= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Lumifer comments on Power and difficulty - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (49)
I think powerful but not difficult things will be hard to find (think about efficient markets).
Let's take piloting drones. The "power output" of a Hellfire missile is pretty impressive. But do you, the pilot of a drone, have that power? Not really. You just do what your commanding officer tells you to do -- it's not up to you to pick the target. And how does he decide who to kill? He gets told, too. Follow the chain and you'll end up with the kill list that is (supposed to be) personally approved by the President of the United States. That dude does have the power. But the difficulty of getting into his position is... considerable :-/
It's a complex issue. Does buying a gun -- which is easy to do -- make you powerful? In some way, yes. In some way, no.
Sure, but - to paraphrase Aleister Crowley - you can kill almost anyone once.
The other factor you refer to comes from us, not any more inherent feature of reality, and society has limited ability to impose it.
The President doesn't just decide who to kill, though. He relies on advisers, and delegates a lot to commanders in the field. Power is distributed throughout the chain of command, in both the afferent and efferent directions: higher-ups live in a world of information almost entirely constructed by what lower-downs tell them, and in turn must rely on the competence of individual contributors to implement policy.
For that matter, a lot of management responsibility amounts to letting people do their thing, then backing them up when they encounter trouble.
That is all true. My point was that the drone operator isn't particularly powerful in this whole scheme.