4 ms·

A lot of the suggested mitigations made a lot of sense to me. For example reducing time to prepare grant applications, or to add 1s jitter to stock trades. Per

A lot of the suggested mitigations made a lot of sense to me. For example reducing time to prepare grant applications, or to add 1s jitter to stock trades. Perhaps there are flaws to these specific ideas, but the thing that struck me most was that we have almost no way of implementing ideas like this in Anglo political countries right now. Entrenched interests, and the technical detail involved makes it hard to imagine these ever happening. Nobody is ever going to raise a rabble based on making the stock market slower in this nerdy way. It feels like these are the sort of technocratic solutions which could only come about in societies with high trust in institutions and a sense of ‘the common good’… ie maybe parts of Northern Europe but almost nowhere else. Rebuilding that sort of trust and shared values is the biggest challenge… just wish I had better ideas for how to achieve it!

kwhitefoot 4y ago
> reducing time to prepare grant applications, Reminds me of a story about, I think, the take over of the Avis car rental company when it was failing. The guy who took charge said that the single thing that he did to turn the company around was to institute a rule saying that any decision, however large or small was not to take more than three weeks. If at the end of that period a decision was not forthcoming then a coin should be tossed to decide between the competing solutions. Apologies if I have misremembered any, or all, of it but I think the idea works. Even if the wrong decision is made one gets to know early and can change course.
jaschasd 4y ago
+1 to this comment! The barrier between (thinking we) know what changes should happen, and realizing those changes in the real world, is complex and frustrating and political.
Aicy 4y ago
> For example reducing time to prepare grant applications, or to add 1s jitter to stock trades. The 1s jitter idea was actually moderately successful in the game Grepolis, the successor to Tribalwars, but not perfect. Tribalwars is a browser based MMO RTS game, where a typical game takes multiple months, and a typical attack may take anywhere because 20 minutes and 12 hours (in real time) to reach it's target. When you sent an attack in Tribalwars it'd have a timer to it, but the battle itself would happen instantaneously. A normal attack just steals whatever resources are available in the village being attacked. In order to conquer someone else's village you must have a successful attack with a "noble" in it, which is a very expensive and slow unit. Attacks can only be a certain size (limited to the population of each village), so in order to take a city you would launch many "clearing" attacks at once at the village you want to conquer, aiming for them to battle slightly earlier than your noble attack, to clear any defences beforehand. This led to the phenomenon that the best way to defend your village was to leave your village completely defenceless for the initial n-1 attacks clearing, and then slip all your defences back home before the nth (noble) attack arrived. This started with players optimising their defence to arrive 1 second before the noble attack arrived. However the attacking players adapted, but would perfectly launch attacks based on travel times such that they would all launch in the same second, but maybe 100ms seconds off. This resulted in players using third party scripts with to ensure their attacks, or defences, arrived within milliseconds of desired times. This all was really far from the point of the game, which was a strategy. To remove this aspect of the game, in it's successor the developers added a random 0-30s variance to either side of the attack travel time. It worked pretty well, but people would still do things like sending attacks, checking if the time was close to optimal, and then cancelling and resending with quicker units if it was not.

kwhitefoot 4y ago

> reducing time to prepare grant applications, Reminds me of a story about, I think, the take over of the Avis car rental company when it was failing. The guy who took charge said that the single thing that he did to turn the company around was to institute a rule saying that any decision, however large or small was not to take more than three weeks. If at the end of that period a decision was not forthcoming then a coin should be tossed to decide between the competing solutions. Apologies if I have misremembered any, or all, of it but I think the idea works. Even if the wrong decision is made one gets to know early and can change course.

jaschasd 4y ago

+1 to this comment! The barrier between (thinking we) know what changes should happen, and realizing those changes in the real world, is complex and frustrating and political.

Aicy 4y ago

> For example reducing time to prepare grant applications, or to add 1s jitter to stock trades. The 1s jitter idea was actually moderately successful in the game Grepolis, the successor to Tribalwars, but not perfect. Tribalwars is a browser based MMO RTS game, where a typical game takes multiple months, and a typical attack may take anywhere because 20 minutes and 12 hours (in real time) to reach it's target. When you sent an attack in Tribalwars it'd have a timer to it, but the battle itself would happen instantaneously. A normal attack just steals whatever resources are available in the village being attacked. In order to conquer someone else's village you must have a successful attack with a "noble" in it, which is a very expensive and slow unit. Attacks can only be a certain size (limited to the population of each village), so in order to take a city you would launch many "clearing" attacks at once at the village you want to conquer, aiming for them to battle slightly earlier than your noble attack, to clear any defences beforehand. This led to the phenomenon that the best way to defend your village was to leave your village completely defenceless for the initial n-1 attacks clearing, and then slip all your defences back home before the nth (noble) attack arrived. This started with players optimising their defence to arrive 1 second before the noble attack arrived. However the attacking players adapted, but would perfectly launch attacks based on travel times such that they would all launch in the same second, but maybe 100ms seconds off. This resulted in players using third party scripts with to ensure their attacks, or defences, arrived within milliseconds of desired times. This all was really far from the point of the game, which was a strategy. To remove this aspect of the game, in it's successor the developers added a random 0-30s variance to either side of the attack travel time. It worked pretty well, but people would still do things like sending attacks, checking if the time was close to optimal, and then cancelling and resending with quicker units if it was not.