The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Book: The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth's Past #2)

Notes

• Synopsis:

  • Trisolarans on the way
  • Wallfacer Luo Ji
  • Dark Forest principle
  • Zhang Beihai’s character - never reveal what one’s thinking - only one who prepares for Dark battle

• A logical way of looking at sociology, with the axioms for Cosmic Sociology

  • Every civilization’s main goal is to ensure its own survival at any cost.
  • Universe has a limited set of resources.
  • Technological explosion - a focused effort - due to intrinsic or extrinsic factors - can lead to a step increase in technical innovation.

• The above axioms lead to the following corollaries:

  • Chain of suspicion
  • Dark Forest principle

• Dealing with an adversary in an asymmetric setting, where 1. they know everything about your technology, but not vice-versa, 2. they can limit/sabotage your technology, but not vice-versa? - This isn’t too different from how battles have been fought in the past. Boyd’s OODA loop comes to mind about dealing with this. Spy craft and use of cloaks and illusions to send enemy on wrong track. For e.g. when India was working on the second series of nuclear tests in 1998, they had to use similar mechanisms to avoid surveillance from US satellites. The Wallfacer project is a similar mechanism.

• Dark Forest principle: It feels like a variation of N-body prisoners dilemma problem. The idea that if you are in an area with limited resources and where you can’t trust anyone else, not revealing your location is the best strategy and if you know the location of someone else, unless you’ve a reliable mechanism for MAD, it’s rational to take the other out as long it doesn’t reveal your own location. This is how snipers operate as well.
• You don’t know what you don’t know and its better to take precautions: I expect this to be standard practice for any military engagement. “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst”. I wonder how much of the coverage of the interception of the probe is realistic. There are aspects that might explain the mistakes - 1. Overconfidence might be explained by the ignorance of history by the post-Ravine civilization. A common complaint against the Millennials is their inexperience with dealing with failure and the resulting overconfidence., 2. The infighting between the fleets resulting in the tight formations - is this grounded in reality? Did this happen during the past wars - such as the allied forced during WW II, or the two Gulf wars? Militaries are usually trained to be rational, but perhaps it’s still possible.
• Transience of human memory: In an extremely elongated mission - either a military engagement or a project, how do you continue to keep everyone motivated towards the goal? Here organization design seems related. Large organizations like GE, IBM, Google, Amazon, Microsoft have to deal with similar issues for survival. Instead of death, they’ve to deal with attrition. Instead of defeatism/escapism, they’ve to deal with diffusion of direction/vision due to attrition/new team-members with different world view. Jeff Bezos focused on 1. communication using succinct leadership principles repeated over and over again, 2. bar raisers to ensure quality was maintained, 3. “Strong opinions weakly held” to avoid local maxima. Patrick Collison focused on ensuring a high bar for the early team hires - the seed - to ensure the company can scale the correct way.
• There’s a part in the book where they’re trying to figure out the societal structure for Spaceship Earth, where Zhang Beihai calls out two critical use-cases: 1. Diversity of opinion is key to ensure good ideas can bubble up, 2. Ability to react quickly in case of emergency. The first rules out a purely totalitarian govt, the second a purely democratic one. I wish Cixin Liu had spent more time on this - perhaps he’ll cover this Death’s End. It appears the Romans had such a society, with the democratic council, but also a military.
• The book uses as a plot point Roger Penrose’s theory of the source of human intelligence at the quantum level interactions, instead of emergence from the neuron connectivity. The latter is something Steve Grand believed in in his work, and his description of it in Creation.
• Notes about the future society:
  • People still want to dress up the same way, But clothes will be made of adaptive materials that’ll fit to its wearer.
  • There’ll be flying cars
  • Power will be distributed via microwaves.
  • language (accents/vocabulary will change, but the language will persist) pp309