"Big-World Intuitions" by sarahconstantin

Consider the following situations:

• when you are a small, growing startup in a big market, standard advice is not to worry too much about your competitors or try to do anything adversarial “against” them, but just to focus on growing and providing value to your own customers.
  
  
• when you are a small trader in a big market, you don’t need to worry about your trades shifting the market price or revealing information to your competitors; in many contexts, your optimal strategy is simply to bid your true price, buying when an asset is cheaper than your “happy price” and selling when it's more expensive.
  
  
• when you are in the early stages of a game, often your best strategy is to grow your “resources” (like developing your pieces in chess, trying to control more territory and have more value on the board), following a pattern that's mostly independent of what the other players are doing and gets you more of something that's valuable across many possible game states.
  
  
• when you are a species whose resource needs are much smaller than the carrying capacity of your environment, you are r-selected; your fitness is maximized by just [...]
  
  

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 30th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/s22XzjQsrh6JXhXGH/big-world-intuitions

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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