#1 Bismarck: the ultimate practical education in the 'unrecognised simplicities' of high performance politics/government
What sort of character changes history? What and how do we learn from history? Why is it so hard to learn the 'unrecognised simplicities'? How did he approach problems we face?
This trade teaches that one can be as shrewd as the shrewdest in this world and still at any moment go like a child into the dark.
To be a minister too long and to be successful with God’s help is to feel distinctly the cold tide of disfavour and hate rising higher and higher right up to the heart. One gains no new friends, the old ones die, or back off in disaffection. Furthermore, the cold descends from above — that is the natural history of all rulers, even the best. Yet every favourable inclination requires reciprocity if it is to last. In short, I am freezing emotionally, and I long for your company and to be with you in the solitude of the country.
As God will, it is all merely a matter of time; nations and individuals, folly and wisdom, war and peace, they come and go like waves, and the sea remains. What are our states and their power and honour in God’s eyes but ant-hills or beehives that the hoof of the bullock tramples flat or fate overtakes in the person of the bee-keeper come to collect the honey.
In an emergency one cannot be hypersensitive about methods — with a gentleman a gentleman and a half, à corsaire, corsaire et demi [with a pirate a pirate-and-a-half].
Great crises constitute the weather that favours Prussia’s growth, provided that it is fearlessly, perhaps even ruthlessly, exploited by us.
Austria’s conflict and rivalry with us was no more culpable than ours with her, and our task was the establishment or initiation of a German national unity under the leadership of the King of Prussia… I repeated that we were not there to administer retributive justice, but to pursue a policy.
State socialism is on the march and there is no stopping it. Whoever embraces this idea will come to power.
The trouble about politics is that you can never be certain when your policy has been correct. Perhaps our policy after 1866 was in fact mistaken.
I am opposed to the notion of any sort of active participation of Germany in these matters, so long as I can see no reason to suppose that German interests are involved, no interests on behalf of which it is worth our risking … the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.
They want to urge me into war and I want peace. It would be frivolous to start a new war; we are not a pirate state which makes war because it suits a few. (1887)
Bismarck
While Bismarck spoke, his soft gentle voice struck me and those unforgettable eyes … teary but remarkably beautiful from which sudden bolts of lightning would flash… On the way home I asked my father about that remarkable, gentle voice. He said to me with a laugh, ‘In those gentle tones he read the death sentence for many careers and twisted the neck of many a diplomat who had provoked his hate.’
Prince Hohenlohe
The German nation is sick of principles and doctrines, of literary greatness and a theoretical existence. What it wants is power, power, power! And whoever gives it power, to him it will give honour, more honour that he can imagine.
Julius Fröbel, revolutionary.
It is a most fascinating pastime to follow a great man’s thoughts.
Pushkin
Genius is knowing when to stop.
Goethe
The world revolves around the inventors of new values, it revolves invisibly. But the people and fame revolve around actors… Far from the marketplace and from fame happens all that is great, far from the marketplace and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt…
[T]he democratisation of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants.
Nieztsche
Famous Punch cartoon after Bismarck’s forced resignation, Dropping the Pilot, 1890
Introduction
This blog introduces a series on Bismarck and a PDF of a 400 page chronology on his career to 1867. I plan to do further instalments — 1867-71, 1871-1878, 1878-end.
The series concerns connected problems:
What and how do we try to learn from history.
Some general principles we can abstract from Bismarck and other case studies.
How we could improve performance in government.
Things we can learn about our own political problems from deep study of Bismarck’s career and time, such as inherent problems of mass participation in politics, permanent features of parliaments everywhere, connections between deep historical forces (such as changing technologies) and politics, the influence of domestic and international politics on each other, the conduct of diplomacy, the role of international law and so on.
Why learning is so hard, why do we see the same general principles underlying success and failure but so few learn so we keep reading the same stories.
Some ideas for how we could improve history, history books, and anti-entropy tools that reverse the natural tendency of errors to spread.
The point of the chronology originally was a) to try to separate facts from interpretation so I could figure out what was more or less accurate as I read book after book and b) to check and update it while reading new books so I could build an increasingly accurate picture of reality, particularly critical moments and problems. Each new book added layers of understanding, resolved a problem, provided an important and/or interesting detail and so on — and added new problems and confusion.
Over twenty years I’ve tried to abstract general principles explaining:
Why some people and institutions are highly successful while most fail in predictable ways. Stealing from Charlie Munger in roughly 2016, I’ve called them ‘unrecognised simplicities’. Some of these I first saw in Bismarck then spotted elsewhere, others I spotted elsewhere then spotted them in Bismarck.
How politics really works, mostly the opposite of how most political players think they work. The ways in which the system actually works almost entirely differently to how almost all players think it works never occurred to me 24 years ago and I only figured it out patchily. It’s been very disorienting, often depressing, and inevitably one sometimes feels almost seasick.
This became an on-off obsession as I turned to it at different points in life including before the referendum, afterwards, and after No10. I’ve loved doing it. I want to make it public so others can use and build on it and learn from it. For example, I would encourage any young people interested in politics and government to read Otto Pflanze’s three volume biography, by far the best, and to hold this chronology alongside it as you read. Not only will you learn about Bismarck, you’ll learn about how people interpret and learn from history in general and Bismarck in particular by studying the two documents side-by-side.
This is not for roughly 99% of the political world. One of the most fundamental things I’ve learned in 24 years involvement is that almost nobody has any interest in general principles underlying success and failure, nor interest in execution/management, and although political people read a lot of history books it’s hard to see any learning.
This is a core feature of why the world is as it is. It’s why I found a lot of interest in Silicon Valley about ‘why did Leave win the referendum’ and ‘how exactly does No10 and the deep state work’ but in London practically no interest beyond the surface phenomena. This is so extreme I’ve found more interest from people in San Francisco in ‘how exactly does X work’ than I have from the actual minister in London nominally ‘in charge’ of X.
So this is mainly for a) people outside politics interested in how it really works and b) people (almost all young) interested in the general problem of ‘the hard thing about doing really hard things’ (cf. Ben Horowitz’s excellent book on this in the entrepreneur context). I predict I will have ~100X more interest from entrepreneurs and researchers than from people ‘working in politics’. (And 1,000X more interest from some deep state officials than MPs who aren’t even interested in how the media really works even though they’re obsessed with the media.) But I also learned that odd people in politics are interested in these things and the <1% who are interested have an interesting knack of finding each other and working on things. These people are disproportionately young. (This is partly what happened in Vote Leave.)
