There Is No Such Thing As Grand Strategy - The Continued Influence Of A Bad Genre

So this all begs the question, if not grand strategy, then what? If we discard the idea that states possess a coherent, elevated ideological and philosophical design integrating all instruments of power across time, what replaces it? I would simply say that doing so would provide a far clearer view of what strategy actually is. If we return to Gaddis’s original definition, “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities,” strategy appears not as a grand design, but as a continual exercise in discipline, prioritization, and adjustment.

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A more realistic approach, then, is to focus on decision points rather than designs. Instead of asking whether a state has a grand strategy, we should ask how it resolves specific tradeoffs at specific moments. Where does it allocate marginal resources? Which risks does it accept, and which does it avoid? Which commitments does it reinforce, and which does it quietly allow to erode? These choices, taken together, tell us far more about strategy than any post hoc narrative of alignment ever could. This reframing also forces greater intellectual honesty about failure. When strategy is imagined as a grand design, failure is attributed to incompetence or moral weakness. When strategy is understood as constraint management, failure is often tragic but explicable. States misjudge adversaries, overestimate capacities, underestimate costs, and act on incomplete information. These are not deviations from strategy; they are the conditions under which strategy exists.

Finally, abandoning the grand strategy genre clarifies what strategic skill actually looks like. It is not the ability to synthesize everything into a single vision, but the capacity to say no, to sequence objectives, and to recognize when ambition has outrun means. It is judgment exercised under uncertainty, not mastery imposed from above. This kind of strategic thinking is less glamorous and far harder to narrate, which is precisely why it is so often displaced by grander abstractions.

There is no higher plane of statecraft waiting to be discovered beyond politics, budgets, institutions, and tradeoffs. What exists instead is the ordinary, difficult work of governance under constraint—choosing among competing priorities, allocating scarce resources, managing risk, and accepting imperfection. Abandoning the language of grand strategy does not mean abandoning strategic thought. It means stripping away a genre that flatters elites and replacing it with analysis that takes politics seriously. Strategy need not be grand to be real. It needs only to be honest.

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"Surprisingly Popular" Algorithm - Better Wisdom From Crowds

The new method is simple. For a given question, people are asked two things: What they think the right answer is, and what they think popular opinion will be. The variation between the two aggregate responses indicates the correct answer.

“In situations where there is enough information in the crowd to determine the correct answer to a question, that answer will be the one [that] most outperforms expectations,” says paper co-author Drazen Prelec, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as the Department of Economics and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

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Across all these areas, the researchers found that the “surprisingly popular” algorithm reduced errors by 21.3 percent compared to simple majority votes, and by 24.2 percent compared to basic confidence-weighted votes (where people express how confident they are in their answers). And it reduced errors by 22.2 percent compared to another kind of confidence-weighted votes, those taking the answers with the highest average confidence levels.

The paper, “A solution to the single-question crowd wisdom problem,” is being published today in Nature. The authors are Prelec; John McCoy, a doctoral student in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; and H. Sebastian Seung, a professor of neuroscience and computer science at Princeton University and a former MIT faculty member. Prelec and McCoy are also researchers in the MIT Neuroeconomics Laboratory, where Prelec is the principal investigator.

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In this sense, the “surprisingly popular” principle is not simply derived from the wisdom of crowds. Instead, it uses the knowledge of a well-informed subgroup of people within the larger crowd as a diagnostically powerful tool that points to the right answer.

“A lot of crowd wisdom weights people equally,” McCoy explains. “But some people have more specialized knowledge.” And those people — if they have both correct information and a correct sense of public perception — make a big difference.

- More Here

No-Technological-Solution Problem

Bingo! What an insight!

We sapiens fucked things up, are still fucking things up, and promise, to continue fucking things up in future. 

Changing their mind and behavior is not in the equation but my species is planning to  innovate the fuck of technologies to clean up the mess they created while they continue to fuck things up. 

Hmm, god bless my species. 

Wonderful, wonderful interview with Dan Brooks about his new book A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century:

Well, the primary thing that we have to understand or internalize is that what we’re dealing with is what is called a no-technological-solution problem. In other words, technology is not going to save us, real or imaginary. We have to change our behavior. If we change our behavior, we have sufficient technology to save ourselves. If we don’t change our behavior, we are unlikely to come up with a magical technological fix to compensate for our bad behavior. 

