The Nameless Virtue
In The Twelve Virtues of Rationality, Eliezer Yudkowsky points at a nameless virtue. He pulls this quote from Miyamoto Musashi:
The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him.
He adds:
Every step of your reasoning must cut
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At the moment, centralized human command-and-control norms make large militaries similarly fragile. They've gotten around this in recent decades by letting smaller, more autonomous parts take over when there are enough dead bodies, but this does not last long. The same problems in policy elsewhere continue within militaries. While elements of the military have seen this problem (it's an old problem best explained by the writing of David Hackworth, Erwin Rommel, and B.H Liddell-Hart), they can't really change it from the inside, so there's been a shift toward retirees who've started consulting firms with an implicit aim of changing culture from the outside.
Progress in technology will yield the same problems that it... (read more)