Is there such a thing as generalized effectiveness for some hypothetical individual or composite agent? This is, to make a vast understatement, an extremely old topic and an enormously complicated question. The very framing of it often invites circular (at best) answers. However, it comes up frequently in everything from foundational philosophy (Machiavelli’s Virtù) to scientific debates over definitions of rationality. It seems to be also a recurrent issue in problems I study, work, or write about.
I can’t seem to get away from it, and the areas in which it is relevant keep multiplying. I have been meaning to write about the idiosyncratic way of thinking about it I’ve unwittingly assembled and refined over time. I’ve been successful at taking notes for private use, but attempts to write something for public consumption often devolve into disorganized and overlong posts. I challenged myself to keep a post under 2,000 words and that seems to have done the trick.
I do not really believe thinking about effectiveness is useful — or at least as useful as thinking about limitations on effectiveness. The latter are far more tangible, observable, and also in my experience more practically valuable. I am skeptical of many explanatory constructs used to explain how a desired effect is achieved. I am a true believer in obstacles to effectiveness. After all, aren’t there many quotes that state in some way that failure is the best teacher?
This post is a brief introduction and outline of how I think about limitations on effective action and the sources I draw from.
Generalized friction
Consider that until quite recently, you were very likely to die before reaching puberty. Obviously, dying early is a very big obstacle to accomplishing some goal of interest. You might croak well before you even develop the desire to achieve that goal to begin with! The world can be a very harsh place, and it kills all of us in the end. Our ability to do anything of value is a constant struggle against obstacles we frequently did not choose for ourselves but also cannot ignore.
The 20th century concept of bounded rationality gave us a formalized way of thinking about at least some of those obstacles — cognitive constraints and environmental influences. However, there is no one overarching field studying obstacles to effective action because the topic is impossibly broad. Any such body of knowledge will, in any event, be subject to the biases and framing assumptions of whoever organizes it. If all one knows is Boss Baby, everything will have Boss Baby vibes.
Due to my background (and particular biases) I tend to subsume limitations into generalized Clausewitzian friction. So I look at something and say “I’m getting a lot of Clausewitzian friction vibes from this.” I make no apologies for that, but I do try to be transparent about it. I find Carl von Clausewitz’s description of friction as “movement in a resistant medium” to be both succinct and compelling. And worth, naturally, quoting at length:
Activity in war is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in war, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity. This is the reason that the correct theorist is like a swimming master, who teaches on dry land movements which are required in the water, which must appear grotesque and ludicrous to those who forget about the water. This is also why theorists, who have never plunged in themselves, or who cannot deduce any generalities from their experience, are unpractical and even absurd, because they only teach what every one knows—how to walk.
Friction is a very simple concept in outline but often hard to understand in practice. Edward Luttwak once challenged armchair generals to lead a moderately sized group of friends on a trip to the beach or the countryside. Yes, really. Don’t laugh. Can you get everyone to agree to a time, ensure they show up, and deal with any unexpected problems that emerge (such as plus ones or traffic issues)? Now imagine you are trying to do this while hostile people are shooting at you.
War is the most extreme form of it, but “friction” can be fruitfully considered to be a generalized force that is encountered whenever we try to impose our will on the universe. The universe, in a myriad of ways, pushes back. Broadening it outside the military context requires a much broader conception of it, incorporating work on the nature of problems and problem-solvers. There are many different possible “images” of friction that come up in analysis.
Several books I’ve really gotten a lot of value out of, Images of organization and Images of strategy, break varying ways of conceptualizing their objects of interest into subjective images used by competing schools of thought. Similarly, the analyst has an enormous degree of freedom in how they choose to frame obstructions to intentional action. Some images are better than others for specific problems, but at least superficial familiarity with all of them is beneficial.
Images of friction
I informally categorize the images of friction I often think about into four (often overlapping) categories:
- External (broadly speaking) bounds on goal-driven behavior.
- Self-harming possibilities of normally beneficial operations.