This is why Sal and I have adopted a position that we should not be talking about sustainability, but about survival, in terms of humanity’s future. Sustainability has come to mean, what kind of technological fixes can we come up with that will allow us to continue to do business as usual without paying a penalty for it? As evolutionary biologists, we understand that all actions carry biological consequences. We know that relying on indefinite growth or uncontrolled growth is unsustainable in the long term, but that’s the behavior we’re seeing now.

Stepping back a bit. Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

To clarify, when we talk about survival in the book, we talk about two different things. One is the survival of our species, Homo sapiens. We actually don’t think that’s in jeopardy. Now, Homo sapiens of some form or another is going to survive no matter what we do, short of blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons. What’s really important is trying to decide what we would need to do if we wanted what we call “technological humanity,” or better said “technologically-dependent humanity,” to survive.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours. So we have to understand that we’ve produced a lot of human beings on this planet who can’t survive outside of this technologically dependent existence. 

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That’s actually a really good analogy to use, because of course, as you probably know, the temperatures around the Norwegian Seed Bank are so high now that the Seed Bank itself is in some jeopardy of survival. The place where it is was chosen because it was thought that it was going to be cold forever, and everything would be fine, and you could store all these seeds now. And now all the area around it is melting, and this whole thing is in jeopardy. This is a really good example of letting engineers and physicists be in charge of the construction process, rather than biologists. Biologists understand that conditions never stay the same; engineers engineer things for, this is the way things are, this is the way things are always going to be. Physicists are always looking for some sort of general law of in perpetuity, and biologists are never under any illusions about this. Biologists understand that things are always going to change.

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One of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is to understand why it is that human beings are so susceptible to adopting behaviors that seem like a good idea, and are not. Sal and I say, here are some things that seem to be common to human misbehavior, with respect to their survival. One is that human beings really like drama. Human beings really like magic. And human beings don’t like to hear bad news, especially if it means that they’re personally responsible for the bad news. And that’s a very gross, very superficial thing, but beneath that is a whole bunch of really sophisticated stuff about how human brains work, and the relationship between human beings’ ability to conceptualize the future, but living and experiencing the present.

There seems to be a mismatch within our brain — this is an ongoing sort of sloppy evolutionary phenomenon. So that’s why we spend so much time in the first half of the book talking about human evolution, and that’s why we adopt a nonjudgmental approach to understanding how human beings have gotten themselves into this situation.

 

Culture Is The Mass-Synchronization Of Framings!

This can be good and bad too. Hence, I have an aversion for that word - "culture".

The genesis of almost all savagery, ruthlessness, and immorality against animals is from so called culture, 

This is an insightful piece on the same topic: 

A mental model is a simulation of "how things might unfold", and we all build and rebuild hundreds of mental models every day. A framing, on the other hand, is "what things exist in the first place", and it is much more stable and subtle. Every mental model is based on some framing, but we tend to be oblivious to which framing we're using most of the time (I've explained all this better in A Framing and Model About Framings and Models).

Framings are the basis of how we think and what we are even able to perceive, and they're the most consequential thing that spreads through a population in what we call "culture".

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Each culture is made of shared framings—ontologies of things that are taken to exist and play a role in mental models—that arose in those same arbitrary but self-reinforcing ways. Anthropologist Joseph Henrich, in The Secret of Our Success, brings up several studies demonstrating the cultural differences in framings.

He mentions studies that estimated the average IQ of Americans in the early 1800's to have been around 70—not because they were dumber, but because their culture at the time was much poorer in sophisticated concepts. Their framings had fewer and less-defined moving parts, which translated into poorer mental models. Other studies found that children in Western countries are brought up with very general and abstract categories for animals, like "fish" and "bird", while children in small-scale societies tend to think in terms of more specific categories, such as "robin" and "jaguar", leading to different ways to understand and interface with the world.

