The need for small teams of supreme intellectuals (Feynman, von Neumann tier) is paramount if a difficult challenge is to be overcome. Institutions predicated on extensive collaboration between large teams (like the EU/India) fail miserably due to the number of compromises that need to be made. Curtis Yarvin points to an alternative which is a top down monarchical authority capable of uniting a large team, however this doesn’t always work. Philip Tetlock puts forward a good argument as for why top down leadership isn’t always successful by alluding to the success of the Wehrmacht which possessed the mentality of decentralized decision making on the front lines to accelerate the rate of response to changes in plans, e.g. low ranked troops being able to hold top generals to scrutiny and pursue alternative methods of getting an objective done if real life circumstances deviated from pre-drawn plans – live updating if you will. The Wehrmacht was still fundamentally top down and hierarchical.

This can still be integrated into the top down approach wisely, for example tasking local jurisdictions with issuing x amount of vaccines by date y, giving them a rough outline of how it can by done, but letting them put together a small task force who can plan a response specific to the environment they are in, as a generalized approach will not be optimized perfectly.

Science has deeper problems. It is a prestige system, but now that there are fewer groundbreaking discoveries and far more scientists, there isn’t enough prestige to go around. You can’t just phone up Niels Bohr anymore, you’re left with his intern’s intern or whatever. Any old iq >140 person can learn all of these scientific facts, but they just don’t have the same disposition as Feynman, etc. There is a military paper talking about this problem of peacetime vs wartime generals. Basically, in peacetime you get a bunch of agreeable people who know how to please their superiors. These skills have no bearing on what a real general needs which is making calculated risks. Real generals will have lowly ranks (because they’re disagreeable people), and you need to spend the first part of any war finding them. I am interested to know if this helps explain why Israel produces high quality of science/tech.