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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 Problem of Scale Clash in Human Collaboration
Summary:
The problem goes beyond ideal scale of humanity.
Different things we want involve different scales. Science works on a huge scale for problems like climate change while other things work on medium or small scales.
There is a clash of different scales and no optimal scale.
The big scales tend to win and squash out the small scales.
However, over long time scales, these complex systems tend to implode. It's about a dynamic balance where different forces coexist. How do we handle this in light of global coordination, bioregional organization, and personal relationships at the neighborhood level?
Transcript:
Speaker 2
I think the problem is even worse than what you're describing I'm going to try to pessimize what you said I mean when you ask me a question like have we gone past the ideal scale of humanity That implies that there is an ideal scale that we could plausibly hit if we could somehow convince people to scale back. For me the real worry is there's no ideal scale of humanity because different things we want to be involved in demand different scales science works really big good on a huge scale solving Problems like climate change our massive scale problems that everyone has to get together on and then there are other things that work at medium or small scales and there's just this Unsolvable scale clash my real worry is that different parts of us and our needs call us to different scales and there is not an optimal scale and so I have to participate in these different Scales or in tension with each other and also the big scales tend to win because they get really powerful and so they squash out the small scales.
Speaker 3
Over short time scales though right because over long time scales those like you know this is the Bob May will a complex system large complex system be stable question it's like at some Point those things tend to implode so it's not about like an equilibrium so much as it is about a a dynamic balance or a zone at which these different forces are able to coexist how do you Deal with all of this in light of both the need for global coordination and bioregional organization and neighborhood level personal relationships etc.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
The Danger of Incorrectly Mapping Between Scientific Measures and Truth
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And it's a problem when scientific culture tolerates too much ambiguity. There's always a caveat there, which is that at the early stage of theory development, sometimes you need ambiguity because you don't actually know really what you're talking about Yet. And so you need to allow for multiple interpretations to be possible until you can figure out what you mean. But a mature theory should be minimally ambiguous. This is at odds with things like metrics in terms of let's say how to evaluate something because people think, oh, well, it's scientific. Therefore, I want to use this to then therefore impose a value judge on something. It's better because it has a higher score on it. But that's not what science is actually able to do. Science can say, it has this score and it measures this thing because what it measures is this. If you say what it measures is this, and therefore it means this other thing, that's a problem because that's a false mapping. And it's not really about ambiguity versus precision. It's about, I think, the imprecision of the mapping between the measure and the term. So if you want to measure something like happiness or economic prosperity, you can say, well, we'll measure the genie coefficient, we'll measure GDP. But those are rigorous, clearly unambiguous measures. They have a meaning. This is what they are. This is how we measure them. We can compare things on this measure. And that's not problematic until you then say, and it is better to have a higher GDP full stop.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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