But framings affect more than understanding. They influence how we take in the information from the world around us. Explaining this paper, Henrich writes:

People from different societies vary in their ability to accurately perceive objects and individuals both in and out of context. Unlike most other populations, educated Westerners have an inclination for, and are good at, focusing on and isolating objects or individuals and abstracting properties for these while ignoring background activity or context. Alternatively, expressing this in reverse: Westerners tend not to see objects or individuals in context, attend to relationships and their effects, or automatically consider context. Most other peoples are good at this.

How many connections and interrelations you consider when thinking is in the realm of framings. If your mental ontology treats most things as largely independent and self-sufficient, your mental models will tend to be, for better or worse, more reductionist and less holistic.

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The basic force behind all culture formation is imitation. This ability is innate in all humans, regardless of culture: we are extraordinarily good imitators. Indeed, we are overimitators, sometimes with unfortunate consequences.

Overimitation ... may be distinctively human. For example, although chimpanzees imitate the way conspecifics instrumentally manipulate their environment to achieve a goal, they will copy the behavior only selectively, skipping steps which they recognize as unnecessary [unlike humans, who tend to keep even the unnecessary steps]. ... Once chimpanzees and orangutans have figured out how to solve a problem, they are conservative, sticking to whatever solution they learn first. Humans, in contrast, will often switch to a new solution that is demonstrated by peers, sometimes even switching to less effective strategies under peer influence.

— The Psychology of Normative Cognition, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, emphasis theirs.

We have a built-in need to do what the people around us do, even when we know of better or less wasteful ways. This means that we can't even explain culture as something that, while starting from chance events, naturally progresses towards better and better behaviors. That's what science is for.

Once the synchronized behaviors are in our systems, when we are habituated to certain shared ways of doing things, these behaviors feed back into our most basic mindsets, which guide our future behaviors, which further affect each other's mindset, and so on, congealing into the shared framings we call culture, i.e.: whatever happens to give the least friction in whatever happens to be the current shared behavioral landscape.

This is why, often, formal rules and laws do indeed take root in a culture: not because they're rules, but because the way they are enforced creates enough friction—or following them creates enough mutual benefits—that, like in the corridor lanes, crowds will settle into following them. This is also why, perhaps even more often, groups will settle into the easy "unruly" patterns.

 

Deep Congruence

Congruence is a quality discussed by many psychologists—Carl Rogers popularized the word, saying that, among other things, it is a necessary trait in therapists. He defined it (roughly) as a state of unity between your experience, your self-concept, and your outward behavior. Which is to say: you aren’t pretending. I think this is a solid definition, but it’s likely to be misread. It can sound like living up to a scorecard—I said I would be an academic, now I’m tenure track. If that were the only requirement, congruence would be fairly common, when in fact highly congruent people are uncommon.

Deep congruence requires accepting all of the stuff of your life, every particle of feeling. If you are highly congruent, you disown none of your experience. None of it. You agree with what you’re doing with your time. You accept the stubborn approach of death, the arbitrariness of your fortune, your unimportance on the cosmic timescale, your potential importance for the local environment, the emotions of you and the people around you, the resources you’ve squandered. What stops congruence from occurring are layers of denial that are unpleasant to pass through. Although congruence is a source of endless happiness, the path there can be devastating. To paraphrase a cliche, you may have to finally give up on experiencing a better past.

But must we define it? We know it when we see the genuine article in abundance. We can spot people who live in non-naive contentment, or unhurried action. Running into them is comforting if we seek integrity ourselves. Speaking to my teacher feels like drinking water from a lucky well, filled with life-restoring minerals. On the other hand, if we’re interested in maintaining some variety of denial, the company of highly congruent people is disturbing. The falsehoods we’re trying to maintain immediately ring false before them. They appear as highly but particularly resonant chambers, in which integrity echoes and bullshit dies immediately.

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Congruent people compel us because they have little to prove; they have converged on an inner authority. Thus, when you encounter them, you don’t feel like you’re being enlisted in their ongoing arguments with themselves. You’re not recruited to shore up their self-image, or resolve their dilemmas. You’re liberated to be as you are—talking to them feels like entering open space. Their love isn’t grabby and manipulative, and they can say hard truths from a place of simple observation. They can deeply understand you without needing to suck up your essence, or merge with it. Being listened to in this way, by a person capable of it, is psychoactive; you hear yourself anew.

