Beware the Metagame

How can smart, ambitious people stay working in an area where they have no long term ambitions? I think a good analogy for the mistake they are making can be found in computer science.

The human brain does quite a bit of optimization on its own, and screws up on its own, no matter what you try to tell it in school. But this fully wraparound recursive optimizer would have no protected level that was optimizing. All the structure of optimization would be subject to optimization itself. And that is a sea change which breaks with the

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In 2004, I sat down in my boardroom with our strategy documents and started to dissect them. There were lots of familiar and comfortable terms. We had to be innovative, efficient, customer centric, web 2.0 and all that this entailed. Alas, I suspected these common “memes” were repeated in the strategy documents of other companies because I was pret... See more