If you disbelieve me, reflect on one simple fact that I’ve hammered repeatedly: the entire Westminster debate has, with the sort of ruthless focus it cannot muster to achieve anything positive, totally ignored the loathed, despised, lowest status issue in Westminster — how the government actually buys critical goods and services and the capacity of our industrial production. And it has maintained this ruthless focus through the worst pandemic in a century that left over a hundred thousand unnecessarily choking to death then through the biggest war in Europe since 1945. There has literally been more interest in Russel Brand among political-media-academia elites than this central aspect of how our state and society work and why we’re worse at it than we were in the pre-computer age.
We are living through exactly what we read about in periods like summer 1914 — a structural blindness of dominant political-media-academic elites about core features of the system they participate in all day. We read history books about summer 1914 and ask ‘how could the entire Cabinet week after week not probe exactly what our military commitments to Belgium were, what exactly the plans were, and expose that there was no actual plan or institution to cope with the crisis’. We’re in a worse situation than they were.
It’s a disaster and an opportunity. And studying this chronology can help you see how to create opportunities from disasters. In 2015 I thought the structure of the system was a disaster but the referendum was an opportunity and I tried to apply some of the things I’d learned. This proved unexpectedly successful. And, in keeping with the point above about people struggling to learn, the same happened in 2019 even though powerful forces really wanted it not to happen.
What’s needed is a shift in governing institutions roughly as profound as the shift from the ancien regime pre-1789 to what we think of as the modern western state — a shift in the types of people, their training, their tools, institutions, and the fundamental principles and incentives by which they operate. We are still governed by the Cabinet Room almost indistinguishable from what it looked like when it was overwhelmed in summer 1914: a dozen or so people with poor education and training on top of highly centralised dysfunctional institutions largely blind to the incredible system complexity yet responsible for crises that can affect billions. This was the core issue of my 2013 essay. I blogged about this in summer 2019 then saw it overwhelmed in 2020. And Moscow, Beijing, and DC are, as far as we know, also governed by institutions essentially the same as the Cabinet Room / Situation Room model.
No, I don’t think the shift we need is likely. I assume normal history — slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse, catastrophes, regime change.
But, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will…
A high performance monster
Bismarck was an extraordinary monster, endlessly resourceful, boundlessly cynical, an unprecedented epistemological humility entangled with titanic self-belief, an incredible sensitivity for others’ moods entangled with utter ruthlessness. He once replied to a question about the soubriquet ‘Iron Chancellor’ with the answer:
I am all nerves, so much so that self control has always been the greatest task of my life and still is… Faust complains of having two souls in his breast. I have a whole squabbling crowd. It goes on as if in a republic.
People from all walks of life, from kings to revolutionaries and his political enemies, were fascinated and charmed. Among those who worked for him he inspired intense loyalty and terror.
The novelist Theodor Fontane remarked ‘when Bismarck sneezes it’s more interesting than the wise speeches of six progressives’. Even those who hated him knew there was something special about him, even if they thought it was the product of his diabolical soul. He had an extraordinary combination of huge physical presence (even by today’s standards), astonishing mesmerising eyes, and a soft, sensitive, gentle voice completely at odds with the rest of his look and his often appalling words. He could be icy cold in his ruthlessness, and the next moment weep emotionally about his dog or fate or an insult from thirty years ago, though one could never be sure if the weeping was fake.
Contemporaries often described him as a devil or demon — ‘un barbare de genie’ (Bamberger), ‘le diable’ by Windthorst and many others.
Disraeli, another statesman with a writer’s eye, wrote to Queen Victoria from the Congress of Berlin:
The contrast between his voice which is sweet and gentle with his ogre-like form, is striking… [He has] a sweet and gentle voice, and with a peculiarly refined enunciation, wh[ich] singularly contrasts with the awful things he says: appalling from their frankness and their audacity.
One of his adversaries (Bamberger) wrote:
Behind the curtain of his heavy moustache one can always only partly observe him. With his usual chattiness there appears something soft and always lightly smiling across his broad lips, but directly behind lies something powerfully tearing, definitely like a predatory beast. This charming, lightly smiling mouth can open suddenly and swallow the interlocutor… The eyes are mistrustful/friendly, lurking/bright, cold/flashing, determined not to reveal what goes on behind them unless he intends it.
After Prince Hohenlohe took his son to visit him in his retirement, the latter recorded in his diary:
While Bismarck spoke, his soft gentle voice struck me and those unforgettable eyes … teary but remarkably beautiful from which sudden bolts of lightning would flash… On the way home I asked my father about that remarkable, gentle voice. He said to me with a laugh, “In those gentle tones he read the death sentence for many careers and twisted the neck of many a diplomat who had provoked his hate.”
He could without a flicker of conscience resort to the most mafia of methods. He drove rivals to jail, ruin, madness and death. Elon cutting SpaceX costs has nothing on the intensity of hate that pursued people across Europe, like the Furies in Aeschylus.
After Bismarck had retired and Lord Salisbury had to deal with problems caused by his successors, he wrote that he missed ‘the extraordinary penetration of the old man’ but when he had to confront him in office he’d written:
In dealing with the Bismarcks, especially on personal matters, it is necessary to be extremely careful. To get rid of a rival, they will do things of which it would be absurd to suspect any other statesman in Europe.
Bismarck challenged rivals to duels (and might have been killed in the 1850s) and in December 1874 he recounted how in response to an insult in the Reichstag he felt in his pocket for a pistol, which he sometimes carried after various assassination attempts, and considered shooting the deputy on the spot.
We can and should learn from such an extraordinary character but without making the characteristic mistakes of intellectuals — power worship, forgetting that success doesn’t mean ‘good’ or ‘right’, confusing what works in politics with how we should encourage people to behave, or overrating intelligence. We can learn from his blackmail and destruction of enemies but that doesn’t mean we should become blackmailers (with domestic opponents, though blackmailing foreigners can be justified!).
Perhaps the greatest passage in all history was written by Thucydides reflecting on revolutions and violence:
Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Greece. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared… In general, the dishonest more easily gain credit for cleverness than the simple do for goodness; men take pride in one, but are ashamed of the other… At such a time, the life of the city was all in disorder, and human nature, which is always ready to transgress the laws, having now trampled them under foot, delighted to show that her passions were ungovernable, that she was stronger than justice, and the enemy of everything above her… When men are retaliating upon others, they are reckless of the future and do not hesitate to annul those common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his own hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity; they forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in vain… The cause of all these evils was the love of power, originating in avarice and ambition, and the party-spirit which is engendered by them when men are fairly embarked in a contest… For party associations are not based upon any established law nor do they seek the public good; they are formed in defiance of the laws and from self-interest…’ Book III, Jowett translation.
We should always keep this distinction in mind — between the simplicity of a noble nature and the sophistication of attempts to justify wickedness.