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Seeking congruence can sound selfish. However, in practice, it rarely is. Given that our environments consist of others in pain, facing the totality of your experience and remaining self-serving requires being a real asshole. Most of us are less cruel than that, and capable of gradually moving towards increasingly skillful love for others. The highly congruent people I know tend to support everyone around them, in ways both obvious and not.

One reliable test to see whether you’re in a place of congruence is the existence of boredom. When you are in a state of congruence, at rest you don’t feel bored. Instead you feel peace. What needs to be done has been done or will be done, there is no need to flail against the silence.

I’ve heard from multiple sources that deathbed enlightenment is a real phenomenon. Which is to say: approaching death, many disintegrated and suffering people suddenly find acceptance. Congruence is coming after you; you can almost outrun it, if you try.

- More Here

Akrasia !

Sometimes a simple word explains so much about humanity. 

Akrasia is a greek word, wiki page: 

Akrasia refers to the phenomenon of acting against one's better judgment—the state in which one intentionally performs an action while simultaneously believing that a different course of action would be better. 

Sometimes translated as "weakness of will" or "incontinence," akrasia describes the paradoxical human experience of knowingly choosing what one judges to be the inferior option.

Where do I even start unpacking this :-) ?  There are so many people who are akratic in some of the fundamental elements of one's life. I mean the core of existence 

Paul's piece about the stupidity of free-soloing, his accident and finally, how he learned from his akratic traits and now - the best part rebuilding his life with cat name Koshka.

for the record, I skipped the akratic segment and went straight to Max :-); man what a decision was that! Thank god, for once my pre-frontal cortex helped me.

Precisely because free soloing is selfish and stupid, it is a controversial topic even amongst climbers. The vast majority of free climbers do not free solo. Some of my closest climbing partners would commit to doing very serious traditional climbing routes, and yet firmly draw the line at soloing. (And trad climbing definitely is serious, as proved by the cripple voice dictating these words.) They told me bluntly that I should never do it, and they didn’t like hearing about it when I had done it. So why did I do it?

There is an ancient Greek term, akrasia. It is sometimes translated as “weakness of will” – although I don’t like that translation, because it already narrows and contorts the field in ways that distort reflection. Nonetheless, akrasia refers to situations in which a person apparently acts against their own professed best judgement. For example, the student who knows that the best thing to do is stay home and prepare for tomorrow’s exam (the outcome of which is crucial to her final grade), and yet who nonetheless goes to the party and gets drunk. She knows and agrees and affirms that the best thing for her to do is to stay home and revise. But she not only does something else, she does it when she herself knows and agrees and affirms that it is a worse thing for her to do. She is akratic. We all are, sometimes.

But the stakes of akrasia are not always the same.

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On the way down, I texted my friend and told him what I had just done. He told me that I was a fucking idiot. I didn’t care. Sometimes you just have to go to the party, even when you know you shouldn’t. And whether you ultimately regret going will depend on more than just the fact that you went. Akrasia is a bird of many feathers.

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But then I try to watch my anger, notice it – and let it slip away. Fair doesn’t come into it. It never did, and it never will. Such anger leads to nothing worth keeping. This week I adopted a cat. I’ve named her Koshka. You rebuild a life, one brick at a time.

 

The Four Pillars of High Agency

 

- Via Here

The Original Position Fallacy!

This is so god-damn important to understand that it should be taught in schools for all grades!

Mathew McAtter has a beautiful explanation: 

This is a simplified example of the Original Position Fallacy in action. A person supports some kind of policy, action, or revolution because they assume they’re either A) in the group that will benefit from it, or B) not in the group that will suffer from it. When used as a literary device, this is often used to compount a character’s suffering with the knowledge that they supported the measure when they thought someone else would be hurt. Indeed, you can think of the Original Position Fallacy as the opposite of the Golden Rule.

You’ve probably seen this fallacy in action among certain communists, neo-reactionaries, and a few libertarians. Many of these often support a massive upheaval to the social order, believing of course that they would inevitably survive (or even thrive) afterwards. Many modern communists forget that in many revolutions, large groups of supporters suddenly found only too late that the revolutionaries considered them in the class of the “bougie” instead of the true “proletariat”.

