1-ply thinking is a common trap that leads to various problems in complex systems with multiple competing actors, power dynamics, and time horizons. Some examples include getting trapped in local maxima while hill-climbing, chasing pyrrhic victories, overlooking the negative externalities of our actions, repeating loops of harmful behavior, and being easily manipulated by our opponents. This happens at every scale, from toddlers who lack a theory of mind to companies that don’t understand the difference between iterative and non-iterative games to multinational alliances run by brilliant strategists who fall prey to the politician’s syllogism:We must do something.This is something.Therefore, we must do this.
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N-ply thinking allows you to adopt a more sophisticated strategy by thinking through multiple rounds of turns. However, go too many layers deep, and there are so many strategies, counterstrategies, possibilities, and contingencies that you may be unable to choose a move. When the “game” you are playing is life, this can be debilitating. This combinatorial explosion of possibilities is why many games have developed sophisticated strategies so players can combine a plausible amount of look-ahead with patterns that extract the key elements of deeper look-ahead paths.
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1-ply thinking is a common trap that leads to various problems in complex systems with multiple competing actors, power dynamics, and time horizons. Some examples include getting trapped in local maxima while hill-climbing, chasing pyrrhic victories, overlooking the negative externalities of our actions, repeating loops of harmful behavior, and being easily manipulated by our opponents. This happens at every scale, from toddlers who lack a theory of mind to companies that don’t understand the difference between iterative and non-iterative games to multinational alliances run by brilliant strategists who fall prey to the politician’s syllogism:We must do something.This is something.Therefore, we must do this.
- No location available
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N-ply thinking allows you to adopt a more sophisticated strategy by thinking through multiple rounds of turns. However, go too many layers deep, and there are so many strategies, counterstrategies, possibilities, and contingencies that you may be unable to choose a move. When the “game” you are playing is life, this can be debilitating. This combinatorial explosion of possibilities is why many games have developed sophisticated strategies so players can combine a plausible amount of look-ahead with patterns that extract the key elements of deeper look-ahead paths.
- No location available
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