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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 Once published, such as a memo, it begins to become outdated.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 It is already going to be out of date.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

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

Perspectives on Organizational Strategy & Coordination: Optimizing for Few Coherent Goals v.s. Many Incoherent Goals Transcript: Speaker 1 I think one of the things where the corporate world is actually much better at this than the academic world or the educational world, because their goal is profit. So it's very clear. It's much harder to say what the goal of an educational institution is. It feels like it should be obvious, but within the general goal of like we want to produce successful, well-rounded people, there's a lot of disagreement about what the goals are. And so shaping the institutional incentives around those goals becomes extremely difficult, because not only do we have to worry about perverse incentives, but we have to worry about Vigorous disagreement about the kinds of things that are valued in the first place. And I think exactly what you're talking about, T, is something that if you went to a bunch of university administrators, let's say, or medical school administrators or doctors, and You said, what is the point to what you're doing? Is it to produce wise, well-rounded people? Is it to minimize costs to insurance companies? Is it to increase donor contributions? What is it? And there are all these competing goals. And so there's this constant infighting about among different people who have different versions of what the best version of their institution is, and it's so difficult to articulate What that is. Speaker 2 I wonder if we're in different sides of this, because are you like worried about the hardness of it? It sounds like you think it's a problem that it's hard to come to agreement and articulate a goal, where I actually prefer the university that disagrees, has many incuit and plural goals, And worry that when it articulates an outcome clearly and starts orienting around that outcome, that's when it starts shedding a lot of what was good about the kind of pluralistic more. So let me just give you this is like from my life, right? So a university I've been employed at has started moving toward orienting everything around student success, where student success is defined as graduation rate, graduation speed, Salary after graduation. When you define that outcome, it becomes really easy to target, and the people that are targeting it, as you say, the people that target it well tend to rise, people that are willing to Go all in on targeting that stuff instead of caring about all the other weird shit that education might be for, tend to have better recordable outcomes and tend to rise in the university Structure. So I actually am happier for something as complicated with education, in which different groups have different conceptions of values about what they're doing, and we don't actually Try to settle it, and we don't hold them all to a high articulability constraint, because I think the business school and the CS department have more easily articulable outcomes than The creative writing department, art history department. A lot of the stuff that I'm writing right now is about like this defense of the inarticulable. Speaker 1 It's a hard question to answer because I think that there are multiple levels of organization going on here. There's like a top administrator level, because these institutions tend to be pretty hierarchical. I think at the top of the hierarchy, there has to be some sort of reasonably well-defined goal, even if it doesn't specify what every individual component of the organization or institution Would do it. And I think that that trickles down to those levels though, and creates incentives. Regardless of whether or not it's a good thing, I think there has to be some sort of coherence at the very top level, even if it doesn't dictate what each individual component is doing.

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

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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