On silicon valley vs the river: in retrospect silicon valley is much more village than river, and the reason I liked the switch from bigtech to hedge funds is that hedge funds are a lot more river and feel much better for me.
Contra the damore story though, this isn't so much about politics (I don't think politics ever really came up even when I was at Google, aside from the one "diversity training" day), it's more about the general culture and being targeted at cutting at the problem. A central example would be that if you need to write code in bigtech you're a lot more likely to make it needlessly complicated and try to shove some fancy algorithm or data structure into it, because you're more focused on the status game of "made complicated thing" than on building something that works to solve the problem.
"Most people, even if they ‘put their trust in’ the Village, Wilderness or River, or even The Vortex."
You haven't defined 'The Vortex' at the time you put this quote in. You probably edited out the bit where you defined it into another section or something. I'd change it to make it a little more clear what's going on for the reader.
I have intentionally not defined The Vortex and I don't think I come back to talk about it later. I am merely gesturing at its existence, and leaving identification of it as an optional exercise for the reader.
You mention bad execution as a big part of the failure of COVID — I think that is absolutely right. This crystallized for me that a major virtue of Village is (or was, or ought to be) “good execution”.
I think of a medical doctor — highly prestigious authority figure who has been grinding for prestige since high school — as maybe the paradigmatic Village person.
Doctors as a rule are alarmingly bad at making basic probabilistic decisions. However they have some other virtue — you can see it especially in ERs — of making the right decisions under pressure in a non-EV-thinking way. A well-run hospital has something similar going on, one level up.
This is why I’d want an MD to treat me for complicated medical problems even if I don’t trust the medical research literature, or doctors to understand it or use basic reasoning skills to understand my condition. It's too bad that all that stuff is my job, but the MD still has something extremely important that I don't.
Ongoing breakdown of administrative competence in hospitals and worse, harried bad execution by doctors is also a bad harbinger. It feels comparable to one of these situations where a group of supposedly Riverian people start making ex ante terrible bets en masse.
This comment is 110% right on, especially in focusing on medicine and the "specific treatment" vs "general policy" differences.
Insufficient competence/good execution in the Village will destroy your society. It isn't enough for River people to be right on some other things, because your day-to-day admin of your society needs Village policies to be at least "good enough" that most people can't see glaring holes, otherwise they'll flock to political contrarians, with no assurance their policies actually are better.
Not much to say other than I enjoyed this review a lot and had read the book a few weeks ago. I would be interested in hearing more about trading on Don’t Worry About the Vase.
I really need to read the book - just bought it via your first paragraph link, hopefully it was an affiliate one - but (at least the way you describe it) the River vs Village thing has a lot (almost certainly for very good reasons) of the Robin Hanson Forager vs Farmer dichotomy. (edit: on retrospect, also has lots of similarities to Julia Galef scout vs soldier mindset)
This, to me, is the most important line, with respect to "what we need to do in the US":
"Starting around 2016, a lot of that changed, and other parts reached tipping points. Also they blew their remaining credibility and legitimacy in increasingly stupid ways, cumulating in various events around the time of Covid. The Village’s case for why The River should accept its authoriah is down to a mix of ‘we have the legible expert labels and are Very Serious People’ and ‘you should see The Other Guy (e.g. The Wilderness’). Both are increasingly failing to hold water."
Minor quibble, I believe Cartman has another "t" in that word. But overall that gets it: the Village can be wonderful, but in almost every way, every actual Village policy was adopted from - here, using yet another field's terminology - a past/historic River Conquest Elite. At least the good ones, because otherwise - how would they have been adopted? The covid mismanagement was the camel-breaking-straw for me as well, especially because it looked like there was a decent plan in place! I'd been reading about epidemic strategies for years - heck, we all played Pandemic - and even though I'm very much in the "socialist-calculation-failure" house of libertarianism, it seemed pretty likely we'd handle it in a reasonable fashion.
We had already done the River-style math and odds calculations, all we had to do was pop in the specific-covid related numbers into the formula and we'd see the best way to handle it. Then it actually happened, and we threw the playbook out the window and did totally different things, with the one exception of "vaccine crash program", except that we then decided that was actually Bad, either because Trump was Bad, or vaccines were Bad.
So, not to rehash old debates, but given that example of covid, how do River people who have done the math on [some problem] actually convince (force?) the Village People (haha) to implement a better solution? It doesn't seem like even learned experience (covid) was enough to do so, so how on earth is it gonna work with - take your pick of - China, AI, pangolin flu, debt crisis or whatever?
