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Risk tolerance in org change: When 1 bad thing happens, don't pave over it with rules
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Two is, and Sam, like you and I have talked about this a million times, like there is such a bias around risk where it's like this thing happened once. Now we make a rule for it. Now we have to uphold that rule in perpetuity. And that is what we call work debt. We don't even know if that one thing would ever happen again. But now we have hours and time and money and cycles and cycles and cycles probably forever because let's be honest, we're never going to unwrite that rule for what might have been a one Off. And so on the one hand, I think like that person's perspective is really valid. On the other hand, I'm like, if you want to be strategic, you have to learn to look at risk a little bit differently, which is that you can never eliminate it. You are always doing stuff with the issue in the rear view.
The Future of HR — Building Your Capabilities, Pt. 1 - Getting to Level 3
At Work with The Ready
To Eliminate Undesirable Behavior, You Have to Eliminate The Stimuli That Precedes It
Summary:
Self-control problems require structuring life to avoid stimuli that tempt bad behavior, similar to avoiding walking past a tavern if you're an alcoholic.
Investors can improve mental hygiene by unfollowing negative sources and following those with a long-term perspective to reduce hyper reactivity to market fluctuations. Changing exposure helps in turning down the amplitude of emotions.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
But if you 're an alcoholic, you would be crazy to walk past the tavern and say, i will demonstrate the will power not to walk in. You can't do that, and you know you can't, so you walk on the other street. And that's the kind of governor that people need to put on their behavior. If you know that you have self control problems, you have to structure your life so that the things that tempt you into bad behavior don't get surfaced in your stimuli. And that's very easy for investors to do. If you, if you know you have a tendency toward hyper reactivity to, you know, red arrows pointing downward on stock market displays, then turn that web site off, un follow that person On twitter. Follow people who take a longer term perspective and aren't rattled by this kind of thing. Improve your mental hygiene. You can't turn yourself into someone who's unemotional, but you can turn down the amplitude of your own emotions if you change what your exposures are.
#4 Jason Zweig — Elevate Your Financial IQ
The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish
How Measurability/Mathematical Bias Limits the Scope of Scientific Inquiry and Human Discovery
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So there's this old paper from the, I think, 1960s by Eugene Vigner, the Nobel Prize physicist. It's called something like, on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. The fun paper, and he's like, there's no good reason why mathematics should work as well as it does. And there's no good reason why there should be a tool that allows humans to predict things as well as math does. There's no good reason. It's kind of nuts. And we should all just be grateful. And he says some other things, but he's basically just kind of being all about how great mathematics is and how there's no good reason why it should be. And it's pretty cool that it does work so well. I think that there's a counter to that, which is that not everything is that easily described that mathematics. And there's lots of things for which mathematics is not that effective at describing. And it's actually just the things that were well described or easily described by mathematics are the things that were discovered using mathematical tools. They're the things that lend themselves that were amenable to mathematical inquiry. And a lot of the things that we're interested in terms of social science and cognitive science and the related philosophical inquiry are things that are much less tangible in terms Of this kind of specification. And you can see it like in a physics equation, right, a physical theory, whether it's about mass or electricity or something else, right, you have a theory about how things work. And then you can write out equations. And all the terms in the equations have units. And they are all directly related to the things that are measurable. The theories are directly about relationships between things that are measured. And in social theories and cognitive theories, so often our theories are about relating constructs. And then we have proxy measurements, but the theory isn't about the relationship between the proxy measures. The theory is about the constructs and the relationships between the constructs that are social in nature, that are cognitive in nature, but aren't the things that are being measured. And so there's this gap. And I don't know the extent to which that gap can be overcome.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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