Bismarck was extremely intelligent and not just by the standards of politics. But there are many highly intelligent people in politics who achieve nothing. He also had an incredible intensity and an incredible insight into people, which are crucial to achieving things in very complex and competitive environments.
He was also something of a monster. He was not a monster in the style of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their armies of torturers. As extreme anti-Semites and proponents of a preemptive war against Russia gained ground he crushed their arguments hard (privately). He would never have supported a Nazi-style regime. But there was something undeniably monstrous about his combination of intelligence, psychological acuity and manipulation, ruthlessness and charm.
And but for him — but for five bullets all missing in 1866 — the course of 20th Century history would undeniably have been very different. Perhaps the 1917 Revolution, the two world wars, the gulag and terror of Lenin/Stalin, Hitler’s Holocaust, and Mao’s terror would never have happened.
As I’ve said many times, it would have been better for the world if one of the assassin bullets had found its mark. And this makes stark a deep paradox about the nature of politics and political success: it would have been best for the world had the greatest case study of effective action in politics remained unknown. As von Neumann said, For progress there is no cure — and there is no known solution to the problem of how to improve political performance without potentially creating a monster that will devour you.
Below I explore why I got so deeply interested in Bismarck, how I started off believing normal things about politics then learned it actually works in ways nobody explains, the sort of questions he faced that we also face, how this Chronology is useful and so on. The PDF is at the bottom…
Facts, abstractions, theories and politics
I came across Bismarck as a teenager at school. It seemed that he thought and acted so differently to his competitors that he was playing almost a different game. I’ve been fascinated since. I’ve read a library of books and spent (sporadically) a substantial fraction of my adult life, in between my own projects, trying to figure out what he was thinking when and what one can learn from his career. I’ve searched for some general principles that explain his success and searched for evidence of these principles elsewhere. I’ve tried to apply some of them myself in campaigns and government.
As I read book after book, it became clearer and clearer that scholarly history does not rest upon secure foundations. Every major book uses different dates for key events. Many attribute crucial quotes to the wrong people or assert that ‘X happened because Y’ when Y occurred after X and could not have been a cause. Older books are often more accurate as errors seem to get copied and spread like entropy over time. It started to annoy me more and more and I started thinking, ‘if you get the month of the election wrong or when country X declared war, what else is wrong and what can we really rely on?’ But the primary sources, in the sense of actual original documents, are rarely online and it’s hard to track down even reliable copies of famous speeches and letters (I haven’t been able to find English translations of official Prussian Foreign Office documents 1862-70 though there’s an excellent set from 1871). E.g Where are the actual documents signed by Wilhelm on partial mobilisation that someone would have to find to resolve the total confusion across secondary sources about Prussia’s and Austria’s mobilisation orders of spring 1866? And many crucial documents were destroyed in the collapse of the Nazi regime.
I engaged with politics myself from 1999 and saw how public accounts of ‘facts’, motives, meetings and ‘plans’ differed from what I’d witnessed, or what I’d said and done myself, but almost all journalists and academics commenting on contemporary events believe what they see in the media if it fits with what they want to believe. Every major aspect of how the media described my time in No10 is false, essays were written on the basis of things I supposedly said in meetings but never said — from ‘herd immunity’ to the reorganisation of No10. If I said repeatedly ‘X’ and did ‘X’ but Westminster wants to believe I thought/did opposite-of-X, they just tell themselves and the world what they want to believe. And these illusions and inventions become a pseudo-reality on which some base accounts of the past and others base future decisions. Pseudo-facts become treated as actual ‘facts’ by future historians. (We can see this process running live with the covid Inquiry.)
So with these things in mind, constantly confused by secondary sources and knowing from personal experience how common beliefs can be completely wrong, over the years, interrupted by bouts of working in politics, I sketched a chronology, a simple tool, to help me keep track of the Bismarck story, different versions of ‘facts’, and errors. I referred to it as I read everything new, noted new dates, fixed things, spotted inconsistencies and tried to track down the truth and so on.
Underlying this was the feeling, also shaped by my own experience, that (1) it’s very hard to figure out what history-makers are really thinking, they necessarily wear many masks and in Bismarck’s case tell an extraordinary number of lies (often mixed with astonishing honesty), but (2) the only chance of learning lay in trying to disentangle the stories and higher level theorising from ‘facts’. Did he really write A or B; was it really then or then; historian X writes that he did A because B but B happened after A (so what higher level issue might X misunderstand, having confused crucial details).
I learned in 1999 the Official Story about politics is nonsense but there are some general principles nobody teaches you
I’ve watched British politics and been sporadically involved since 1999 (age 27) when I got involved in the campaign to stop Blair replacing the pound.
I believed, without ever really thinking about it much, the Official Story that Insiders largely believe and almost universally reinforce:
Elite politics a) is, like elite anything, dominated by very talented people, b) they are really focused on the important issues facing the world, c) they are really focused on winning elections and are true experts in doing this, d) they have brilliant teams to get things done.
I learned in 1999 that this Official Story is a fairy tale. I realised with shock that Tory-world — described as ‘the natural party of government’ and this was thought to have validity — was actually mostly clueless about how politics really works even though they’d often been knocking around Westminster for decades.
My first shock came after I did a lot of market research on attitudes to the euro in the first quarter of 1999. This was the first time I ever watched focus groups and organised polling. I discovered that most important assumptions made by those I was working with on ‘my own’ side (those who wanted to keep the pound), and those talking about the issue in the media (on both sides), were totally wrong. (E.g it was assumed by everyone that ‘tax harmonisation’ was clearly bad for the pro-euro campaign but it turned out a lot of people’s only knowledge of taxes was taxes like booze and fags where European taxes were much lower, so ‘tax harmonisation’ could be good, cheaper booze and fags! And, relevant to the 2016 referendum, the word ‘sovereignty’ confused the public as much as it does SW1’s supposed experts, so ‘keep control’ worked much better.)
This was very surprising but did not itself shake my faith in the Official Story. But then I rushed to explain our research to MPs and other senior figures involved in politics, including senior MPs I’d seen on TV and senior journalists. I naively assumed they’d be happy to learn about these errors and campaigners could improve what we were doing. Most were angry and dismissive. I was shocked. Most were happier to keep believing illusions than face reality and admit mistakes.
I figured out how ‘news’ works, how hacks are obsessed with exclusives, how players like Mandelson manipulated this system. And I saw that the entire Tory machine seemed to be largely clueless. Even though Tory world was absolutely obsessed with the media — not with the voters — they didn’t seem interested in how it really worked. They were focused on the wrong thing and not really focused on it! How extraordinary!?
