Water-drinking example of macro landscape-warping, micro problem-solving

The process by which complex systems achieve goal states involves “higher level” aspects of the system adjusting the incentives under which the lower levels of the system operate (principle 6), so that when the lower-level aspects of the system optimize for their own goals, they inadvertently end up contributing to the goals of the broader systems. This sounds complicated, but it’s an ordinary and entirely familiar process. You do it every time you drink water out of a cup.

When you go to drink water, you need the water to behave in a way that accomplishes your goals. But there’s no way you can command the water to just do what you want it to do (principle 1). Instead, the water is just going to do whatever the water wants to do—in particular, the water wants to go down. You can exploit this fact by warping the energy landscape that the water acts within, i.e., you can change where down is. You do this by tilting the cup so that the water that was previously down is now up. The water tries to solve this problem by moving down. Since it’s entirely predictable where the water will move, you can exploit this by positioning your mouth in the path of the water as it runs down, enabling you to drink it with very little effort. The water does most of the work. By shaping its energy landscape, you can ensure that the work it does works for you.