People sometimes make mistakes [citation needed].

The obvious explanation for most of those mistakes is that decision makers do not have access to the information necessary to avoid the mistake, or are not smart/competent enough to think through the consequences of their actions.

This predicts that as decision-makers get access to more information, or are replaced with smarter people, their decisions will get better.

And this is substantially true! Markets seem more efficient today than they were before the onset of the internet, and in general decision-making across the board has improved on many dimensions.

But in many domains, I posit, decision-making has gotten worse, despite access to more information, and despite much larger labor markets, better education, the removal of lead from gasoline, and many other things that should generally cause decision-makers to be more competent and intelligent. There is a lot of variance in decision-making quality that is not well-accounted for by how much information actors have about the problem domain, and how smart they are.

I currently believe that the factor that explains most of this remaining variance is "paranoia", in-particular the kind of paranoia that becomes more adaptive as your environment gets [...]

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Outline:

(01:31) A market for lemons

(05:02) Its lemons all the way down

(06:15) Fighter jets and OODA loops

(08:23) The first thing you try is to blind yourself

(13:37) The second thing you try is to purge the untrustworthy

(20:55) The third thing to try is to become unpredictable and vindictive

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First published:
November 13th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yXSKGm4txgbC3gvNs/paranoia-rules-everything-around-me

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.