It takes maturity and humility to step back, assess objectively, trade off pros and cons, and ultimately let the best decisions, ideas and solutions win, even when it’s hard to give up your idea or a solution you’ve worked super hard on.
It also takes energy, focus, and intellectual capacity. All of which are being removed from the current effort at hand. There is a real cost to continually reevaluating the situation. Sometimes you just have to put your head down and plow ahead.
This is why having competition is so powerful. Someone will likely be working hard at the right problem using the right strategy.
There is no perfect strategy that will always result in using the fewest resources to generate the best solution. We have to accept inefficiencies and wasted efforts.
Competition isn't a panacea that makes everything bad go away.
It's almost an institution in its own right, and is just as likely to suffer from Shirky-like problems as anything else.
Nobody said it did.
I'm not making a moral claim, i'm saying that it is a matter of reality that nobody can predict the future perfectly and that effort from any individual is a limited resource. So it makes sense sometimes for an individual to just press on in the direction they've chosen, and not "waste" time reevaluating too often.
You can either have one central authority that dictates a single direction, and forces all effort down a single path. Or you can have a more diffuse strategy that explores the solution space in multiple directions simultaneously. Competition, in the context I was referring to it, is basically just the difference between breadth first, or depth first search. I wasn't making a claim about what motivated the search in the first place.
Competition solves everything.
Who gets to mate with who has been answered by competition our entire existence.
Striving for non-violent, yet fair, competition is what advancing the world is about.
Guilty of this.
I worked for about a decade on a pet project to find a new family of computer languages designed for both humans and machines.
I did not think machines were close to mastering our languages, and new languages were needed.
I knew my approach was a long shot, but if I found a way to make it work the upside was huge.
Then LLMs happened. The possible upside of my approach dropped dramatically.
I have been trying to "rewire" my brain and re-purpose the neurons that evolved over a decade to keep turning my approach around from different perspectives. It is very hard.
It is easy to get a sapling to grow into a desired shape. It is much harder to reshape a fully grown tree. Just the physic of it.
To tie this back to the original article, if you model an individual's brain like Minsky's Society of Mind, you would have neural agents that create a circuit ("Institution") to solve a problem, and some of those agents focus on the task of preserving that circuit. Without those Institution preserving neurons, you would never keep the circuit going long enough to see through a contrarian idea. But the downside is that the organization will persist even when it is no longer a good bet.
Perhaps you can turn your idea around slightly into finding a language that finds a balance between formality and universality, rather than computers and humans. Because even though computers now speak our language they do not use it in a logical way at all (arguably because we humans don't).
And while mathematics is very formal it has a lot of trouble expressing ideas from different branches that aren't as formal. Things like fuzzy logics have been created and many things like that but they are still very much on the formal side.
Perhaps you could even derive an academic language for a specific field, perhaps standardizing between synonymous constructions. You could even use LLMs to accelerate the process. Maybe LLMs are a good thing that makes your work easier!
Oh I 100% agree. LLMs are amazing. Plenty of neural agents in my brain are on board. I use them everyday to work on problems in a way not possible before.
I think what I was trying to express is that a contrarian idea might require developing a large number of your own original solver brain circuits that are very dumb, always running, trying to brute force a path for your idea to work.
Later you can then develop new circuits that recognize there's now a better approach, but those solver circuits that you grew are still in your brain, occasionally still running (like sometimes when I wakeup in the morning), because that's what you trained them to do.
In other words, there's a risk to taking on a contrarian idea in that you have to build up lots of brain circuits that will stick around for life, even if your idea turns out to be wrong. I'm sure people have written about this more eloquently. I need to search more.
It sounds very similar to what happens with love. In my experience, at least, when you love someone you build up these circuits that care about the other person and you cannot break them down, it seems. You can ignore them but then there's this part of your brain you're ignoring.
So perhaps you could say you were/are literally in love with the idea.
Ha! My experience as well. Even after many years when you see that person again those circuits turn back on (and are very strong).
That is a bigger more important thing. But also, on the topic at hand, an interesting and probably strong analogy!
This is well off topic now, but this doesn't follow at all. LLMs aren't brains and don't even resemble them that closely. LLMs demonstrate that it's possible to learn grammar from scratch, not that humans actually do. I for one think it's pretty plausible that humans have a little bit of neural wetware-acceleration for syntax. In much the same way, it's possible to implement AES with just an ALU and memory operations, but your CPU probably has special hardware anyway.
Individuals and organisations can also be impostors.
The impostor as individual cannot usually scale the lies. An organisation can be a total imposture or have internal structures that are impostor structures.
This is not exclusive to government.