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The people with the most accurate models of others tend to have diverse social networks
Summary:
To correct for this handicap, we need to listen to the oppressed in the population.
This includes laborers, students, and others who are usually not given a political voice. By expanding our social networks to include more diverse perspectives, policymakers can make better decisions based on a deeper understanding of societal trends and people's desires.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
But it sounds like this gives us a really clear pointer on how to correct for this handicap. And that we really ought to be like, perhaps when it comes time to make decisions on behalf of everyone, we should really be listening to whomever the oppressed are in that population. We should be really paying attention, for example, to laborers and students and people that are ordinarily not historically, not given a lot of political voice. And what you're saying, yeah, it's in other words, what we need to do is broader our social networks include in our social networks, those people who are typically not there. So if the policymakers who are making these important decisions should know as many different people as possible. And we show in related studies that people who have most diverse social circles are also best able to predict societal trends and to understand how the overall population lives and What people want.
Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-Making
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
Why Bigger Animals Live Longer: The Relationship between Size, Energy, and Longevity
Summary:
The larger an animal is, the more efficient it becomes in terms of energy consumption.
This is because the self-similar fractal structure of larger animals allows them to save energy. Bigger animals require less energy proportionally to run their bodies due to the massive amount of tissue per gram or per cell.
As a result, bigger animals experience less wear and tear and live longer than smaller animals.
The reason for less wear and tear is that bigger animals use less energy and create less damage, reducing entropy.
This principle can also be observed in machines, where those subjected to less stress and driven at lower revs per minute tend to last longer.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
So that's why we don't need to double our metabolism when we double our weight. It's that fractal like self similarity that allows us to get these essentially efficient savings in the amount of energy we need. So it's better to be bigger, isn't it? Because you don't need as much energy proportionally to run yourself. Correct.
Speaker 1
So you need massive tissue per gram of tissue or per cell. You need less energy, the bigger you are. And by the way, this has huge consequences throughout all aspects of biology and life. And maybe one just to tie it back to the beginning of this discussion where we started out by talking about aging and mortality. This means that the bigger you are, the less hard your cell is working. The bigger you are, there's less wear and tear the longer you live systematically. So this is the origin of why bigger things live longer than smaller things.
Speaker 2
And why is there less wear and tear if you're bigger?
Speaker 1
You're using less energy and creating less entropy. That is you're creating less damage the bigger you are because simply you're using much less energy if you have an engine, an automobile and you insist on racing it at 10,000 revs per Minute every time you drive it, I can assure you that car will not live as long as a car that's driven by a little old lady or a little old man like me who keeps the revs at about two or three Thousand revs per minute. So you know, cars and machines last much longer, the less stress you put on them.
Scaling 2 — You and I Are Fractals
Simplifying Complexity
DEEP Framework: Documenting Decisions, Events, Explanations, and Proposals in Your Org
Summary:
The DEEP framework emphasizes the documentation of decisions, urging the recording of the rationale behind business and general decisions.
It also stresses the importance of documenting events such as meetings and town halls, highlighting the need for summarization. Furthermore, the framework encourages documenting explanations, especially in the context of onboarding, as they often involve repeated material.
Lastly, it emphasizes documenting proposals or ideas, allowing individuals to present their rationale to others and providing time for considered reactions.
The acronym 'DEEP' serves as a reminder for teams to consider the documentation created within their workflow.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So I came up with an acronym as well, and I call that acronym deep. I think you'll identify with some of these. So deep for decisions, if there's ever a decision, then you should record the rationale for it. And we've talked about it endlessly on our tech radar's decision record systems. But I extend that to business decisions as well and general decisions as well. So similar format. Then there's events. So you have a town hall, you have a meeting, all of those are events, right? And you better document them for the benefit of other people. And when I say document, I mean, summarize, sure, you can have a recording or snippets of recordings if they are useful for people, but the summary is the more important thing. Then there's explanations, and I found these very useful in the context of onboarding, because there's a lot of explainer material that gets repeated in onboarding. And those are definitely great candidates for documentation. And the last one is proposals. And I called that proposals, but really I'm trying to talk about things like ideas. So let's take an example. I want to use this new library on my project. I have a certain rationale for it. Let me write down the thought process. What value is it going to bring? Let me present it to everyone. Everyone has the time to consume it. Oftentimes we go into decision making with a lot of cognitive load, where, you know, Ken explains in rapid fire things that he's been thinking about for the last 15 days. And now I have to consume it in the next 30 minutes and give Ken a year or nay. It's really difficult because Ken's done all the deep thinking, I need the time to process it and writing gives me the time to process it, right? And I can also not give knee jerk reactions, but considered reactions. So proposals, and that starts to include design documentation, idea papers, any kinds of proposals that you make on the team. So that acronym deep is a good trigger for teams to kind of hold on to and think about what is the documentation we're creating in the flow of work.
Asynchronous Collaboration — Getting It Right
Thoughtworks Technology Podcast
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