Zubon, I thought of that possibility, and one possible singleton-imposed solution is "Who says that subjective time has to run at the same rate for everyone?" You could then do things fast or slow, as you preferred, without worrying about being left behind, or for that matter, worrying about pulling ahead. To look at it another way, if people can increase in power arbitrarily fast on your own playing field, you may have to increase in power faster than you prefer, to keep up with them; this is a coordination/competition problem, and two singleton solutions are to fence off people who grow too fast, or to slow down their subjective time rates so that the competence growth rate per tick of sidereal time is coordinated.

Ramarren, Banks added on that part later, and it renders a lot of the earlier books nonsensical - why didn't the Culture or the Idarans increase their intelligence to win their war, if it was that easy? I refuse to regard Excession as canon; it never happened.

Unknown, the question is how much of this divergence is due to (a) having moved further toward reflective equilibrium, (b) unusual mistakes in answering a common question, (c) being an evil mutant, (d) falling into an uncommon but self-consistent attractor.