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Hurry up and Wait

· 2 min read

"Hurry up and wait: The coming amplification of human effort"


I have attempted to express our waiting strategy in a formula. Waiting is almost never the right choice, but we are looking at a once in a lifetime amplification of effort. The below formula then applies:

As an example for a 12 month project, waiting makes sense anywhere up to 8 months, if we consider an amplication factor of 3:

However I think our amplification will be more like 10x or higher, since we will be amplifying the number of humans we can command, and they will be amplified also.

I'm not sure how to accurate express that type of interdependent amplification, but its large, anyways. This is why we think it is best to focus solely on getting the amplification tooling working for ourselves first, then leverage that to do other tasks.

From this graph, the amplification factor isn't nearly as dominant as both the time to wait for the amplification to arrive and the total project time for the intended use of the amplification. Hence why doing nothing else but getting the amplication tooling working seems best, and given that we have many projects we can target with it, of varying time frames, there is almost no delay for the tooling that isn't worth waiting for, especially in the variances we are expecting, which worst case another 6 months worth of revisions, which seems highly unlikely