As we developed our campaign, I naturally turned to the question: what are Blair and his inner circle thinking? One day I had an idea. I’d been studying Philip Gould’s book, The Unfinished Revolution. I saw that Gould himself was something of an organisational shambles, always forgetting things on trains and so on. Having studied espionage, an idea occurred to me. Gould was in the Blair inner circle, what if he was given a lot of documents and he … just threw them all in the bin and didn’t shred them? What if an ancient idea could be applied?
I explored the law. Cutting a long story short I figured out a way in which one could (legally) hire someone to pop around to Gould’s house in the middle of the night and go through his bins the night before bin day. For roughly a year I read many documents from the Blair inner circle including notes from Blair. Many of them were market research about the euro. I saw Gould writing memos for Blair who would try out ideas (remember ‘the bridge between Europe and America’?) then Gould tested the results. I tried to counter these moves but, obviously, without being able to tell people that my ‘hunches’ about what Blair was up to were not hunches. For a few thousand quid a month I had a window into the Government’s secret plans.
It became increasingly, shockingly clear that Tory-world — the network of MPs, pundits, donors, think tanks etc — were living in a parallel world and they didn’t want it disturbed. They wanted to make arguments against the euro that increased support for the euro or that were clearly incomprehensible. They wanted to make attacks on Blair that made themselves more unpopular. They wrote leaders and columns about Hague’s performances in PMQs as if these were communication triumphs and exhorted him to do things that were counterproductive. They didn’t grasp what Blair was up to. They didn’t grasp how voters thought.
And they acted as if they didn’t want to understand. Instead they acted collectively as a network reinforcing delusions to each other, a ‘massive denial of service attack on their own perceptions of reality’, as Marc Andreessen has described American mainstream news today. (I don’t mean from this that I think politicians should simply respond to how the public thinks. I mean that if you say you’re trying to do applied psychology and marketing and ‘communication’ then it only makes sense if you are anchored to reality, if you really care about it and are interested in it, and the reality portrayed in the political media is often very far from actual reality.)
I was also shocked that my naive operation worked. Why hadn’t an intelligence service done the same?! I half-expected a queue of Russians and French outside his house at 3am telling my guy ‘get to the back of the queue’. No. Might our own security services have anticipated this? No. I wondered, what other million dollar bills are lying on the pavements of Westminster?! (Eventually one of the guys going through the bins realised what he had was valuable and sold some of it to the Sunday Times. How times change: I learned this via Ceefax. For a few weeks I continued to see stuff, including the leak inquiry itself which Gould helpfully threw in the bin, then it abruptly stopped. The game was up. So I gave some of the stuff to the Sun and Times as a joint exclusive. Remember the ‘eye-catching initiatives’ Blair wanted to be ‘personally associated’ with?)
After these first shocks in 1999 I gave myself a second education over years studying organisations that had extreme success and disastrous failure, the brain, psychology, armies, the history of computation and AI, dozens and dozens of subjects. I went back to look with fresh eyes at things I’d studied at university, such as Bismarck and Alexander the Great and the outbreak of World War I.
I was trying to understand things like — why and how is the Official Story false, what can we be confident in, what organisations do much better than others and why, what’s the connection between how individual minds work and how institutions work? In the referendum on the North East Assembly 2004 and in the Department for Education 2010-14 I tested some ideas out and refined them. And it seemed there were some general principles you can abstract from history and apply and they work.
By the time I got to the referendum I’d roughly figured out (I thought) some of these general principles about how politics really works, how great organisations really work, how communication really works — not, obviously, fully figured out which is impossible, but some unrecognised simplicities that capture a huge amount of easy-to-grab value. I had the same experiences during the referendum with people not wanting to face reality but by then I was no longer surprised. By then I realised this was normal, pathological and programmed by very deep incentives and culture. Normal performance in politics is so bad that during the referendum, people who were just months into their first job aged 21 were briefing Cabinet ministers on what to say on subjects they’d been talking about on TV for decades — because the 21 year olds understood it much better. And performance in industries adjacent to politics, like advertising and market research, is often so bad that there are m/billion dollar bills on the pavement there too.
The more involved I have got in politics and government, the more absurd the Official Story was always revealed to be — even when I dug all the way down through the ‘deep state’ to discuss nuclear weapons infrastructure, or ‘what’s the process for deciding priorities for aggressive intelligence operations against Xi and Putin’. Everywhere the same story: some wonderful people dotted around crushed by atrocious management and the worst kind of apparatchiks, and billion dollar bills that officials and politicians leave to rot with no thought.
And there is close to zero learning. After 2016 the political media spent three years having a meltdown over £350 million and ranted about how it seemed to have been a deliberate provocation to make them repeat our message. And in the constitutional chaos of 2019 they collectively did the same thing. Hostile MPs and hostile media were so obsessed with the debate and twitter-dynamics between themselves that they couldn’t focus on the voters or see accurately our strategy.
The ‘unrecognised simplicities’ and ‘the rising sea’
People, ideas, machines — in that order! Colonel Boyd
No action communicates a manager’s values to an organisation more clearly and loudly than his choice of whom he promotes. Andy Grove
Look for intelligence, will, and character — if they don’t have the last one the first two will kill you. Warren Buffett
If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure. Bezos
The startups that do things slowly don't do them any better. Just slower. Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator
Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. Steve Jobs
Fascinating that the same problems recur time after time, in almost every program, and that the management of the program, whether it happened to be government or industry, continues to avoid reality... [S]o many programs fail because everybody doesn't know what it is they are supposed to do. George Mueller, head of Apollo project, on management and systems thinking.
What do I mean by ‘unrecognised simplicities’?
The phrase comes from Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner.
There isn’t one novel thought in all of how Berkshire [Hathaway] is run. It’s all about ... exploiting unrecognized simplicities... Warren and I aren’t prodigies. We can’t play chess blindfolded or be concert pianists. But the results are prodigious, because we have a temperamental advantage that more than compensates for a lack of IQ points.
The legendary mathematician Alexander Grothendieck wrote about how there are two ways of attacking problems — a) as if they’re a nut to be cracked with ‘hammer and chisel’ or b) by seeking a more general, more abstract way of thinking that submerges the specific problem in a wider theory.
I can illustrate the second approach with the same image of a nut to be opened. The first analogy that came to my mind is of immersing the nut in some softening liquid, and why not simply water? From time to time you rub so the liquid penetrates better, and otherwise you let time pass. The shell becomes more flexible through weeks and months — when the time is ripe, hand pressure is enough, the shell opens like a perfectly ripened avocado!
A different image came to me a few weeks ago. The unknown thing to be known appeared to me as some stretch of earth or hard marl, resisting penetration ... the sea advances insensibly in silence, nothing seems to happen, nothing moves, the water is so far off you hardly hear it ... yet it finally surrounds the resistant substance. [Grothendieck 1985–1987, pp. 552-3]
In the ‘rising sea’ the theorem is ‘submerged and dissolved by some more or less vast theory, going well beyond the results originally to be established’.
