📚 Quinn's Highlights

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Perverse Incentives Select for People Who Are the Best at Exploiting a Given System Summary: The original deans and administrators burn out due to their dislike of the US News and World Report rankings and are replaced by individuals driven by ranking success. This shift reflects a difference in mentality between valuing money as a means of support versus valuing money as the sole purpose of life. Similarly, pursuing publications and citations for a job versus making them the ultimate goal shows a significant distinction. However, these differences are connected through a temporal dynamic where initially people adapt their behavior to succeed in a flawed system. The system then filters out those who can best exploit it, resulting in the selection of individuals with specific values. Transcript: Speaker 2 What happens later on, the original deans and administrators burn out because of how much they hate the US news and rule report rankings, and they get replaced by people who are all it. They think the only point is to rise in the rankings. And those people don't hold back. They only have one target. I think something similar is the difference between so realizing I need a lot of money in order to a decent amount of money to support my family, but not thinking money is the point of life. And similarly, realizing that getting a decent number of publications and citations is necessary for a job versus thinking the goal of my life is to max out citations. And for me, there's a huge gulf between those things. Speaker 1 Well, here's where I think they're connected because I see the difference and I understand the difference you're talking about. But I think the difference is that is this temporal dynamic, right, where you start out with, let's say, perverse incentives and people saying, well, I don't necessarily value these Things, but I have to shape my behavior in order to succeed in this system. But the thing is, the system being the way it is creates a filter. And the people who are the best at figuring out how to operate in that are the ones that then end up being successful. And they're the ones that teach the next generation or emulated by the next generation. And over time, the people for whatever reasons, psychologically or behaviorally or ever their path is, are best able to exploit the system are going to be able to thrive in it. And I think that because of that, you end up selecting for people with certain kinds of values, because they're going to be the people who there's always exceptions, but are going to Be best able to thrive in this kind of thing.

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Level's Company Onboarding Process Summary: The company has a well-guided onboarding checklist for all employees, which spans over a full month. Each new employee is guided to take onboarding seriously, and not expected to start producing for the first month. There is emphasis on reading specific documentation that outlines the company's culture, which is highlighted as significantly different from past experiences. The company eases new employees into the transparency of operations and has a unique practice of requiring employees to update the onboarding process at the end of the month, reflecting the value that 'everything's written in pencil' and is subject to change. Transcript: Speaker 1 And we have an onboarding checklist in notion. We have a template. We copy it for each new person that joins and they have a set of tasks that they do each day. It's pretty well guided. I can share the template with you if you're curious. That'd be amazing. Speaker 2 I would love that. Is this for all employees or EA specifically? All employees. All employees. Okay. Speaker 1 And there is a video of me at the start of each week. It's a loom where I specifically say, Hey, at this point, people usually want to skip onboarding and start jumping into their tasks. Don't do that. It's always a mistake. Really take onboarding seriously. Our onboarding process is a full month. And we don't expect people to start producing for a month. It really does take that long for a lot of people to get fully up to speed. And we help guide them in more slowly. Read these books. Read this documentation that we have about how we built our culture, especially for our case, because the way that we operate is very different than a lot of people's previous experiences. And so it's pretty jarring when you see a lot of the transparency of when your first one on one gets published to the rest of the company, it's pretty jarring. Speaker 2 And so we try to ease people into these things. You know, it's also going to be jarring is if you become a public company, yeah, totally. Things will have to change a bit. Probably. But yeah, continues. All right. That's a job. Speaker 1 That's true. And over time, people get used to it over the course of about a month. I think the biggest thing is the cultural assimilation. In our case, has been the biggest hurdle over the course of onboarding is getting people reading the memos, practicing some of the things. One of the cultural values that we have is everything's written in pencil. But also you can change things here. And one of the things that we do is at the end of onboarding, everybody is required to update the onboarding process for something that was out of date, and then post to a channel confirming What they changed and just giving a list of what they changed. And it's pretty weird for people, especially those who come from larger companies, like when they've had, you know, the same onboarding process that the company's had for 20 years, And then they go in the actual files and edit it themselves. I'm a new employee.

#694 — Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go

The Tim Ferriss Show

The Expert Identification Problem and the Challenges of Democratic Decision-Making Key takeaways: • The expert identification problem is a major concern when it comes to trusting experts in a democracy. • Democracies aim to harness the intellectual power of diversity for better solutions. • The challenge lies in recognizing the best solutions when they require expertise that the democratic entity may not possess. • There is no clear solution to this problem, and democracy remains the best way to organize society according to the speaker. Transcript: Speaker 2 So for a long time I would say that the problem I've been most obsessed with is something I call the expert identification problem it's like how does the non-expert figure out which expert To trust if they don't have the expertise and one of the worries about a democracy is that it runs straight into the expert identification problem right like if we're democratically Voting on what to do we are aggregate non-experts I mean I'm not talking here about like oh we are the experts and you all are not even if you are the world expert in X you're a non-expert In a million other fields right so as an aggregate we are non-expert so here's the real worry for me if you have the right solution how would that get democratically approved Helen Landemore Is this a political theorist I really like she's part of a movement who are epistemic democrats and they think that democracies are the best way to harness the intellectual power of Diversity and the basic model is something like diverse people will come up with a better set of solutions and when you put them together the best solutions will rise to the top and my Worry is how will the democratic entity recognize which are the best solutions because if the best solution requires expertise to recognize and the democratic entity as an aggregate Is not an expert how will they figure it out and that's a problem I'm not sure there's a solution to and I also can't think of a better way to organize the world than democratically

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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