Succeeding in any Persuit - Ada’s Bet

But these are just illustrations, because they’re problems i’m familiar with.

Intro

I’m going to take a page from the Chinese government’s technology transfer playbook. Specifically, how they have fostered and created globally competitive industrial ecosystems across multiple different industries over decades of support.

Catching up to the frontier of technology shares a key similarity with doing well in education. You must curate an ecosystem, because that ecosystem is what produces what you want, day-in and day-out. Manufacturing is difficult, it has a lot of prerequisites that fan out before you on the supply chain, that loop around. So is education.

Modernisation at this speed depends on lots of technology transfer from outside the country. so too, for most of the beginning of your academic journey, does learning mean memorizing and internalising existing knowledge. The end product is export-quality goods vs competitive scores on a standardised test, and by extension brand recognition (inertia, staying power) and a recognized personal ability to contribute to the field.

Generalisation beyond

These problems have analogous binding pockets shaped like “knowledge acquisition” and “incentive design”.

the RL and agent framing is actually the most general one. state-supported firms are agents. states are also agents - ones that manage other agents. I am also an agent in the context of persuing my goal of performing well in education, and I have responsibility over myself in the day-to-day, who optimises only for what i’d like to do at any point in time. The state wants its firms to be capable of using the best, most modern technology to produce the best export products.

I as principal want myself in the day-to-day (the agent) to be able to use the best methods of studying to gain the best scores on standardised tests and the best methods of skills acquisition to make the best contributions to group projects.

These issues map. They are both agentic persuits optimising for incentive design, foundation building and knowledge transfer

[both leading-edge tech and course syllabi and practical tasks being known, solved problems].

ecosystems and niches

explore vs exploit

principals and agents

[the human capability framework of development]