Similarly, it seems to me that in politics almost everybody focuses on specific problems. But almost nobody looks at the deeper general level.
Why do we get the people we do at the top of politics, such that an incompetent is appointed then replaced with another practically interchangeable incompetent, then the same again, all without the appointing person aware that they keep appointing duffers, and without anybody pointing this out?
Why do similar patterns of errors recur in existential crises (e.g similar conceptual errors about deterrence of Germany in 1870, 1914 and 1936-8)?
Why is it so hard to build institutions that can focus really hard on the core issues that will 1,000X swamp almost everything else (e.g 1910-14 the critical issues around a military commitment to France and Belgium and whether to warn Germany publicly we would fight if…)?
Why do even the most powerful people caught up in disaster so often treat it as a natural disaster rather than partly a consequence of institutions that they could reshape, with different leadership and incentives?
These ‘unrecognised simplicities’, and consideration of why they’re so simple to read but so hard to do, explain success and failure at a more general and deeper level.
They’re simple to understand, almost impossible to do, impossible to maintain for more than a few decades
They are written down.
They recur again and again.
They can be compressed.
There are modern case studies where you can track execution in detail.
You don’t need to be smart to understand them. Understanding high performance is nothing like quantum mechanics, it’s not even as hard as A Level Maths! But people like General Groves and Bob Taylor are rarer than Nobel winners. The combination of these two facts explains a lot.
Successful execution never lasts much longer than the odd individual career. There is some general entropic force that perpetually knocks us back to square one unlike in, say, the cumulative process of ever deeper understanding of science over thousands of years.
Where do you see them?
You see them in classics of history such as Thucydides and Sun Tzu.
You see them in the lives of some famous people and a few organisations.
Some case studies in high performance and expertise:
What sort of experts in what sorts of fields are more likely to understand their field and make good predictions; what is expertise in politics, how is it different to fields like MMA and physics? Cf. a series on expertise starting January 2017; the difference between fighting and physics vs politics
Lessons from Alanbrooke on delivering ‘strategy’ in World War II
Lessons from General Groves and the Manhattan Project (and how the ‘Manhattan Project’ metaphor is mis-used) [coming]
Lessons from SkunkWorks
Many aspects are best explored in great literature. I wrote about politics in War and Peace here, e.g Tolstoy’s description of political meetings is a hundred times better than anything you can read in ‘political science’.
How big is the gap between normal and the best?
Some people are 1,000X or more more effective than normal. The things they can do can’t be done by aggregating efforts from large numbers of people. Want to build a bigger pyramid? Get more slaves. The effort aggregates. Want to turn Prussia from a weak non-global player to a force that changes world history and determines the fate of billions? More people won’t do it. One extremely unusual person might. Want to build something like OpenAI or SpaceX? More smart people isn’t enough, it needs at least one highly unusual person like Sam Altman or Elon. And the ‘unusual’ bit here is not on the dimension of IQ. Want to beat the best human at chess? As was proved practically, using the internet to coordinate millions globally could not aggregate thinking power effectively enough to do it.
If you watch normal human competitions like sports or chess, the difference in ability among the top players is relatively small and often determined by intensity of effort that compounds over time. Magnus Carlsen is clearly the best chess player but most of his games end in draws and he loses frequently. But now we can watch chess games with AI systems versus the best humans or other AIs. When we look at the games, we can appreciate some beauty and (with the system’s help) understand some of the moves, but there’s a vast world of calculation to which we have almost no access and in detail the workings of this intelligence are largely mysterious (one of the most interesting subfields of AI is ‘interpretability’, i.e using AI to interpret AI in ways humans can grasp, cf. Chris Olah at Anthropic).
The closest we have to this in politics is Bismarck — someone clearly playing not just a bit better but so differently that it’s really a different game. Unlike some ancient characters like Themistocles, Alexander or Caesar whose achievements were also extraordinary, with Bismarck we can trace the details, we can read diaries and reports, we can follow him down different trails, many of them false, watching his lies and, as shocking, how often he told the truth but was not believed. Bismarck is the best case study we have in the intersection of ‘world-changing political genius’ and ‘someone whose moves we can track at a fine-grained scale to understand the details of how they operated’. (Another, underrated, object of study is Jean Monnet, godfather of the EU, who understood the difference between competing for power today and ‘preparing the future’, i.e shaping the future environment so it’s easy for those with power to do what you want.)
Studying Bismarck can help you understand history better and, practically, help you achieve goals in any competitive field including startups.
It’s useful to think about these abstractions but it’s also necessary to consider them applied chronologically to appreciate them fully.
Why is high performance so rare, why does it not last?
I’ll write a specific blog on this but the fundamental reason is this…
To the extremely limited extent Insiders explicitly contemplate (openly or not) the trade-offs of trying to make something very high performance, the core issue is that the social costs of pushing for high performance are high, immediate and personal while gains seem relatively speculative, distant and mostly accrue to others.
Watching politicians I’ve almost never had the sense that they have any theory of this, or, in most cases, they really think it through. But over and over I see a sort of instinctive calculation along these lines. You see it in the questions they ask. In the way their eyes flick away when you answer. The way they avoid digging. They can feel instinctively if they are pushed that it will be a nightmare to try to face reality. But the thought processes are vague because the discussions are practically never made explicit. I forced such explicit conversations on the PM and others. It produced powerful negative emotions precisely because the people who get to these jobs have mostly done so by avoiding reality and focusing on social dynamics relevant to their careers.
If you accept, or pretend to accept, the general beliefs around you and don’t argue with them, in countless ways your life will be easier. But by definition extreme performance comes from spotting errors in these generally held ideas and institutions then exploiting them and building new ideas and institutions with extreme relentlessness. This necessarily is costly. People do not like being told ‘you’re wrong’ or ‘X must change so you will have less power and status’ or ‘you/your friend must be replaced’. Relentless focus on high performance acts like friction on social relations everywhere except those few magical short-lived environments that people talk about with love and wonder for the rest of their lives (but these places do not eliminate tough conversations, they make them less socially unpleasant).
If forced to confront these simplicities all normal large organisations will either create explanations for why case studies of high performance are not ‘real’ or explanations for why they are not relevant. You see this dynamic at work today: the world of politics, media and academia is full of people who have had roughly zero effect on the world giving and sharing confident explanations for a) why the guy who built SpaceX and Tesla is actually an idiot (his high performance is not real) and/or b) why his success isn’t relevant to government (which needs really specialist understanding that Elon doesn’t have blah blah).
If you read Alanbrooke’s Diaries I’ve been blogging on, you see that even when you’re all fighting Hitler, the iron laws of bureaucracies are extremely resistant to these unrecognised simplicities. Alanbrooke himself was exhausted by his hourly struggle to impose the unrecognised simplicities on the entropy of normal big organisations.
