree on objectives; top-down always results in tyranny, abuses of power and fails anyway. Vested interests and bad actors always subvert promising initiatives.
However, halfway the post instead of going all metaphysical and try to create a garden, isn't the logical conclusion that individual gains in the rat race trump any grand plan you might have? Is it about the balance between being the best rat and finding a community to create a garden? If you garden by yourself, isn't that just being a rat with extra steps?