Join 📚 Quinn's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .
The danger, and you see it often in investing, is when people become too McNamara-like – so obsessed with data and so confident in their models that they leave no room for error or surprise. No room for things to be crazy, dumb, unexplainable, and to remain that way for a long time. Always asking, “Why is this happening?” and expecting there to be a rational answer. Or worse, always mistaking what happened for what you think should have happened.
The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a neverending chain of absurdity, confusions, messy relationships, and imperfect people.
Does Not Compute
collabfund.com
The Tension Between Organized Behavior at Scale and Individual Needs
Summary:
Large-scale organizations aim for legibility and coherence, but this may lead to a lack of diversity and individual needs.
The educational system's emphasis on GPA overlooks other important skills and qualities.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
One of the most influential ideas for me recently has been from James South's book Seeing Like a State. And Scott has this idea that like what large-hill organizations wants its legibility and legibility is a kind of clear coherence that's aggregatable to a kind of higher level view. So a simple version might be like look if you're a CEO you can't have every department have its own obscure little value system. You need a single collective value system or something close to it so you can get production and profit measures and aggregate them in what Scott says is bring the whole organization Into view. So one way to put my worry is that what would be good for human life is an incredible diversity of bottlenecks which work on different often non-metrified systems. If Scott is right large-scale institutions will tend towards is a kind of monolithic measurement system that moves towards let's have a small number of bottlenecks and let's have A unified measure. And so like the heart of my worry is that organized behavior at scale is inevitably in tension with what a diverse population of individuals needs. And that's just an unfixable problem. Let me just give one quick example. In the educational system the dominant measure is GPA. You can add other like I can write in my notes all kinds of other shit about what students are good at. That barely matters because that's not aggregatable. When a law school admissions officer is doing their spreadsheet to do the first main cutoff nothing in my weird little notes is going to make it into that first level cutoff. The big moving forces just look at GPA.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
The Golden Rule Doesn't Account for Other's Preferences and Interests
The Golden Rule fails to consider individual differences, particularly in power dynamics. It assumes treating others as we want to be treated is ethical, but ignores the possibility that they may have different preferences based on their unique characteristics and circumstances.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The golden rule does not adequately take into account these differences, especially of power. People commonly say, why is it ethical to treat others as we would want to be treated? They may be different than us and may want to be treated differently.
The Golden Rule
In Good We Trust
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