The Mafia Boss Effect
On the mob, money and magick
There is an almost universally prevalent trope in video games that is quite goofy, but I love: The concept of a “boss battle.”
After your protagonist has fought their way through lots of easy to dispose lower level enemies, they will encounter the “boss”, who will be the toughest to fight yet, often many many many times more powerful than any previous enemy, with much higher stats, special abilities, etc.
Narratively, this is super fun. It’s a climactic finale for your journey.
But if we step out of the narrative lens for a moment, this is…extremely silly, and not at all how things tend to work in reality.
The Mafia Boss
As a standin for a set of “video game enemies”, lets take the example of real life organized crime.
Which members of an organized crime syndicate will be the most violent and dangerous hand to hand? The young, buff, new recruits itching to prove themselves…or the 50s something balding don?
In real life, the “boss” of an operation (whether criminal, corporate, or otherwise) is often among the least physically threatening, often due to age. If I had to get into a boxing ring with a low level mafia gangbanger or the elderly don…hm well actually I’d still probably take the gangbanger…even though I would probably have much better physical chances against the elderly “boss”. But why do I have that intuition?
If I, in real life, were to actually encounter a mafia boss1, I would probably be extremely intimidated. Much more so than I would be from meeting some low level street crimimal.2
There’s clearly an important way in which the boss is, in “emotional/narrative space”, way scarier than they are in “physical space”.
Why is that?
The obvious first answer: If I did anything to piss off the boss, his goons would fold me like laundry.
So in some sense, the boss has the “strength” of not just one elderly italian man, but of a whole (potentially large) squad of young, extremely violent italian men.
Where is the boss healthbar located?
Lets spin this further: Another video game trope is that the boss has a huge “healthbar”, which indicates how super powerful they are compared to other enemies.
If in real life, the boss is super powerful, but that “power” is not “located in their physical body”, where is it?
It is “located” in the minds of other people.
The “resource” the boss has accumulated over his career, the thing that makes him dangerous is the setting of variables in other people’s heads.
This phenomena generalizes, a lot.
Money
Where is the “value” of money located? Why is a US dollar so much more useful than a monopoly dollar? Is it because it’s structural integrity or pretty colors?
No, it’s because many, many people have put a lot of effort into making sure that “the US dollar is valuable” is set in many people’s minds.
And this is recursive. The reason many people want the US dollar, is because other people have in their mind set that they want it too. This makes it useful, and hence, desirable.
This is the exact same effect that makes the mob boss powerful.
There is nothing physically within the mob boss that makes him powerful, nor is there anything physical inside the dollar that makes it valuable, it’s the state of other people’s minds that make it valuable/powerful.
Magick
I care about this phenomena a lot, because it is a fundamental primitive of reality that is (usually) obvious when pointed out, but not before that.
Many, many things that are important3 are hard or impossible to discuss or reason about cleanly if you don’t have the concept in your mind that “the value/power of something can be located not-in-their-body and not-in-physical-traits”.
Especially the latter (“not-in-physical-traits”) can sometimes be confusing to people, in both directions: Some think that, because a mafia boss isn’t actually physically stronger than his goons, he is in some sense a fraud; while others make the mistake of thinking that the power is located in some kind of supernatural property, rather than being very much physically encoded in the neurons of his subordinates.
The power of money has a physical location. It is just not in the money itself, it’s in the neurons of many many people.
Having this intuition is fundamental to thinking about even more confusing concepts.
I have never encountered one so far, but my emails are open if you are a mafia boss and wanna talk about superintelligence!
I have in fact met low level street criminals before, and as long as you aren’t actively on their shit list, it’s mostly pretty chill.
Such as: Status, laws, institutions, culture, religion, magic spells, mass hysteria, coordination…