Is there a post in this blog on the successes and failures of the COVID response? As a layperson, there are certainly many individual spots where I can tell things didn't go well, but I don't know which of those were poor strategy, which were poor execution, and which were bad luck (or which actually went reasonably well, but were poorly marketed).
Until around Feb 2023, it was almost exclusively covid content - just scroll back to that in the archives, I think there was a few "post-mortem" style ones.
Step one might be crafting an articulation of River Thought that doesn’t say the Village is always stupid and wrong. Nobody really responds well to that, but a group that is characterized by stronger than usual in-group out-group dynamics *definitely* won’t.
Once the footguns have been put away, you appeal to areas of shared values, and show you’re willing to distinguish yourself from River who delight in violating shibboleths, instead of rallying to them out of tribal allegiance. As an irrational tide rises, become more careful to be grounded and precise, instead of more strident to meet it.
“I want us to follow the science too, but I’m concerned this advice is being filtered through unscientific bureaucracy.”
“I don’t have much sympathy for whiners who got fired for shitposting in the company intranet. Be a professional. But this Robin D’Angelo stuff isn’t professional either.”
“I think the bar for a person who’s not a public figure getting fired for their political views outside of work should be very high.”
“Tech founders are always going to be weirdos. That’s okay, the world needs weirdos to try new things. I don’t listen to athletes or musicians about politics either.”
"Step one might be crafting an articulation of River Thought that doesn’t say the Village is always stupid and wrong"
Absolutely, especially since (and I'm saying this as someone who definitely mentally associates with R) they are mostly right, just usually in hard to see "dog bites man" sort of ways, but that are still important for society functioning.
"appeal to areas of shared values"
Yes, definitely. The village/system/status-quo doesn't * have * to hate new (potentially better) ideas, but they are definitely gonna if the new ideas come with "and therefore we should depose the village/system/status quo" attached to it. There is common ground that both sides can agree on in "here is objective, non-partisan, non-culture-war-points-scoring proof that this new policy/idea would be an improvement, and people who want effective policy can see it." Sure, maybe that new proof was discovered only because of some shibboleth-violating River person's intransigence, but surely we can also find some effective pitchmen to file off those village-offending edges.
This is sound general advice, but in my experience the problem in such situations is often that the logic driving "a group that is characterized by stronger than usual in-group out-group dynamics" can rapidly become incomprehensible to outsiders, or in other cases so obviously incompatible with the needs of people living outside the in-group that cooperating with it on the basis of "shared values" ceases to be a meaningful option.
This is because the presence of strong in-group dynamics in that kind of powerful institutional setting makes it possible to skip all kinds of "normal" reasoning steps and considerations and jump to conclusions that most people outside that group perceive as inherently counterintuitive or unworkable. When a serious disconnect of this kind happens in a complex, fast-moving setting, it can be nearly impossible for outsiders to discern the "shared values" that the in-group presumes are being served. And a lot of the less savvy/experienced ones probably don't even understand how the strategies in play are meant to serve the values in question.
Relatedly, I'd bet that it would not even occur to many of the Americans who *are not* "characterized by stronger than usual in-group out-group dynamics" to think that they'd need to remind anyone about the last two points. I doubt that a commitment to being wildly intolerant of non-conformity--absent a plausible claim as to why such an attitude is warranted in that particular context--can be counted on as a "shared value."
I guess my point is that it's fairly easy for honest disagreements to emerge about the meaning and significance of being seen to support certain "shibboleths." I would not expect "The Village" to extend a great deal of patience and charity to people who see things differently when the stakes of "non-compliance" are high, but that doesn't change the fact that the nature of the disconnect tends to be at odds with the ability to take the approach you suggested here. At the very least, anyone who made an earnest effort to do so would probably phrase it in a way that strikes "The Village" as hyperbolic or confused.
But, just to be clear, I realize that the dynamic you describe exists, and I'm not trying to justify actual cases of important, well-informed people responding to serious situations with self-indulgent tribalism, etc.
Oh for sure, there’s no skeleton key to unlock every tribal ingroup. But the Village specifically is very legible, because it’s the elite consensus.
The set of things that will get people to yell at you on Twitter for Village-y reasons is uncountably large, but the set of things that can actually get a well-meaning person exiled is generally small and well known. I think that’s a big problem with Silver’s framework: he got brain poisoned by Twitter, and he extrapolates big psychotropic implications from facts that are better explained as, ”Nate likes to beef.”
