This is a great military-design story, along with the one about how you shouldn't put armor over the places where returning airplanes got shot, but the spots that were probably shot on the airplanes that never returned.

Survivorship bias. Or why you should take the advice of successful people with a grain of salt.

This reminds me of the story about a statistician who drowned in a river that was an average of 3 feet deep.

Gotta love military-grade pragmatism.

The military can be quite pragmatic, when they want to / need to.

Compare https://www.gwern.net/Backstop

Basically, war (or the threat of war) is what keeps militaries honest.

Competition and the threat of bankruptcy keeps companies on their toes.

Evolution keeps brains honest.

But those forces are rather blunt, so the day to day optimization has to proceed by other means.

I would counter your evolution point. Evolution hates brains and wants them to be as small as possible, because they cost a lot of energy. Saving energy is the reason our brains rely so much on biases and heuristics.

I’d like to find someone with more citations to back up this claim, but my hypothesis is that evolution favors the biggest, baddest, and most intelligent during stable times. In an unstable environment, small stupid generalists are what survive (thanks to their lower caloric needs).

Eh, I don't think your claim about stable and unstable environments works in general. Things are just too diverse in this universe.

For example, just for humans a big, big driver of instability in the last few millennia has been other human brains.

Also keep in mind that (in-)stability and harshness of environment are too almost independent dimensions; if you see instability as something like the variance of outcomes.

Eg if some new opportunities open up, everything is strictly better (so the environment is less harsh), but variance might shoot up dramatically, perhaps because only the clever and resourceful can make use of the new opportunity.

What you say is true, but it's not a counter: it's not at all at odds with what I suggested as far as I can tell.

Evolution only suffers brains to exists, if their advantage outweighs their costs. (Though keep in mind that the example I gave is a bit broader than just brains: any way for an organism to learn would fit the bill. That doesn't necessarily need to be a full sized brain, if fewer nerve cells do the trick, too.)

Similarly, smart and resourceful leaders for your company are only useful if their advantage outweighs their costs.

In any case, read the linked Gwern article for a deeper discussion. I'm just rehashing the main point here, Gwern has more to say.

> Basically, war (or the threat of war) is what keeps militaries honest.

It really does not.

> Competition and the threat of bankruptcy keeps companies on their toes.

Only some companies and some of the time.

And from the article:

> One defense of free markets notes the inability of non-market mechanisms to solve planning & optimization problems.

s/notes/falsely claims/

etc.

>> Basically, war (or the threat of war) is what keeps militaries honest.

> It really does not.

I meant 'honest' in the sense of suffering if they bullshit themselves too hard. Not 'honest' in the sense of dealing with third-parties honestly.

Could you expand on your point?

>> Competition and the threat of bankruptcy keeps companies on their toes.

> Only some companies and some of the time.

Maybe. And that suggests that one goal of public policy should be to subject more companies more of the time to these pressures. Eg by abolishing tariffs, lowering barriers of foreign companies entering local markets or buying subsidiaries; allowing WalMart to become a bank, and banks to sell coffee etc.

>> One defense of free markets notes the inability of non-market mechanisms to solve planning & optimization problems.

> s/notes/falsely claims/

Not sure what you are complaining about here? If you read the rest of the introduction, it's rather clear from context that the author agrees with you here. (You don't even need to read the whole article for that insight.)

"Aspirational".

Belief that the mechanisms cited actually work, or at least its prima facie plausibility, is necessary to gain buy-in from people making decisions.