A disorienting chapter

Some of the readers of the first draft of this chapter commented that it confused them. They felt as if they'd lost the plot because it seemed to conflict with the mental models that had been building up in their minds over the course of the previous chapters. The reason why this chapter confused in this way is because the chapter is not about a personal mental model, but, a model for a whole community.

To illustrate the idea of a Game Theory strategy with heuristic rules I use as an example a community of people who have evolved a set of rules that have worked extremely well for thousands of years. Although these rules apply to individual behaviour, they are designed to make the whole community efficient: not any particular individual. This can be confusing.

The best way to read this chapter is to suspend the mental model you are building for yourself and look at this chapter as only an example of another kind of strategy. Then, at the end of the chapter, you can think about how you might apply the essence of this kind of strategy, used by a community, for your own personal use. It needs a conceptual jump.