napoleon on strategy

and why it's not possible to not be religious

so a long time ago some guy named napoleon was pretty good at organizing people. the extent to which he was good at organizing people is not something people are aware of. how much better at organizing people was napoleon vs say elon? i would say it’s about the difference between messi and ur best local soccer player. quantity is always the most underrated quality.

anyways, when people think about napoleon they think small man. big ego. like a steve jobs type his most visible traits are over emphasized. napoleon has been territorialized into a cartoon character. it isn’t obvious that he is someone who we maybe should look to understand. the task of knowledge is to hold onto the obvious. this isn’t obvious. obviously.

anyways, napoleon had some pretty good ideas. one of those ideas was his definition of strategy. he says the following: “strategy is the art of making use of time and space"

okay, you read this and sounds nice, but wtf does it actually mean? what is strategy? well he just told you. what is art? what is making? what is time? what is space? what does it mean to use? how do we make this literal. how can we understand this. how can we understand understanding. by symbol grounding it. duh.

so, here i go. i’m going to define these terms in a more symbol grounded manner so we can learn from this famous guy. i will start with art.

• napoleon says art

• when he is saying art, he is saying shit can’t be perfect.

• in info theoretic terms, art could be a system for organizing and transmitting information about what cannot be fully computed or predicted.

• in computational language, i could say ‘art’ is working within computational irreducibility

• this is to say that art is a religious act.

• what is religion?

• a system for encoding, transmitting, and stabilizing information about inherently uncomputable aspects of reality.

this is obvious. once you see what is in front of your face, it should be obvious to understand that everyone is doing religious and everyone is doing art. it’s literally impossible to do other wise. we cannot exist without using symbolic or social systems to organize and transmit information about what cannot be fully computed or predicted. science is science within a small context window, science is religion in any real context window. words have sizes, killa.

but anyways, lots of people that are in a scientific spirit have backed up the idea that shit can’t be perfect. a system cannot be perfectly bounded.

the guy who came up with the idea of systems (kinda), von bertalanffy argues in general systems theory (mid 20th century) that all real systems are open and never fully isolated. norbert wiener the guy who game up with the science of organization writes a book called cybernetics (a bit before bertalanffy) in which he shows that feedback necessarily ties a system to its environment. herbert simon, in the sciences of the artificial (1969), described systems as “nearly decomposable” but never absolutely separable. thermodynamics adds that closed systems exist only as abstractions, not realities.

turing extended this unboundedness into computation: the halting problem showed that no machine can decide all aspects of itself. his work on morphogenesis says biological order emerges only in interaction with the environment, and the universal machine itself implies that no formal system is ever fully self-contained. stephen wolfram repackages this with his concept computational irreducibility, the idea that many systems cannot be reduced to any higher-level bounded model. errbody doing art.

so napoleon has told us that strategy is about doing shit not perfectly. art is religion. great, crude, wrong and satisfactory.

now let’s tackle time and space and making.

• time is the structure through which change and information are represented, related, and communicated. it’s a measure for encoding, ordering, and transmitting changes within a system.

• space is the structure through which differences and relations between information are represented and organized. it’s how elements relate across a system.

• definitions that are crude, wrong and satisfactory

• making is creating; creativity is integrating information. more broadly, creativity is the generation and organization of information in unbounded or unpredictable domains.

i’ve said nothing and we have so far pretty much learned nothing.

here is where i think it gets interesting.

the word use.

if my goal is to use space-time it is pretty much implied that i am trying to be optimal. at minimum this is the spirit of the word strategy.

this is where napoleon and american business logic differ.

if i’m drinking some yc kool-aid, i might come up with some american business logic conclusion that the art of making use of time and space is running quick experiments or just doing shit. founder mode, my killa. the tech definition of leverage is something like automation something-something founder mode something some-thing. here is what diego zaks says about velocity.

but if a penguin is not a cat, and sex is more real than porn, and the pope is catholic and my goal is actually to make actual use of the space and time then i have to have a definition of leverage that looks something like the ability to use a small amount of information or action to reduce uncertainty disproportionately across a larger system.¹

in the purest sense strategy is playing with words or concepts, because words are information structures that maximize leverage. said maybe more plainly, conceptual space has lower change cost then any other space. by manipulating words and concepts, you generate maximal “spacetime change” that everything else is built on. in info-theoretic terms, conceptual play with language is like applying energy to a highly connected, unbounded informational network. strategy is the art of making use of time and space. strategy is the art of figuring out the relationship between words within whatever it is your doing.

"systems engineering is very much about finding the correct words to describe the problem (and related risks), so that they can be readily solved via engineering solutions. jack ring said that a systems engineer's job is to "language the project."" — ring et al. 2000

this is a true “maximal creativity per unit action.” strategy is ur immediate theory of categories. (this is obvious if u look at any applied mathematical research paper).

“strategy is the art of making use of time and space”—strategy itself as an act of high-leverage information manipulation in unbounded systems: exploiting the structure of change (time) and relations (space) to produce something.

napoleon’s strategy is just applied creativity—deploying information, resources, and actions to maximize change in the system with minimal effort which means starting with words and there relations².

1. crude, wrong and satisfactory

2. and knowing it ain’t perfect.