April 25, 2020 • #
Benedict Evans looks at what could return to normal after coronavirus, and what else might have accelerated change that was already happening.
“Every time we get a new kind of tool, we start by making the new thing fit the existing ways that we work, but then, over time, we change the work to fit the new tool. You’re used to making your metrics dashboard in PowerPoint, and then the cloud comes along and you can make it in Google Docs and everyone always has the latest version. But one day, you realise that the dashboard could be generated automatically and be a live webpage, and no-one needs to make those slides at all. Today, sometimes doing the meeting as a video call is a poor substitute for human interaction, but sometimes it’s like putting the slides in the cloud.”
One of the things continually aggravating about all of the data, models, projections, and analyses about COVID-19 is how little anyone cares to retroactively analyze prior predictions. Over the last two months the predictions have been all over the map, and as time marches on and many are wrong, some are right, there’s no analysis of what assumptions were made that turned out not to be true causing the wide divergence between projection and reality.
Peter Attia calls out here something rarely acknowledged about why projections are wicked:
“Projections only matter if you can hold conditions constant from the moment of your prediction, and even then, it’s not clear if projections and models matter much at all if they are not based on actual, real-world data. In the case of this pandemic, conditions have changed dramatically (e.g., aggressive social distancing), while our data inputs remain guesswork at best.”
Nassim Taleb, making his way into the New Yorker.
December 21, 2019 • #
Farnam Street:
Time is our most fundamental constraint. If you use an hour for one thing, you can’t use it for anything else. Time passes, whatever we do with it. It seems beneficial then to figure out the means of using it with the lowest possible opportunity costs. One of the simplest ways to do this is to establish how you’d like to be using your time, then track how you’re using it for a week. Many people find a significant discrepancy. Once we see the gulf between the tradeoffs we’re making and the ones we’d rather be making, it’s easier to work on changing that.
The article reminds me of Sowell on economics. Take this and apply to any other life domain:
Economics is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses.
A timeless one from Paul Graham, 2006. On the advantages of outsiders:
Even in a field with honest tests, there are still advantages to being an outsider. The most obvious is that outsiders have nothing to lose. They can do risky things, and if they fail, so what? Few will even notice.
The eminent, on the other hand, are weighed down by their eminence. Eminence is like a suit: it impresses the wrong people, and it constrains the wearer.
Outsiders should realize the advantage they have here. Being able to take risks is hugely valuable. Everyone values safety too much, both the obscure and the eminent. No one wants to look like a fool. But it’s very useful to be able to. If most of your ideas aren’t stupid, you’re probably being too conservative. You’re not bracketing the problem.
This is an extension of the Amazon mantra of forcing your team to “write the press release” for a product or feature before starting on it. The goal is to concretely visualize the end state as clearly as you can, and get on the same page strategically to outline the why of what you’re building. The PR FAQ is another assistive technique for setting and articulating the goal.
December 19, 2019 • #
This piece resonated in the wake of the mess around California’s AB5 legislation, which puts limitations on classifying workers as independent contractors. The backlash to AB5 shows how it’s a case study in unintended consequences.
The modern interventionist’s view wildly overestimates how well problems are understood, and what the second- or third-order consequences of an intervention might be.
I’m reminded here of Hayek’s quote on economics (applicable to any uncertain, massively complex field):
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
In complicated, many-sided issues like the AB5 one, it makes sense to take small steps to react to the issue at hand (which is, admittedly, a mess and imperfect for employees). Sweeping steps like AB5 feel good and address one problem while simultaneously generating multiple others.
November 27, 2019 • #
I found this piece cited in Taleb’s Antifragile, a unique case of an author citing a paper that was itself inspired by a galley of that book. The concept of “antifragility” (systems that gain or improve from disorder, volatility, and chaos) is fascinating. All organic or organic-like systems (economies, social orders) fall into this category, and here we see the concepts applied in biology:
Living systems are antifragile in that they can do much more than simply respond to the “pressure” of the environment by random mutations followed by selection; they have an in-built property that allows them to find solutions in the face of adversity. Antifragility is one such property. It unfolds not only in individual organisms, which age much slower than what could be expected from a fragile entity, but also in the way they generate a progeny. All these processes have in common the ability to create some novel information: antifragility cannot be separated from management of information.
In the paper the authors explore flexible protein development and how the “tinkering” process gives organisms a way to improve in robustness over time:
Choosing among a variety of antifragile processes, we discuss the existence of (literally) flexible proteins and the processes in which they participate. We show how this could help delay the senescence process, providing an example of how tinkering and antifragility work together during ageing.