Hot take: lotteries are good. They dignify the poor, giving them the opportunity not only to contribute public funding (often to very good causes) in excess of what is strictly owed by them, but in also keeping alive the American Dream of coming into a shitload of money by a totally random strike of good fortune.
Zvi's point still stands: there is a big variance in how much lotteries charge for their product. Why?
I can understand that a casino charges 10% for the thrill, and a lottery an additional 25% for the Dream and Dignity. But then what justifies the 50% premium in other states?
Suggested addendum to the coin-flip-to-decide-where-to-eat rule: you can sometimes get a little more EV by doing the heuristic whereby you flip the coin and then before revealing the result ask which result one would be happier to see, and then just not even looking at the result.
> The Village thinks that if you do not give up your epistemics to support their side of the Hegelian dialectic, then you lack moral clarity and are naive.
Yeah, we River folk would never split the world into a simplistic Good/Bad dichotomy, the way those stupid Village people do.
I think this is mood affiliation seducing you into sloppy thinking. I can totally buy that there is a Village Thought tendency, and even people with more or less Village Nature. But we should think critically about what the heart of it is, and resist the temptation to lump everything that scans as anti-River into a single tendency.
The biggest failure of Village Thought in my lifetime was the Iraq War, with being overly Covid cautious way way down the list. That was often Manichean, but not left wing. The second biggest might have been PNTR for China? Small-l liberal, but not really left wing, and definitely not Manichean. There was definitely left wing excess in Me Too and the reaction to the Floyd murder, but was that about credentialism, deference to authority, or putting up the appearance of being Very Serious?
>Successful risk-takers are process oriented, not results oriented. They play the long game.
Maybe too obvious to say, but being process oriented -is- being results oriented, over the long run.
Sometimes I imagine explaining to people that just because someone won the lottery, doesn't mean it was a good idea to play it, unless there was some way to nudge the EV to positive, via whatever exploit(s).
On silicon valley vs the river: in retrospect silicon valley is much more village than river, and the reason I liked the switch from bigtech to hedge funds is that hedge funds are a lot more river and feel much better for me.
Contra the damore story though, this isn't so much about politics (I don't think politics ever really came up even when I was at Google, aside from the one "diversity training" day), it's more about the general culture and being targeted at cutting at the problem. A central example would be that if you need to write code in bigtech you're a lot more likely to make it needlessly complicated and try to shove some fancy algorithm or data structure into it, because you're more focused on the status game of "made complicated thing" than on building something that works to solve the problem.
Hey Zvi,
"Most people, even if they ‘put their trust in’ the Village, Wilderness or River, or even The Vortex."
You haven't defined 'The Vortex' at the time you put this quote in. You probably edited out the bit where you defined it into another section or something. I'd change it to make it a little more clear what's going on for the reader.
I have intentionally not defined The Vortex and I don't think I come back to talk about it later. I am merely gesturing at its existence, and leaving identification of it as an optional exercise for the reader.
The Vortex contains those who are at least ecstatically semi-conscious of their roles as critical components (or avatars) for the Molochian plot.
Zvi, I would pre-order your book now!
You mention bad execution as a big part of the failure of COVID — I think that is absolutely right. This crystallized for me that a major virtue of Village is (or was, or ought to be) “good execution”.
I think of a medical doctor — highly prestigious authority figure who has been grinding for prestige since high school — as maybe the paradigmatic Village person.
Doctors as a rule are alarmingly bad at making basic probabilistic decisions. However they have some other virtue — you can see it especially in ERs — of making the right decisions under pressure in a non-EV-thinking way. A well-run hospital has something similar going on, one level up.
This is why I’d want an MD to treat me for complicated medical problems even if I don’t trust the medical research literature, or doctors to understand it or use basic reasoning skills to understand my condition. It's too bad that all that stuff is my job, but the MD still has something extremely important that I don't.
Ongoing breakdown of administrative competence in hospitals and worse, harried bad execution by doctors is also a bad harbinger. It feels comparable to one of these situations where a group of supposedly Riverian people start making ex ante terrible bets en masse.
This comment is 110% right on, especially in focusing on medicine and the "specific treatment" vs "general policy" differences.
Insufficient competence/good execution in the Village will destroy your society. It isn't enough for River people to be right on some other things, because your day-to-day admin of your society needs Village policies to be at least "good enough" that most people can't see glaring holes, otherwise they'll flock to political contrarians, with no assurance their policies actually are better.
