A Book Bunch for Thinking Clearly and Boldly About Broken Systems

Why is our society unable to solve problems which appear to have easy solutions? Because of our systems. How can you think about these systems and their insane offspring? How can you see when you can beat these systems? How could these infuriating systems be improved?

Some books are best in bunches. Inadequate Equilibria (a must read), along with Radical Markets and Rethinking the economics of land and housing are a great bunch. Read as a group they complement each other and give ideas for answering those difficult questions. Questions I think are important if you’re looking at how to build something useful, bold, and interesting.

The peduncle of this book bunch is Inadequate Equilibria. A good start to answering our questions is the idea that stupid outputs of systems do not imply stupid people are creating the outputs. The participants are intelligently competing at maximum intensity along the incentive dimensions of their system. You ambitious world changer can fly in there with your great ideas, but the system won’t reward you.

If something sensible is to be done within this multi-party system you need a lot of people to ignore their incentives. Take doing something truly different in academia, how many roles would have to ignore the systems incentives? Phds, professors, faculty members, other academics who judge and cite work, journals, grant givers.

New system incentives for less insane outputs, which your world changing idea of course produces, would require a lot of people to simultaneously make a high risk shift away from their inadequate system to a better one.

So perhaps don’t rush in too fast. Perhaps accept nothing can be done? Not exactly. Luckily for the daydreamers if inadequate equilibria exist an extension is to then question the “modest” view of the world. The modest view is that an intelligent rational person cannot know better than a system. If the European Central Bank says something which appears to be suboptimal, the modest view is you cannot know better. They are experts. They wouldn’t miss something so obvious! But with the concept of Inadequate Equilibria you can ask: is the system incentivised to find the right answer here? Can anyone exploit the mistakes this system makes and make a profit by being right?

It could be that the answers are no. In which case, an intelligent observer could know better than the system. The individual cannot exploit that knowledge for great profit, otherwise the system would have had to correct itself, but the individual can personally profit. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s example is a DIY solution of stringing high powered light bulbs all over the house to cure seasonal affective disorder. The modest view is: if this worked, someone would have done it and I would be able to find this solution on Google. The inadequate view is that the system is not incentivised to try this, so you may as well test your model of the world by spending $500 on lightbulbs.

That is an inadequate summary of the book, you really need to read it. But I’ll continue with the advice Yudkowsky gives to creators based on these ideas. The first is not to be so modest about what you can know and can do. Not to think you can’t possibly have a model of the world which you can exploit to create something better. It’s a pushback against the most extreme take on the lean startup concept which becomes a random walk. The flipside of this advice is to avoid overconfidence. Don’t look at a broken system and think you can roll in and pick up all the free energy everyone has missed. They didn’t miss it; it can’t be picked up.

To build on these concepts are the fingers of the book bunch. The first is ‘Rethinking the economics of land and property’. It’s a treatise on property’s inadequate history. With the lense of Inadequate Equilibria it’s really interesting to see one broken system in depth. Where are the incentives broken? Why can no one exploit the system? Could this multiparty system shift to something remotely less insane?

The other finger is Radical Markets. It’s full of ideas for how mechanisms can be designed to set up incentives for more optimal systems. Plus ideas for how our messed up systems can transition to something better. Suggestions for how to solve Inadequate Equilibria’s problem of shifting a multi-party system.

A book bunch for thinking clearly and boldly about broken systems. A bunch of what makes systems insane, the hundreds of years of history behind some of the insanity, and how we could find something better.