📚 Quinn's Highlights

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A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .

The Map is not the Territory Summary: Humans often confuse maps with territories, despite evidence from various disciplines. We wrongly assume that what we measure is what matters, but our values may not have quantifiable metrics. Biometric data can oversimplify complex discussions on health. This conundrum becomes more significant when considering governance on a larger scale. How do we count and operate a nation state wisely? Can social science inform smarter political economies? We must escape the false clarity of information systems that lack collective wisdom. Transcript: Speaker 3 There are maps and there are territories and humans frequently confuse the two. No matter how insistently this point has been made by cognitive neuroscience, epistemology, economics, and a score of other disciplines, one common human error is to act as if we know What we should measure and that what we measure is what matters. But what we value doesn't even always have a metric and even reasonable proxies can distort our understanding of and behavior in the world we want to navigate. Even carefully collected biometric data can include the other factors that determine health or can oversimplify a nuanced conversation on the plural and contextual dimensions Of health, transforming goals like functional fitness into something easier to quantify but far less useful. This philosophical conundrum magnifies when we consider governance at scales beyond those at which homo sapiens evolved to grasp intuitively. What should we count to wisely operate a nation state? How do we practice social science in a way that can inform new, smarter species of political economy? And how can we escape this seductive but false clarity of systems that reign information but do not enhance collective wisdom?

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

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Organizational Entropy: the tendency for artifacts you produce to start rotting immediately Summary: Any artifact produced within an organization immediately begins to deteriorate, much like a new car losing its value. Once published, such as a memo, it begins to become outdated. Entropy, in this context, always increases, requiring continual input of energy to prevent deterioration. This demands the creation of reinforcement mechanisms to ensure that all content remains current and functional, such as periodically checking and updating a database of memos. Transcript: Speaker 1 Organizational entropy, which is any artifact that you produce immediately starts rotting the moment that you have created it. Speaker 2 It's like driving a new car after a lot. Speaker 1 Yeah, the moment that anything is published in the company, you write a memo, it is already rotting. It is already going to be out of date. And so the concept of entropy is it is always increasing. And so the only way to keep entropy at bay is you have to add more energy into the system. So you have to create reinforcement mechanisms for any piece of content that you have. If you have a database of all your memos, you have to check them every once in a while to make sure they're up to date. You need to create more energy always has to go in in order to keep things fresh and functional.

#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

Left unchecked, your team members move from one task to the next, doing the easiest things, the things someone asked them to do, or simply the things right in front of them. Especially as stress increases, prioritization effectiveness declines. In one study of 43,000 encounters of doctors and patients, researchers found that when the workload was heaviest, physicians prioritized their easiest cases, leaving the most severe cases to wait the longest – a tendency known as “completion bias” (Gino and Staats 2016). Among all professions, it can be easy to get sucked into an endless stream of activities that feel like progress but that leave tomorrow looking much like yesterday.

The Leader Lab

Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger

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