Big-World Intuitions
a thought
Consider the following situations:
when you are a small, growing startup in a big market, standard advice is not to worry too much about your competitors or try to do anything adversarial “against” them, but just to focus on growing and providing value to your own customers.
when you are a small trader in a big market, you don’t need to worry about your trades shifting the market price or revealing information to your competitors; in many contexts, your optimal strategy is simply to bid your true price, buying when an asset is cheaper than your “happy price” and selling when it’s more expensive.
when you are in the early stages of a game, often your best strategy is to grow your “resources” (like developing your pieces in chess, trying to control more territory and have more value on the board), following a pattern that’s mostly independent of what the other players are doing and gets you more of something that’s valuable across many possible game states.
when you are a species whose resource needs are much smaller than the carrying capacity of your environment, you are r-selected; your fitness is maximized by just having as many offspring as possible and not “worrying” about running out of resources.
when you expect that you’re going to run into the same people over and over again for a long time to come, it’s wise to be consistently trustworthy and helpful even if you could get an advantage in the short run by betraying someone; the long-term costs to your reputation, and the costs of making a habit of doing something that’s usually destructive, vastly outweigh any short-term advantage you could gain this one time.
when you are working on a hard technical problem that’s a long way from solved, and could have both benefits and harms to humanity if it were solved, you don’t really have to worry about “what if we succeed and it’s bad?” or “what if this information gets into the hands of the wrong people?” You’re a long way from winning, worrying about winning too much is silly, and heuristics like “do a good job on important work” and “share scientific knowledge freely” are more trustworthy than galaxy-brained arguments for why in this particular case the utilitarian calculus works out the other way.
These kinds of intuitions are what I’d call “big-world” heuristics.
What they have in common is that the world is “big” enough relative to you — the market is much bigger than you, the problem is much bigger than your progress on it, the game is very far from being over, the environment is much bigger than your resource consumption, etc — that your best strategy for achieving your goals is not to explicitly calculate how your action will affect the environment (including how your actions will affect other agents’ actions.) There are zones where the best move is non-consequentialist, in the sense that you do best by following heuristics (or principles, or virtues) that are good regardless of the exact specifics of the situation you’re in. You can neglect your (immediate) action’s (immediate and specific) effect on the environment.1
By contrast, if you are in the endgame of a game of chess, or in an oligopolistic competition, you absolutely need to think about how other players will respond to your actions. You do need to search through a tree of “if I do this, that will happen” and compute that specifically for the specific game state you’re in, and recompute it every time the game state changes.
Big-world intuitions feel a bit like “play fair, mind your own business, cultivate your own garden, do your best, and it’ll all more-or-less work out for the best in the long run”. Or like “keep your eyes on your own paper”, don’t try to manipulate people, just follow the same path you would if you were alone; whether you’re Robinson Crusoe alone on an island or one anonymous citizen in a big city, your “job” is pretty much the same, in that you need to work to take care of your own needs.
This came to mind because I noticed that I pretty much always rely on big-world intuitions. I don’t really know what to do about questions like “what if we win too much and it’s bad” or “what if I, personally, have the power to shape society, how would I choose to set it up”. And I don’t really even know where to begin with chains of adversarial strategic thinking like “if I do this, she’ll do that, so I’ll do this…” I’m always thinking of myself as one participant among many, with a small share of power/influence, working on problems hard enough that the only thing I have to worry about is doing the best job I can, and trying to follow universally sound principles/heuristics.
The nice thing about sticking to principles/heuristics is that it’s robust to uncertainty. What if you’ve misread the situation? What if you’re not as big a deal as you think you are? Behave in a way that’s usually for the best, even so.
Except, of course, if you really are super powerful, super close to winning, super close to the “endgame” in some sense, or in a really bizarre situation where the consequences of following generally-good heuristics happen to be very bad. Most of the time, for most people, this is not the case! But it is disquieting to notice that none of my grounding intuitions or usual ways of thinking about what “healthy” or “prudent” or “ethical” look like, are fit for such situations.
This intro to mean field theory seems to be pointing to a similar concept of a “foreground” particle and a “background”, where the background is made of the interaction of lots of little “foreground” particles, but each particle has negligible impact on the background; you can just model the particle’s behavior as some function of the (assumed approximately fixed) background. But I don’t really know mean field theory in physics so I can’t be sure the analogy is apt.
This is well stated. It reminds me of an argument I used to have with social justice friends like 15 years ago, where I would be like “this trend (eg cancel culture) seems bad if we win/ get powerful” and they would say something like “that will never happen, we will always be tiny and comparatively powerless.” But then it turned out that not handling those problems was in fact bad when the movement did get powerful!
In astrodynamics this is a formal operation. You exploit the fact that the earth is way more massive than a satellite, and in LEO way stronger than the moon or sun etc. Elaborate approximation techniques exist to avoid solving 3-body or 4-body problems using the big-world approximation to use your metaphor. Astrodynamics also supplies the nicest metaphor for when you’re too big to use such approximations — you say “you exert your own gravity field.” Relatedly for problems where big world effects make you an ineffective npc, the Amazon heuristic of “get big fast” applies. One domain where this really matters is marketing. Below a certain scale of reach you’re basically a non-entity, no matter how clever your messaging. So you have to get past that threshold asap.