The Vor Game
Hugo Award Winner! Miles Vorkosigan graduates from the Academy, joins a mutiny, is placed under house arrest, goes on a secret mission, reconnects with his loyal Dendarii Mercenaries, rescues his Emperor, and thwarts an interstellar war. Situation normal, if you're Miles.
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What Hacker News says
- > They live by the Rule of Law.
I feel that description is a bit too strident for the underlying stochastically-creative writing exercise going on.
> "Is this a chain of command, or a chain of credulity?"
> "There's a difference?"
-- The Vor Game by Lois McClure Bujold
- > In his first Term when the GoP controlled congress Trump would praise a bill one day, and say he would veto it the next.
Trump probably rationalizes consistency as weakness. After all, people with principles are people you can cheat and defraud, like his contractors.
Reminds me of a fictional scene:
> “You were out of your league from the beginning, Cavilo,” said Miles, walking slowly around her as if inspecting his prize. Her head turned to follow him, then had to swivel to pick up his orbit on the other side. “You should have stuck to your original contract. Or your second plan. Or your third. You should, in fact, have stuck to something. Anything. Your total self-interest didn’t make you strong, it made you a rag in the wind, anybody’s to pick up. [...]"
-- The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold
- > when he thinks he is
Or when they do not think they are defeated, but their goals now align with your own.
> But Miles had seen it complete in Metzov's eyes sixty seconds earlier. It reminded him of that definition of his father's. A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind. The mind was the first and final battleground, the stuff in between was just noise.
-- The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold
- > Victory begets cultural decay by sparing the navy the rigors of future combat, the truest test of martial adequacy.
Reminds me of a fiction quote:
> The general was only warming up. [...] "You infants who've come up in the past decade and more have no concept of combat. These long periods of unbroken peace weaken the Service. If they go on much longer, when a crisis comes there'll be no one left who's had any real practice in a crunch."
> Miles's eyes crossed slightly, from internal pressure. Then should His Imperial Majesty provide a war every five years, as a convenience for the advancement of his officers' careers? His mind boggled slightly over the concept of "real practice." Had Miles maybe acquired his first clue why this superb-looking officer had washed up on Kyril Island?
(The Vor Game, by Lois McMaster Bujold)
- "The key to strategy... is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to a victory." — Cavilo, The Vor Game
Reading your post just reminded me of that line. It's quite a brilliant line, and it seems that Google have found their forte and are exploiting it to the fullest. Also, if you're not keen enough, one could say that Google is excellent at misdirecting their strength/core-competency (w.r.t. revenue generation).
- I can't read the original article right now. So I must poke around in the darkness when trying to respond. Sorry if I'm being unfair.
But it sounds like we're once again enmeshed in the never-ending process of second-guessing Twitter. Let me offer a pertinent quote, from the Hugo-winning novel The Vor Game:
[You did] a right thing. Perhaps not the best of all possible right things. Three days from now you may think of a cleverer tactic, but you were the man on the ground at the time. I try not to second-guess my field commanders.
Twitter solved their problem. It is unlikely that they did so as elegantly as possible, and it's quite possible that their logic at the time will be of no use to the rest of us at all, because it was based on incomplete information about a rapidly-changing software universe.