I’ve personally met many libertarians that believed that if only the government got out of their way, they could finally thrive. Of course, few give thought to any possible negative outcomes of reduced regulation (like Pan-Am, which was famously doomed when the airline industry was deregulated) or possibilities of being crushed by far more ruthless competitors. Many also seem to forget even recent times in their lives that they’ve had to rely on some kind of safety net, and don’t consider what might happen if that net were no longer there.

The Neo-reactionaries are an interesting bunch that desire a return to monarchies and autocracies, away from democracy. Few of them consider that they might end up outside a given autocrat’s favored inner circle, or that technology has not stopped modern monarch’s courts from being snake pits.

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The point I’m trying to make is that even if you only have your own self-interests at heart deep down, you should at least acknowledge that the future is far too uncertain for you to be mentally throwing anyone under the bus. After all, your guarantees that you won’t be under the bus with them are getting shakier by the day.

Well, Pastor Martin Niemöller's poem goes well with original position fallacy and I am literally living to see this happen now. Alas, human nature doesn't change that easy: 

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

And of-course one of my favorite quotes of all time: 

Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of error left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on. … The work of preserving society is sometimes onerous, sometimes almost effortless. The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is notably precarious. If it falls, we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.

- Robbery Under Law, Evelyn Waugh

Dhurandhar!

If you fall upholding Dharma, you will attain heaven.

If you are victorious, the world is yours.

So rise, O Arjuna, and prepare yourself for battle.

- Bhagavad Gita 2.37

After a long, long time I have seen a Hindi movie completely engrossed for 3.25 hours!

Amazing casting, immaculate screenplay and complete awareness of every minute details. 

I hope this movie shifts the game of Hindi movies to be more like Malayalam movies. 

This is the first time I watched Aditya Dhar's movie. I need to catch up on his other movies. 

I didn't know the meaning of the Sanskrit word Dhurandhar, so had to look it up.

Dhurandhar means well I got two versions; I like the later version:

• An Expert, master A A top notch person In a specific field.
• A person built to carry unbearable responsibility and still move forward.

Global Water Bankruptcy

Published on the occasion of UNU-INWEH’s 30th anniversary, and ahead of the 2026 UN Water Conference, this flagship report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, argues that the world has entered a new stage: more and more river basins and aquifers are losing the ability to return to their historical “normal.” Droughts, shortages, and pollution episodes that once looked like temporary shocks are becoming chronic in many places, signalling a post-crisis condition the report calls water bankruptcy.

The report makes the case for a fundamental shift in the global water agenda—from repeatedly reacting to emergencies to “bankruptcy management.” That means confronting overshoot with transparent water accounting, enforceable limits, and protection of the water-related natural capital that produces and stores water—aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers, and glaciers—while ensuring transitions are explicitly equity-oriented and protect vulnerable communities and livelihoods.

Crucially, the report frames water not only as a growing source of risk, but also as a strategic opportunity in a fragmented world. It argues that serious investment in water can unlock progress across climate, biodiversity, land, food, and health, and serve as a practical platform for cooperation within and between societies. Acting early, before stress hardens into irreversible loss, can reduce shared risks, strengthen resilience, and rebuild trust through tangible results.

- More Here

Via 

What water bankruptcy looks like in real life

In financial bankruptcy, the first warning signs often feel manageable: late payments, borrowed money and selling things you hoped to keep. Then the spiral tightens.

Water bankruptcy has similar stages.

• At first, we pull a little more groundwater during dry years. We use bigger pumps and deeper wells. We transfer water from one basin to another. We drain wetlands and straighten rivers to make space for farms and cities.
• Then the hidden costs show up. Lakes shrink year after year. Wells need to go deeper. Rivers that once flowed year-round turn seasonal. Salty water creeps into aquifers near the coast. The ground itself starts to sink.
• That last one, subsidence, often surprises people. But it’s a signature of water bankruptcy. When groundwater is overpumped, the underground structure, which holds water almost like a sponge, can collapse. In Mexico City, land is sinking by about 10 inches (25 centimeters) per year. Once the pores become compacted, they can’t simply be refilled.