Not much to say other than I enjoyed this review a lot and had read the book a few weeks ago. I would be interested in hearing more about trading on Don’t Worry About the Vase.
I really need to read the book - just bought it via your first paragraph link, hopefully it was an affiliate one - but (at least the way you describe it) the River vs Village thing has a lot (almost certainly for very good reasons) of the Robin Hanson Forager vs Farmer dichotomy. (edit: on retrospect, also has lots of similarities to Julia Galef scout vs soldier mindset)
This, to me, is the most important line, with respect to "what we need to do in the US":
"Starting around 2016, a lot of that changed, and other parts reached tipping points. Also they blew their remaining credibility and legitimacy in increasingly stupid ways, cumulating in various events around the time of Covid. The Village’s case for why The River should accept its authoriah is down to a mix of ‘we have the legible expert labels and are Very Serious People’ and ‘you should see The Other Guy (e.g. The Wilderness’). Both are increasingly failing to hold water."
Minor quibble, I believe Cartman has another "t" in that word. But overall that gets it: the Village can be wonderful, but in almost every way, every actual Village policy was adopted from - here, using yet another field's terminology - a past/historic River Conquest Elite. At least the good ones, because otherwise - how would they have been adopted? The covid mismanagement was the camel-breaking-straw for me as well, especially because it looked like there was a decent plan in place! I'd been reading about epidemic strategies for years - heck, we all played Pandemic - and even though I'm very much in the "socialist-calculation-failure" house of libertarianism, it seemed pretty likely we'd handle it in a reasonable fashion.
We had already done the River-style math and odds calculations, all we had to do was pop in the specific-covid related numbers into the formula and we'd see the best way to handle it. Then it actually happened, and we threw the playbook out the window and did totally different things, with the one exception of "vaccine crash program", except that we then decided that was actually Bad, either because Trump was Bad, or vaccines were Bad.
So, not to rehash old debates, but given that example of covid, how do River people who have done the math on [some problem] actually convince (force?) the Village People (haha) to implement a better solution? It doesn't seem like even learned experience (covid) was enough to do so, so how on earth is it gonna work with - take your pick of - China, AI, pangolin flu, debt crisis or whatever?
Is there a post in this blog on the successes and failures of the COVID response? As a layperson, there are certainly many individual spots where I can tell things didn't go well, but I don't know which of those were poor strategy, which were poor execution, and which were bad luck (or which actually went reasonably well, but were poorly marketed).
Until around Feb 2023, it was almost exclusively covid content - just scroll back to that in the archives, I think there was a few "post-mortem" style ones.
Step one might be crafting an articulation of River Thought that doesn’t say the Village is always stupid and wrong. Nobody really responds well to that, but a group that is characterized by stronger than usual in-group out-group dynamics *definitely* won’t.
Once the footguns have been put away, you appeal to areas of shared values, and show you’re willing to distinguish yourself from River who delight in violating shibboleths, instead of rallying to them out of tribal allegiance. As an irrational tide rises, become more careful to be grounded and precise, instead of more strident to meet it.
“I want us to follow the science too, but I’m concerned this advice is being filtered through unscientific bureaucracy.”
“I don’t have much sympathy for whiners who got fired for shitposting in the company intranet. Be a professional. But this Robin D’Angelo stuff isn’t professional either.”
“I think the bar for a person who’s not a public figure getting fired for their political views outside of work should be very high.”
“Tech founders are always going to be weirdos. That’s okay, the world needs weirdos to try new things. I don’t listen to athletes or musicians about politics either.”
I like it.
"Step one might be crafting an articulation of River Thought that doesn’t say the Village is always stupid and wrong"
Absolutely, especially since (and I'm saying this as someone who definitely mentally associates with R) they are mostly right, just usually in hard to see "dog bites man" sort of ways, but that are still important for society functioning.
"appeal to areas of shared values"
Yes, definitely. The village/system/status-quo doesn't * have * to hate new (potentially better) ideas, but they are definitely gonna if the new ideas come with "and therefore we should depose the village/system/status quo" attached to it. There is common ground that both sides can agree on in "here is objective, non-partisan, non-culture-war-points-scoring proof that this new policy/idea would be an improvement, and people who want effective policy can see it." Sure, maybe that new proof was discovered only because of some shibboleth-violating River person's intransigence, but surely we can also find some effective pitchmen to file off those village-offending edges.