So I’ve also drafted over the years an anti-checklist, some rough principles for understanding how politics and power really work, which is mixed up with ‘how do all big bureaucracies work’.
If you believe the Official Story and take mainstream pundits seriously then the news is very confusing, full of Insiders saying ‘astonishing, amazing, ludicrous’ about each government failure. If you absorb the anti-checklist, the news will make more sense and you will realise, ‘normal, natural, the system is working as programmed and the system’s running the people’.
What questions does this chronology help one consider?
For me history existed primarily to be learned from. Even if the events do not repeat themselves, at least circumstances and characters do. By observing and studying them one can stimulate and educate one’s mind. I have learned from the mistakes of my predecessors in the art of statesmanship and have built up my “theory”, although one ought not to speak of such in the narrow sense of the word.
There is no exact science of politics just as there is none for political economy. Only professors are able to package the sum of the changing needs of cultural man into scientific laws… The professors and their imitators in the newspapers constantly decry the fact that I have not revealed a set of principles by which I directed my policies. Because they have as yet scarcely outgrown the political nursery, the Germans cannot accustom themselves to regard political affairs as a study of the possible… Politics is neither arithmetic nor mathematics. To be sure, one has to reckon with given and unknown factors, but there are no rules and formulas with which to sum up the results in advance.
He came to power in 1862 amid a profound constitutional crisis in which the king was considering abdication. His personal position was very shaky, much of the court including the king’s wife wanted rid of him, and he could not feel even vaguely secure until victory over Austria in 1866. The conservatives were weak in parliament and had no strategy while his liberal opponents had a strong majority. Prussia was seen as the weakest of the Great Powers. He had no authority over the army. The civil service was hostile. He did not have the authority and control over the other ministers of a British PM. There were conspiracies to remove him everywhere.
Four years later Prussia smashed Austria to the shock of Europe (which had overwhelmingly expected an Austrian victory), it expanded and pushed Austria out of north Germany, it ended the German Confederation created by Metternich et al at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, the constitutional conflict ended, the liberals were shocked and divided, and a new North German Confederation was created, with a new constitution, that strengthened Prussian power (and Bismarck’s own power) and could clearly be extended to southern Germany.
A few years later he smashed France and turned the North German Confederation into a new German Empire which he ruled for twenty years as it turned into a Power that dominated Europe and could shake the world. The new Germany brought together rapidly growing power of different forms: economic, technological, cultural, diplomatic, and military, with the armed forces and General Staff solely in the hands of the Prussian King and a constitution that gave all adult men the vote yet preserved a lot of power for the feudal aristocracy (from which Bismarck came).
How did he do it?
Was the creation bound to go haywire?
How do / can we learn from history?
What were the most important decisions/events when history could have turned down a different branching path?
What sort of things constitutes effective action to achieve your goals in politics/government and what is not effective? What distinguishes the most high performance characters from the normal?
Why is it so hard to learn even though some lessons from history seem so simple to understand and are constantly repeated?
How to weigh the effects of internal and largely hidden struggles on big external visible events like wars and revolutions? (Historical figures are largely judged by their large visible effects — in Bismarck’s case, creating a new state with a new constitution that dominated Europe etc — but the figures themselves are consumed in the moment by endless struggles for their own position. He always said that his internal enemies in the court, especially the Queen, were far harder problems for him than his obvious enemies such as Napoleon etc.)
How did states assess their interests and capabilities? How should states assess their interests and capabilities across many dimensions — economic power, technological power, military power (and planning), diplomatic power and so on?
How did the core of the state, the critical institutions around the critical players, cope with crises? How did they cope with the greater speed created by the telegram? How did they cope with the influence on diplomacy of the mass media creating and responding to news much faster than the pre-telegram age? (E.g the role of the famous Ems Telegram, edited by Bismarck to provoke the French media.) What did Bismarck think, and what did he do, about the role of the bureaucracy?
What did other Powers learn from the Prussian General Staff and its successes 1864-1870? What should we learn from the PGS and others’ attempts to learn? What was the relationship between analysis of military strengths/weaknesses and political goals/interests? Who had the better arguments between Bismarck and the PGS on crucial issues? How to resolve disputes when politicians assert ‘military considerations must give way to higher political considerations’ and the military asserts ‘no political interference’? Are there ‘objective’ answers to such questions or are they always going to be decided in chaos in a crisis? How did mobilisation timetables and military plans affect political decisions at critical moments? (The biographies do not consider this question seriously and I have not seen any concerted effort to document and analyse it in detail tied to specific sources. E.g during April/May what did he really think about Moltke’s plans, the disruption caused by delay etc? All the books give different dates for crucial mobilisation milestones making it impossible to be confident from the secondary sources.) How right is Zerber re the ‘Moltke myth’ — has history been somewhat tricked in writing about Moltke’s genius? (It’s clearly wrong for secondary sources just to repeat the same stories about his ‘plan being put into effect’ — it was not, it was chaos. The chaos was not, mostly, Moltke’s fault, as far as I can see, but chaos it was. Those who win tend to claim that their ‘plan’ was vindicated, but winners often stretch in their claims about their plans.)
How could Austria go year after year without being able to decide a critical issue of interests/priorities (i.e whether to prioritise her position in Germany or Italy), then tumble into a shattering war still without resolving the issue, and even tumble into this war after making a secret deal with France such that Austria would have to give up its position in Italy even if she won? (Having trawled through Austrian sources I can’t find a document showing one occasion on which someone tried to set out the core issues and likely scenarios to the Austrian Emperor and try to force disciplined thinking through priorities and the consequences of deciding priorities. The most essential question seems always to have been fudged. This may seem ‘extraordinary’ but I think it’s a routine part of history and we saw it in 2020 over covid, in 2021 over Afghanistan, and in 2022 over Ukraine — and we’ll see it over Taiwan.)
What does his career suggest about how we could improve the selection of people, their training, political/government institutions, new forms of international cooperation and so on? (Roon suspected extreme talents in Bismarck but is it conceivable such political talent spotting can be systematised? Or is the whole point of a true genius they they see things others can’t so they will always seem weird, crazy?)
Is there any way to sustain performance over time and improve our performance on the ‘succession problem’ or are we inevitably doomed to see such people pop up unexpectedly then vanish and be followed by someone much less able? Do leaders (somewhat secretly from themselves?) almost want this to happen to enhance their glory?
