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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

Two Models of Searching for Truth: Unearthing the Truth v.s. Growing Into The Truth Summary: Science is like carving away everything that isn't truth, but I think it's more like an infinite vacuum with trees growing in all directions. The search for truth is complex and ever-expanding. It's like ecology, where species have multiple solutions to a problem, which continually changes. I believe in infinite diversity and combinations, and that complexity can emerge from simplicity. Instead of focusing on the core, we should expect to branch out. Transcript: Speaker 2 One metaphor I like is that I think some people have as their image of science. Imagine we're sitting on the surface of a sphere, and they think they're kind of digging down to the core of the truth. They're discarding the earth beneath them, the falsities, and they're going to hit the truth. Speaker 1 We're carving away everything that isn't science, you're saying? Speaker 2 Yeah. And I think that the image I have instead is there's an infinite vacuum outside of that sphere, and there are trees growing out from the surface of the sphere in all directions. And as they grow out, more space is available, and they branch and expand. And that just goes on, and it gets more and more complex the further you get out. And that's kind of how I think of the search for the truth. That strikes people maybe initially is a little bit weird. I guess that's how I interpret like beginning of infinity, David Deutsches' phrase. But another way to see that is ecology, the way the species were. Species are all after some abstracted fitness landscape, I guess is one way to conceive of it. But somehow we don't end up with one solution to that problem. In fact, we get a bunch of solutions to the problem, and as that problem gets solved, it actually changes the problem, because now for all the other species you've got to deal with, and There's other species that you can eat, there's all kinds of stuff going on. That's how I think about it. I eat reflecting infinite diversity and infinite combinations. I think that there's just a lot of things going on, and you can build a lot of complexity from a small set of ingredients. And you shouldn't expect to get down to the core, you should expect to branch out from the core.

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Increasing Returns (Order) in a System is a Product of Disorder, Numerosity, and Feedback Summary: Disorder, in tandem with feedback, leads to order. Feedback occurs when information is transmitted and found by others, creating a cycle. This feedback, combined with disorder, results in the phenomenon of increasing returns, where random decisions influence subsequent decisions. Increasing returns in a system depend on disorder, feedback, and the involvement of a sufficient number of individuals. Transcript: Speaker 1 The next one on the list will be feedback. So the disorder only in tandem with feedback is going to lead to order. And the and trail again, an example, the feedback is coming from one end going out, finding something interesting as happenstance by accident. And then it leaves information. Another and finds it. And that's where the feedback starts. And this feedback is, you know, just like, I believe, Brian Arthur was talking about increasing returns. Initially, something random happens. Someone makes a random decision and a few more, say, people make a random decision. And that leads other people to not make a random decision, but make a decision based on that previous one. So this increasing returns phenomenon is a combination of disorder and feedback. And of course, the morosity, you need a few people to make it happen.

The 10 Features of Complex Systems — Part 1

Simplifying Complexity

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