This is sound general advice, but in my experience the problem in such situations is often that the logic driving "a group that is characterized by stronger than usual in-group out-group dynamics" can rapidly become incomprehensible to outsiders, or in other cases so obviously incompatible with the needs of people living outside the in-group that cooperating with it on the basis of "shared values" ceases to be a meaningful option.
This is because the presence of strong in-group dynamics in that kind of powerful institutional setting makes it possible to skip all kinds of "normal" reasoning steps and considerations and jump to conclusions that most people outside that group perceive as inherently counterintuitive or unworkable. When a serious disconnect of this kind happens in a complex, fast-moving setting, it can be nearly impossible for outsiders to discern the "shared values" that the in-group presumes are being served. And a lot of the less savvy/experienced ones probably don't even understand how the strategies in play are meant to serve the values in question.
Relatedly, I'd bet that it would not even occur to many of the Americans who *are not* "characterized by stronger than usual in-group out-group dynamics" to think that they'd need to remind anyone about the last two points. I doubt that a commitment to being wildly intolerant of non-conformity--absent a plausible claim as to why such an attitude is warranted in that particular context--can be counted on as a "shared value."
I guess my point is that it's fairly easy for honest disagreements to emerge about the meaning and significance of being seen to support certain "shibboleths." I would not expect "The Village" to extend a great deal of patience and charity to people who see things differently when the stakes of "non-compliance" are high, but that doesn't change the fact that the nature of the disconnect tends to be at odds with the ability to take the approach you suggested here. At the very least, anyone who made an earnest effort to do so would probably phrase it in a way that strikes "The Village" as hyperbolic or confused.
But, just to be clear, I realize that the dynamic you describe exists, and I'm not trying to justify actual cases of important, well-informed people responding to serious situations with self-indulgent tribalism, etc.
Oh for sure, there’s no skeleton key to unlock every tribal ingroup. But the Village specifically is very legible, because it’s the elite consensus.
The set of things that will get people to yell at you on Twitter for Village-y reasons is uncountably large, but the set of things that can actually get a well-meaning person exiled is generally small and well known. I think that’s a big problem with Silver’s framework: he got brain poisoned by Twitter, and he extrapolates big psychotropic implications from facts that are better explained as, ”Nate likes to beef.”
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/book-review-on-the-edge-the-fundamentals
Hot take: lotteries are good. They dignify the poor, giving them the opportunity not only to contribute public funding (often to very good causes) in excess of what is strictly owed by them, but in also keeping alive the American Dream of coming into a shitload of money by a totally random strike of good fortune.
Zvi's point still stands: there is a big variance in how much lotteries charge for their product. Why?
I can understand that a casino charges 10% for the thrill, and a lottery an additional 25% for the Dream and Dignity. But then what justifies the 50% premium in other states?
Suggested addendum to the coin-flip-to-decide-where-to-eat rule: you can sometimes get a little more EV by doing the heuristic whereby you flip the coin and then before revealing the result ask which result one would be happier to see, and then just not even looking at the result.
An underdiscussed (though perhaps not universal?) aspect of Crazy Prepared IMO is Day9's concept of marginal advantage: https://www.teamliquid.net/forum/brood-war/64514-competitive-gaming-article-by-day
> The Village thinks that if you do not give up your epistemics to support their side of the Hegelian dialectic, then you lack moral clarity and are naive.
Yeah, we River folk would never split the world into a simplistic Good/Bad dichotomy, the way those stupid Village people do.
I think this is mood affiliation seducing you into sloppy thinking. I can totally buy that there is a Village Thought tendency, and even people with more or less Village Nature. But we should think critically about what the heart of it is, and resist the temptation to lump everything that scans as anti-River into a single tendency.
The biggest failure of Village Thought in my lifetime was the Iraq War, with being overly Covid cautious way way down the list. That was often Manichean, but not left wing. The second biggest might have been PNTR for China? Small-l liberal, but not really left wing, and definitely not Manichean. There was definitely left wing excess in Me Too and the reaction to the Floyd murder, but was that about credentialism, deference to authority, or putting up the appearance of being Very Serious?
>Successful risk-takers are process oriented, not results oriented. They play the long game.
Maybe too obvious to say, but being process oriented -is- being results oriented, over the long run.
Sometimes I imagine explaining to people that just because someone won the lottery, doesn't mean it was a good idea to play it, unless there was some way to nudge the EV to positive, via whatever exploit(s).
Would the scientific mind be the vortex?