How to judge the gains and dangers of empowering able individuals versus the advantages of more diffuse power such as the British system? (Since 1815 Britain never had someone as able as Bismarck in charge but never suffered the disasters of having someone as bad as Wilhelm II in charge.) What sort of conceptually new institutions (including meta-institutions to shape core institutions) are needed so we can both benefit from such talent and minimise the chances of it escaping control and enslaving us? (Hence why Bismarck encapsulates ‘AI safety’ problems. Rome empowered Sulla and Caesar to eliminate foreign threats — which they did, but then they, like Bismarck, maximised their own power and were seen as similar to, or even worse than, the problem they were empowered to solve.)
How does a theoretically permanent civil service (i.e people can be dismissed and replaced but it’s expected that a large fraction will persist regardless of government/leader changes) affect the quality of government? Is it possible that the ‘professionalisation’ and ‘meritocracy’ of the permanent civil service was a profound error?!
What did he think about basic features of ‘Cabinet Government’, legislatures, and political parties and how do their incentives shape these long-term features?
How did the changing media and communication affect politics?
Was it a mistake to go for universal direct suffrage given his deepest goals? Could even he have resisted entirely the spirit of the age if he’d tried? (He was clearly vindicated in his view that the liberals did not have the support of the masses 1862-6 in the constitutional conflict. The masses were more pro-King and pro-army than the middle classes. Short-term he was right that giving the working classes and peasants the vote helped him divide and conquer the liberals. And it strengthened his position as the King needed someone to master the chaos of the Reichstag. But long-term? Were Metternich and the Gerlachs right that if your goal was preserving aristocratic government and Christian morality, then enfranchising the peasants would inevitably lead to demagogues and ruin? Was the suspicion that this was true behind his increasing talk of a coup and a re-writing of the constitution?)
How does/should ‘international law’ affect politics and war?
How to judge the risks and uncertainties of whether and when a war between Great Powers is justified?
How much did the wars of 1866 and 1870 show new possibilities for speed and manoeuvre? How did they influence so-called Blitzkrieg and German operational planning 1939-45, including the famous thrust through the Ardennes in 1940? (Modern generals are always trying to relive ancient triumphs such as Gaugamela, Leuctra and Cannae. Moltke’s rapid victories in which he encircled opposing armies seemed to show a ‘modern Cannae’ that would influence generals in both world wars and after.)
How did ideas about nationalism — with its unity of nation, language and territory — evolve? How did conservative elites assess this problem and its connection with the growth of liberalism, socialism and democracy?
How do big ideas evolve over decades, how do these influence individuals and institutions, why is it impossible for us to see our own problems more accurately in context with the distance and abstraction we apply to previous times? (We look at history, we abstract whole decades and centuries to simple pictures, but we find it practically impossible to do this to our own time in ways that provide practical help to improving understanding and prediction of our own problems.)
When is violence justified in order to (hopefully) save more people from violence? When is it reasonable to see an internal conflict more in light of a civil war (where violence can be justified) and less as a legal/constitutional matter? How does one decide such questions? (E.g when one looks at the French terror after 1789 it can seem reasonable for those like Bismarck to say ‘deploy the army to stop chaos’. It’s easy to deplore monarchist violence but practically, at the time, it is extremely hard to know where the line of ‘reasonable’ is — violence tends to come amid chaos when it’s very hard to know what’s happening, why, and what it might take to stop it.)
How might this chronology be useful?
1/ If you’re researching German or European history in this period it will be useful and may point to some interesting connections as you’re working.
2/ If you’re interested in the Questions above and study it I think you will see history, politics, how to win an election, how to run an organisation including a government, how to preserve peace, how to make war, very differently. A few weeks really studying this will teach the average young motivated person more about politics than the average MP learns in a forty year career. Although it’s hundreds of pages there’s a career worth of lessons highly compressed. (Also I think it would be useful to have it open when reading many books on 19th Century history not focused on Bismarck.)
3/ It should be put into some sort of wiki so it can be corrected and improved by an interested community. What’s the best tool? What’s really needed is for history to develop a platform whereby open source communities can link to authenticated versions of original documents, with contributors clearly rated by the accuracy of their contributions and so on. This would provide a gold standard reference for facts that interpreters could access fast and rely on. E.g you look at an improved version of this chronology, you can click on the definitive order signed by Wilhelm in spring 1866 for partial mobilisation, photographed from the original archive, and see who attests to its authenticity, where the original is stored, who translated it etc. Similarly, Kindle should create a function whereby you can tag errors for the author who can review them and update. These changes would create anti-entropy forces contrary to the natural entropy forces.
4/ For reasons explained by Turing Medal winner Judea Pearl, who has developed ideas on causation in the context of artificial intelligence, scientists from the later 19th Century focused on correlation while causal models were relegated to very niche corners of academia. Only recently has this debate become more mainstream but it has not touched politics. What does his career suggest about causal models for explaining and predicting history/politics more accurately? How should we think about the interaction of ‘historical forces’ and individuals, famously and beautifully explored by Tolstoy in War and Peace?
Individuals. E.g Bismarck, his allies, his opponents and their clashing motives, beliefs, and methods.
Ideas. E.g Nationalism was spreading and intensifying everywhere, cf. its success in Italy, the creation of the Nationalverein. Nationalism was an inherently existential threat to the multi-national Austro-Hungarian Empire. Conservatism felt itself in crisis after 1848 as liberalism and nationalism advanced. Enlightenment faltering, Romanticism growing. Spread of class consciousness, socialism/communism.
Material and economic/social forces. E.g Prussia’s growing economic dynamism and success of the Zollverein giving Prussia political leverage viz other German and European states. Austria’s relative stagnation and exclusion from the Zollverein. Russia’s relative lack of industrialisation. British naval dominance. Demographics. Geographic reality: e.g Germany stuck between France and Russia. Market forces undermining traditional production, artisans, guilds etc. Credit/debt cycles (short and long term).
Institutions. E.g the Prussian parliament, civil service and General Staff. The British Foreign Office. The Zollverein. The Lutheran Church supporting the Prussian monarchy. Spread of mass education institutions.
Potential/actual alliances. E.g the shadow of the Crimean War making it hard for Austria and Russia to coordinate against him, distrust of Napoleon (especially over Belgium) making it hard for Britain and France to coordinate against him, disagreements over Italy making it hard for Austria and France to coordinate against him. Changes in domestic politics affect power relationships between states — e.g Gramont becoming French Foreign Minister, Bismarck writing on the document informing him of it — ‘WAR’. (Bismarck is often described by ‘realists’ (a bad name) as a ‘realist’. Many in this tribe argue that perceptions of state interests are largely divorced from changing domestic regimes. Bismarck disagreed and often remarked on how changes of individuals and domestic regime affected international relations.)
