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Inversion: Avoiding stupidity is easier than trying to be brilliant. Instead of asking, “How can I help my company?” you should ask, “What’s hurting my company the most and how can I avoid it?” Identify obvious failure points, and steer clear of them.
50 Ideas That Changed My Life - David Perell
perell.com
The tension between the ambiguity of individuals' goals and large scale collective organization
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Here's the pessimistic nightmare. It is really good and healthy for human beings to live in an ambiguous environment with a pluralistic set of goals, many of which are in Kuwait. That is an essential tension with the methods of large scale collective organization. If it's true that for an organization to cohere, it needs to have clear policies so it can act coherently, then we should not expect that kind of ambiguity to survive at scale. And I think what you're describing, so I tend to think about since I'm a philosopher like what makes something constitutively coherent. And what you're describing is a kind of evolutionary process. You know, some organizations are going to be more coherent than others and some people are more interested in coherence. And the people that are more interested in following the strict outcome are going to arise in the organization. And the organizations that have clear outcomes are going to be better at achieving those outcomes. And so our world is going to be full of large organizations staffed with people that have very, very clear specifications of outcomes. And there's something inhumane and bad about that for individuals. But that's what happens when we need to organize in large scale collectives.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
Feeling like a speck in the wind amongst massive Societal systems
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I mean we have thousands of years of human history where you know since the agricultural revolution and the dawn of city-states it's just been constant change and one could argue that On a longish you know say century timescale we haven't been at equilibrium in 10,000 years what's next right how are all these nested feedback loops churning around between you know Societal structure and environmental structure to change the shape of society in the next couple hundred years Peter Turchin probably knows this better than I do but this is where I think thinking about these things at population scales rather than individual scales is it really helps me because when I think about things at the individual level like what can I do how do I live in the society right I find myself slightly distraught about like well I don't know I'm just a speck in the wind getting blown around by this maelstrom of society by trying To sort of think about the way the whole system is of all thing I can see it's not that I'm hurtling through space it's that we're all hurtling through space together in similar ways and That creates patterns that can then be identified what do you do with those patterns well then you know you get a professorship and you get to talk about it that helps sometimes
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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