In your analogy if I get really good at getting stuff passed through city council, what would I optimize for ?
A: Building better bridges ?
Or B: building better money making bridges (potentially of of inferior quality) ?
I'd bet there are more takers for B. And at that point we now have better city council optimizers than better bridge builders.
Lets say we now make a team of some folks from both groups. Now who's going to able to get more people onboard their plans? Its the city council optimizers again. And now some bridge builders figure it out and become better optimizers than builders.
We then take it a step further and add competing teams. Same thing repeats. The team better at city council optimizing beat the better builders all the time.
In this whole process its the quality of the bridges that stays the same ( in most cases it goes down) and the costs of it keep going up.
My sad, unfortunate observations in the field.
Love to see a way out.
Edit: in this way of thinking , the assumption is that there are higher chances of making more money from poorer quality bridge than a more advanced, higher quality bridge. One exception to that is the strategy where you first provide better bridges at lower cost and then bump up the prices for maintenance.
In your analogy if I get really good at getting stuff passed through city council, what would I optimize for ?
A: Building better bridges ?
Or B: building better money making bridges (potentially of of inferior quality) ?
I'd bet there are more takers for B. And at that point we now have better city council optimizers than better bridge builders.
Lets say we now make a team of some folks from both groups. Now who's going to able to get more people onboard their plans? Its the city council optimizers again. And now some bridge builders figure it out and become better optimizers than builders.
We then take it a step further and add competing teams. Same thing repeats. The team better at city council optimizing beat the better builders all the time.
In this whole process its the quality of the bridges that stays the same ( in most cases it goes down) and the costs of it keep going up.
My sad, unfortunate observations in the field.
Love to see a way out.
Edit: in this way of thinking , the assumption is that there are higher chances of making more money from poorer quality bridge than a more advanced, higher quality bridge. One exception to that is the strategy where you first provide better bridges at lower cost and then bump up the prices for maintenance.