Thanks for your thoughtful response! I chose China as an example because it concisely illustrates the contrast - China dominates all the segments that don't need upside, but struggles for those that do. It also explains the narrow definition of virtue I use. It assumes a moderate knowledge of current affairs which is definitely something that's boring for a lot of people, but I'm personally more familiar with China and less familiar with other possible examples like cryptocurrencies or AGI.
The problem with using examples that are as political as China is layed out in Politics is the Mindkiller.
If you want to make a claim like "China is a particularly clear example of the causal mechanism of upside decay. Upside decay is preceded by a lack of virtue". It would make more sense to use a historic example that actually showed that upside decay followed the lack in virtue instead of merely making a prediction that you think that China will suffer upside decay in the future.
I think upside decay is most applicable to venturesome things. So for example, a plastic chair factory is not very venturesome because the technology and processes are well established. The factory manager can be a real jerk and people will still buy his chairs. On the other hand, things like creating a startup, making smaller semiconductors, or new energy technologies are much more affected by upside decay.
...Using the example of scientific discovery, it feels like a major country could have assets such as high investment into education and R&D that help
Yes, the failure modes are mentioned in the last part of the post: trying to decouple identical things, and trying to decouple unrelated things.
How do we identify situations where we are using some concept which may be usefully decoupled? Or, alternatively: which of our concepts in fact constitute couplings of two (or more?!) orthogonal[2] concepts—and how do we tell?
Great catch. This is something I didn't mention in the article because I typical-minded. Here's a description, which I will add back to the article later probably:
1. Whenever you come across something that seems like it is logical, but violates your intuitions, then there's a high chance that this technique can help. ...
You're right, bucket errors are the result of entwining things. Dimensional decoupling is a way of reducing bucket errors. In my personal experience, once I used dimensional decoupling regularly, it became second nature and automatic. I think it's important to have low-friction ways of reducing bucket errors.
And yes, the most valuable decouplings are ones where they aren't identical but we think they are. But until we try to decouple them, we don't know whether they are or not!
Which diagrams disagree?
The pattern is an application of dimensional decoupling - the dimensions are the in the headers of the diagrams.
Top left: sad and not happy.
Top right: sad and happy.
Bottom left: not happy and not sad.
Bottom right: happy and not sad.
Great comment; you're right that in addition to avoiding upside decay, we can also try to increase the positive tail!
Also good spot that virtue as defined here is relative (e.g. during the Cold War the USA would be considered "virtuous" by dint of being less mean than the USSR).