Technologies. E.g the spread of the railway, telegram, newspapers, new rifles (the needle gun), new artillery, steamships. The mix of growing media and the telegram (in an age of growing literacy) contributed to the speed of political contagion in 1848 and to politicians being overwhelmed by chaotic communication in diplomatic crises in 1866 and 1870 (foreshadowing summer 1914). Changing media markets affected the spread of ‘German’ culture.
Crises. E.g famines, pandemics, volcanoes, assassinations, financial crises (e.g 1873, 1929, 2008), coups/revolutions.
How should we think about the interdependency of these things? For example:
Romanticism + nationalism + growing literacy + growing media + growing middle class + telegram.
Railways + telegram + Prussian General Staff.
Crimean War (worsened Austro-Russian relations) + Anglo-Russian ‘great game’ in Central Asia (worsened Anglo-Russian relations) + Anglo-French rivalries over Low Countries and Mediterranean (worsened Anglo-French relations) + Napoleon III pipes up about Poland while Bismarck sides with Russia (worsened Franco-Russian relations) + Napoleon III renounced the 1815 settlement in 11/63 (worsened Anglo-French and Austro-French relations)
British success + idea of free trade + railways + growing middle class + spread of liberalism + conservatives’ fear of revolution
Growing nationalism + English elite support for Italian unification + Habsburg conception of ‘honour’ making it easier for Bismarck to have Vienna attacked by Italy with France acquiescent
Austria: international isolation + economic weakness + financial weakness + multi-national Empire in a time of growing nationalism + rotten army + Emperor refused to prioritise
Britain: fears of France + Russian expansionism + growing global pressures/demands — should we be relaxed about the idea of a strengthening Prussia, is it therefore a more powerful check on our real danger, France?!
How should we think about ‘but for…’ causes (e.g but for Bismarck surviving the assassin bullets) and counterfactuals and branching histories?
It’s easy to read what did happen and think it had to happen while ignoring how crucial individual choices could have been different. And sometimes those choices had vast nonlinear effects.
Some examples…
1/ What if he had failed to scupper Austria’s plans for the Bund in summer 1863? He may have had to resign and would barely be a footnote now.
2/ What if he’d gone with the overwhelming pressure from his own King, liberal opinion, and media clamour in November-December 1863 to support Augustenburg in Schleswig Holstein? It was the easy choice. But he knew all that could do was create another state that would oppose Prussia. It took extraordinary vision to think through the plan of, first, allying with Austria supposedly to defend ‘international law’; pulling the duchies away from Denmark; gradually pulling the King towards annexation; isolating Austria internationally etc.
3/ What if, after Austria flipped and suddenly backed Augustenburg in summer 1864, he had been brittle and confrontational? Instead he seemed to accept the shift then trapped Augustenburg into blowing himself up. As he later said to Beust, he hitched the duke like an ox to the plough then after a little he unhitched him.
4/ Bismarck backed off from war in 1865. He even held open secret backchannels to the end in the summer 1866 crisis (the Gablenz intrigues). Even at the last minute, different decisions in Vienna could have meant no war, in 1866 at least. And of course he could easily have been assassinated and would now be a tiny footnote, thought of barely at all and dismissed as someone ‘obviously doomed to fail’.
5/ What if someone could have persuaded Franz Joseph to choose between a) conceding to Bismarck in Germany in return for alliance against Napoleon in Italy, or b) a deal with Napoleon over Italy in return for an alliance against Bismarck? The failure to choose, the focus on ‘honour’, led to disaster.
6/ How could ‘Germany’ have worked out differently? Was the Confederation of 1815 doomed? Was ‘a liberal Germany’ possible and would it have meant no World War I and Nazis? Could it have worked out differently between Prussia and Austria, could they have done a deal as he suggested? (In his Memoirs, he wrote that he had been genuine in his offers of peace provided Austria let Prussia dominate in north Germany (e.g to Karolyi in December 1862) but events suggested that it was unlikely this could have happened given beliefs in Vienna. The belief in Austrian superiority was too strong and perhaps Vienna couldn’t face reality without a war?)
5/ I wrote a decade ago about how elite Universities could improve courses. If a 20 year old could both study Bismarck’s critical decisions in the 1860s (and the principles underlying them) and be given practical experience in some of the best managed organisations in the world, they would be much, much better prepared for senior jobs than our leading politicians are now.
6/ What sort of institutions and tools does it suggest could improve performance? Given we see the repeated failure of conventional ‘meetings’ to discuss the most critical issues (as in summer 1914 or March 2020), what sort of institutions and tools could improve the chances of forcing critical players to consider the most critical issues more accurately? (Experiments I did 2017-19 and a lot of underrated published research suggest that it’s possible to predict dynamics of political events more accurately than is widely thought.) It would be interesting to see an online game based on Bismarck’s world, a sort of Civilization-type game to explore different decisions and branching histories.
7/ LLM tools. As many have pointed out, authors struggles to remember their own books, all the complexities and dense interconnections. Robert Caro and others have written about how after a lifetime of searching millions of documents, millions more remain unread. There has been no practical answer until now. It is now simple and cheap to fine-tune a LLM on a specific corpus of text then interrogate it.
So, for example, we could fine tune LLMs to read the entire corpus of Bismarck documents that exist, volume after volume, plus all sorts of other documents like biographies, plus potentially (unpublished) scanned documents from archives. And do this for any historical subject. This process is already happening funded by the likes of hedge funds which are tuning LLMs to, say, read every report on energy for 300 years. As a first step in 2024 I will fine-tune a LLM on this chronology and explore questioning of it.
If you consider the covid Inquiry today, nobody on earth will read all the documents. Millions of emails sit on servers so far almost all unread. If we were serious about ‘learning from covid’, the Inquiry would ask the No10 data science team for help in procuring someone to train a LLM on the entire corpus of covid evidence, the millions of documents, the entire email archive etc. This model could then be interrogated. All sorts of surprising and valuable connections would be found that otherwise will not be. It would cost a fraction of the many hundreds of millions the Inquiry will cost.
Here is the PDF. Please post errors, thoughts in comments…
Happy Christmas to all subscribers.
In 2024, two elections and the AI revolution grows 10X or 100X… It will be even crazier than 2023…
I have been waiting expectantly for your Bismarck analysis and it doesn’t disappoint. I know you get a shed load of abuse via social media etc. I wanted to say thank you for introducing me and my son to a wider education that I never received previously. If you are ever near north East Lincolnshire and fancy rattling a couple of decent claret bottles let me know. With every best wish to you and your family.
Would a Bismarck approach to US-China relations be:
Rather than defend Taiwan like Britain defended Belgium in 1914, or following the US containment strategy during the Cold War, we’re instead going to renounce any promised commitment to defend Taiwan and work to build new institutions that respond to the rapid growth of science and technology such as AI and genome editing safety organisations, and an international moon base to distract humanity from its primitive instincts for conflict.