Big boon here is that whoever figures something new out loses it to us quickly, but we also circulate techs back out at a slower pace.
This, including the outflow, is actually good for us. Take the anatomy knowledge, we cannot really advance it ourselves. What if the Khemetri pick up on the anatomy lore, take it home and then...practice it on some of their unfortunates?
The improved anatomy lore will backflow towards us.
While we lose advantages to them, it pretty much ensures we stay on top of the relative advantage game. Whoever gets a new trick, we get it. Then we pass out our old tricks, whatever refinements come to us again. It's thus, only a net demerit when the tech is transferred to a power that can better leverage it, or when transferred to someone so far behind they can't backflow anything.
I call BS on this. Other people getting our tech for free is a
good thing for our polity, and "ensures we stay on top of the relative advantage game"? Really?
If we leak a tech that we are leading and actively working on to people (e.g. Iron), all that does is let other polities catch up, closing our lead.
If we leak a tech that we are leading and NOT actively working on to people (e.g. Anatomy, at least according to your example), that again closes our lead, and then when others overtake us it lets us not keep behind
too much. We still went from being ahead to being behind; congratulations.
If we leak tech that we are not leading in, then both ourselves and the person we leaked it to are still going to be behind the current leader, and the current leader is the one we would want to tech-drain off of anyway. So we've just let some stragglers catch up to us for no advantage.
The only case where your logic works is if we are leading, are not actively working on the tech, and leak it to one and only one polity, using them to "outsource" our research. In that case, we still lose relative advantage to them, possibly massively so, but our relative advantage to others grows. To that, I say, "perhaps". But I wouldn't count on us being able to leak to a single polity, the conditions of leading but not actively advancing aren't that common, it is unclear whether our inwards tech drain is enough to reliably "catch up" to whoever we passed our research to, and even if all of that worked perfectly there is no guarantee that the researcher won't just sell/gift/spread the tech elsewhere.
So no. An effect that says "helps other people catch up to you" does NOT improve our relative advantage.
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