Do what you can to make whatever-constitutes-force in the domain of your choosing mobile and responsive, such that it can be concentrated very quickly. The relevant moment is not always predictable in advance...
This... rather severely understates the problem. Consider the Oreos example: not only is the relevant moment not obvious in advance, it's also not obvious in the moment itself, or even obvious in hindsight. The person has presumably walked into the supermarket dozens or hundreds of times, and not once did it ever rise to their attention that this was a "relevant moment".
Mobility and responsiveness may suffice for some kinds of warfare, but for the more general problem of responding in "relevant moments", I don't think that's usually the hard step. The hard step is figuring out where those key points are at all, whether beforehand or at the time or even in hindsight (so the insight can be used for the future).
There are enough situations where the missing strategic piece is a failure to concentrate your forces to make it a good concept to drill into people's heads. I'm a new MS student in a biomedical engineering lab, and a big boost to my learning rate was reading and visualizing/acting out protocols before my instructor showed them to me for real. Instead of spreading out my attention to trying to learn ever more things, I prioritize being rapidly successful when I'm being taught something new. Everything works much better that way.
Also, sometimes, thinking in terms of force concentration can make it easier to perceive relevant moments, because you know what you're searching for. It's related to decomposing a big problem into its constituent parts, a skill that many people need to practice before it becomes natural. There's plenty of low hanging fruit here for people who don't already think habitually in these terms. At a certain point, you've likely exhausted the gains from problems whose decomposition and "relevant moments" are obvious.
I note that this and the above point are compatible/not necessarily in disagreement.
thinking in terms of force concentration can make it easier to perceive relevant moments, because you know what you're searching for
Yeah. One of the most revelatory questions anyone ever asked me was "so, you say you're searching for romantic partners. Where are they? Like, literally, right now, right this moment, where in the physical world are the kinds of people you think you want to date and marry? Are they at the library, the park, the bar, the skating rink—what?"
Which led me to realize that I'd been putting most of my efforts in places where those people weren't.
(Bullets exert far less force than broadswords.)
This seems inaccurate.
Sources:
Swords are unlikely to be swung faster than baseball bats are (slower, if anything). Even assuming equal swing speed, it would seem that bullets (depending on weapon, caliber, etc.) exert comparable or greater force than broadswords.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
There's certainly something to that. But in the other direction, there's the Claudette Colvin vs Rosa Parks anecdote, where (as I understand it) civil rights campaigners declined to signal-boost and take a stand on a case that they thought the general public would be unsympathetic to (an unmarried pregnant teen defender), and instead waited for a more PR-friendly test case to come along. We can't know the counterfactual, but I see that as a plausibly reasonable and successful strategic decision.
The toxoplasma of rage dynamic is to go out of your way to seek the least PR-friendly test cases, because that's optimal for in-group signaling. I view that as a failure mode to be kept in mind (while acknowledging that sometimes defending scoundrels is exactly the right thing to do).
I believe your Amazon rankings example refers to Ryan North's (and his coauthors') Machine of Death.
Great article. One comment - the Oreo story is an explicitly negative example. You are choosing to ‘not’ to do something. I’m not sure the effective force principle works so well for positive actions. To take one example - I am struggling to exercise at the moment. To my mind the key to starting to exercise again is establishing a routine (e.g. go for a run every morning) but this seems to be a different framework to the idea of applying maximum force at the opportune moment. How would the effective force principle work in this context?
Where is the "smallest nudge" sufficient to give you the momentum you need?
For instance, while struggling to exercise, I found that just going and physically touching my treadmill each morning was enough. It was a small enough commitment that it didn't take much energy and didn't meet much resistance, but it caused me to consciously reconnect with my desire to exercise, each morning, such that I found myself more naturally thinking "okay, when today might be a good time to do this?"
This is interesting. Given that I do not have a treadmill, and want to go for actual walks, what would be your suggestion? Perhaps touching my shoes?
Yeah, my first suggestion is some kind of (extremely) low-effort ritual, early in the day, that causes you to notice the potential for taking a walk, without any pressure to do anything about that fact.
One trick that worked for me in such a scenario, is to make refusal to exercise costly in terms of hassle and inconvenience.
For example, when I'm done exercising, I put my dumbbells on my gaming chair. Thus, it will be impossible for me to go sit and play the next day without actually lifting them again, and if I lift them again...its not that hard to just keep on lifting until I'm exhausted.
Trick number two, was to ask my SO to remind me to work out every other day before sleep. If I refuse, to do so, I would have to face a minor embarrassment of having to explain why, to person who knows all my lies and self-lies. Moreover, my SO claimed sexual preference for a physically fit partner over a pudgy one, so I'm indirectly reminded that refusing to lift is detrimental to my sexual pleasure in the long run, while getting and keeping a sixpack has enormous and enthusiastically noticed benefits.
So in effect, the concentration of force here is a pile of small inconveniences for non-compliance, and small rewards for compliance, that themselves can be established with minimum effort.
You Won’t Believe My Morning feels to me like a solid example of an attempt at concentration of force. It was posted in March of 2020, just as the coronavirus was developing into a big thing. Urban basically is making the point that we should treat it as a wake-up call and realize that there are even bigger things at stake, existential risks for instance.
I think binding TAPs to key moments in time makes them unnecessarily fragile. I instead think of the triggers as affordances in the space of representations. E.g. 'this isn't an oreo sort of trip' feels more available as a context setting representation at another relevant boundary: the inside-outside the store distinction.
Flexibility of representation is a double edged sword. It provides more affordance points and allows more transfer learning and modularity. It also gives you more outs and the chance to cold read-confirmation bias yourself into thinking wrong things instead of using the representations to cut down on the number of counterfactuals that you need to consider (a key feature).
Curated. I like this concept. It's not the total force theoretically but how much can be brought to bear. I especially appreciate the later application to moderation.
I wonder, if there is a plausible way to memetically ruggedize the society against such concentrations of cultural force? I have some ideas, but none of them feel strong enough:
None of the above feel like they would be enough, but anything more powerful like that would introduce more problems than solutions.
I think this post describes an important idea for political situations.
While online politics is a mind-killer, it (mostly) manages to avoid "controversial" topics and stays on a meta-level. The examples show that in group decisions the main factor is not the truth of statements but the early focus of attention. This dynamic can be used for good or bad, but it feels like it really happens a lot, and accurately describes an aspect of social reality.
If I had only thirty total seconds per day of conscious awareness and available willpower This is extremely relatable (I have ADHD and a long history of poor sleep)
Thanks for the very interesting dynamic you’ve presented. It seems to be a subset of the coordination problems seen in iterative prisoner dilemma games when there are more than 2 players, I’m not sure what exact name to call it.
I imagine this is the primary logistical reason why pyramid-like hierarchies formed in the first place in human societies, to solve such coordination problems.
This essay began as part one of a longer piece. Part one is standalone and "timeless." Part two is focused on the local dynamics of the EA/rationality/longtermist communities and LessWrong in November of 2021. Following wise advice from Zack_M_Davis, I've split them into two separate posts. Nevertheless, I recommend that people intending to read both seriously consider reading them back-to-back, so that the content of this one is fresh in the mind. It's both something of a prerequisite and also relevantly context-setting.
Link to part two:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D5BP9CxKHkcjA7gLv/speaking-of-stag-hunts
Part two has a similar introduction:
This is an essay about the current state of the LessWrong community, and the broader EA/rationalist/longtermist communities that it overlaps and bridges, inspired mostly by the dynamics around these three posts. The concepts and claims laid out in Concentration of Force, which was originally written as part one of this essay, are important context for the thoughts below.