- Challenges converting potential power into realized effect.
- Difficulties conserving control, advantage, or progress over time.
My categorization schema is arbitrary and for my own personal utility only. If it is useful to you,, I am pleased. If not, I at least hope it will be a useful point of departure for your own.
One image of friction tends to conceptualize it as some kind of inherent feature of the task environment. These obstacles are essentially a spectrum of hostile intent. At the extreme left end of the spectrum are natural phenomena (or stylized models of phenomena) that impose bounds on your ability to think, decide, and act but have no mentality and bear no malice. At the extreme right end are opposed wills with the mentalistic power to anticipate your actions and select the best means of thwarting you. Most of life falls in between in both intentional capacity and adversarial intent. Not great, not terrible.
The second image of friction is radically different. No external force is analytically necessary. Instead, the problem lies in the self-harming consequences of “normal operating systems.” Giving organizations the ability to set measures tends to make measures into targets. Giving individuals the ability to imagine and simulate things beyond the present moment stimulates all manner of mental health issues. There is, simply put, little way to make a sword that isn’t double-edged. The problem-solving entity itself is the most relevant source of problems! And solving problems creates different problems.
A popular way of thinking about strategic behavior is that strategies are bridges between available actions and desired payoffs in situations where provably optimal solutions are often unavailable. Instead of a bridge, we can better conceptualize it as a gauntlet of obstacles to be surmounted in order to convert some potential capacity into a desired realized effect. Mobilizing potential capacity into will alone is not a trivial issue. Achieving a great ambition is an additive conversion process, and looking at the entire process in a simplified linear sequence helps us better appreciate how hard it is to pull off.
The final image is about the problem of maintaining some desired degree of control over time. In the philosophy of engineering there is an interesting argument that we cannot really make a clean distinction between design and maintenance. Keeping something working usefully — in spite of internal and external state changes — requires as much imaginative thinking as designing it in the first place. Similarly, the power of an exertion in many domains naturally exhausts itself over time. A culminating point of effectiveness — after which diminishing returns set in — is sometimes only discernible in hindsight.
The differences between these images primarily come down to the idealized type of mechanism involved. Some people, including Machiavelli himself, saw fortune as a capricious and dangerous force that required great determination and skill to survive. The closer you get to (post)modernity, the likelier you are to fixate on pathologies of rationality or the tractability of problem classes. I have also found too that it matters whether or not you consider friction to be tragic or absurd. Challenging the Olympian gods is very different from trying to hunt a “wascally wabbit” in Looney Tunes, even if both activities are hazardous.
Movements grotesque and ludicrous
What value do you get from putting whatever type of friction you imagine on center stage? All of this is very interesting, but is it really necessary?
Thinking about friction is very helpful for dealing with periodic resurgences of Great Man Theory, a persistent intellectual cockroach that keeps scurrying out of the proverbial floorboards. You acquire a healthy grasp of why such theories offer little value without discarding the importance of individual talent. You also grasp why human cooperation is necessary to overcome obstacles to ambition without being too naive about it being easy to arrange or sustain.
However, the most important return on investment stems from the unfortunate reality that everyone has at least an unconscious theory of friction. That theory is more often than not dubious. Both populists and technocrats, for example, tend to share the same simplistic idea of why their desired goals have not been achieved. Having a well-developed and diverse range of knowledge about friction is necessary to avoid falling into these (and other) analytical traps.
In my own life, I have benefited a great deal from thinking in terms of generalized friction. It has given me a vocabulary to talk about problems that range from annoying to soul-trying. And it depersonalizes my issues and mitigates against self-pity. If I am futilely trying to deal with a stupid person or the consequences of my own stupidity, all men and women that have similarly struggled against stupidity (external or self-inflicted) throughout history become my brothers and sisters.
Friction may not yield some generalized theory of effective action, but it could at least keep you from going insane. That’s more than you’ll get from most abstractions, many of which tend to do the opposite.