Thought of a term I want to work out. Oblique Altruism, as an evil twin of Effective Altruism.

Inspired by the core idea in John Kay’s book Obliquity, as well as the Ken Stanley/Joel Lehman book The Myth of the Objective.

The first argues that for complex problems, going at it in an on-the-nose rarely works, but oblique strategies often work. The second argues that goal-directed action fails because it induces tunnel vision that prevents you from seeing serendipity and creative stepping stones.

Kay’s book also cites the og synthesis Lindblom’s Science of Muddling Through, which argues that you get to creative strategies by “muddling through” with successive limited approximations (branch method) rather than rational-comprehensive calculation (root method). Muddling through leads to disjoint incrementalism.

A third book reinforces the idea. William Duggan’s Strategic Intuition shows Napoleon’s famous abilities, properly understood, were basically obliquity.

The big problem with OA is that it’s really hard to make legible enough sell. You can hardly say “I want to solve this big problem X, but rather than define it carefully as a goal and make a plan, I’m going to muddle through, doing half-ass things, waiting for serendipity to strike and creative stepping stones to appear.”

You could try to sell it as trial and error, but trial and error proper is actually a variety of the rational comprehensive approach. You design systematic experiments to explore a space. To use Vaughn Tans careful definitions, trial and error explores a risk space rather than uncertainty space.

“FAFO” is closer to the spirit of obliquity, since it explores true open-ended uncertainty with creativity, but the term has come to mean “trial and error but with a yolo attitude.” The search for obliquity is more thoughtful than that.

The upshot is, the main way you sell obliquity is by demonstrating a track record and building personal trust in your ability to muddle through.

So why is this the evil twin of EA?

As best as I can understand it, EA is based on 2 pillars.

1. First, you try to sort problems by real importance to make sure you’re working on the most “important” ones you can tackle within your capabilities.

2. Second, you try to optimize the end-to-end plan, trying to account for main failure modes, and guard against waste, emotional impulse effects that obscure real data, theatrically “clever” ideas like the infamous “play pump” etc.

These aren’t bad ideas. OA doesn’t mean you don’t do this kind of EA thinking (hence “evil twin”). You just apply the Eisenhower principle to it — “plans are nothing, planning is everything.” It’s important to go through the kinds of exercises EA suggests. But then you don’t actually make that a plan of record with OKRs, Goodhart goals, cobra effects, Streisand effects etc. Much less naively execute.

You just switch to muddling through.