📚 Quinn's Highlights

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Perverse Incentives Select for People Who Are the Best at Exploiting a Given System Summary: The original deans and administrators burn out due to their dislike of the US News and World Report rankings and are replaced by individuals driven by ranking success. This shift reflects a difference in mentality between valuing money as a means of support versus valuing money as the sole purpose of life. Similarly, pursuing publications and citations for a job versus making them the ultimate goal shows a significant distinction. However, these differences are connected through a temporal dynamic where initially people adapt their behavior to succeed in a flawed system. The system then filters out those who can best exploit it, resulting in the selection of individuals with specific values. Transcript: Speaker 2 What happens later on, the original deans and administrators burn out because of how much they hate the US news and rule report rankings, and they get replaced by people who are all it. They think the only point is to rise in the rankings. And those people don't hold back. They only have one target. I think something similar is the difference between so realizing I need a lot of money in order to a decent amount of money to support my family, but not thinking money is the point of life. And similarly, realizing that getting a decent number of publications and citations is necessary for a job versus thinking the goal of my life is to max out citations. And for me, there's a huge gulf between those things. Speaker 1 Well, here's where I think they're connected because I see the difference and I understand the difference you're talking about. But I think the difference is that is this temporal dynamic, right, where you start out with, let's say, perverse incentives and people saying, well, I don't necessarily value these Things, but I have to shape my behavior in order to succeed in this system. But the thing is, the system being the way it is creates a filter. And the people who are the best at figuring out how to operate in that are the ones that then end up being successful. And they're the ones that teach the next generation or emulated by the next generation. And over time, the people for whatever reasons, psychologically or behaviorally or ever their path is, are best able to exploit the system are going to be able to thrive in it. And I think that because of that, you end up selecting for people with certain kinds of values, because they're going to be the people who there's always exceptions, but are going to Be best able to thrive in this kind of thing.

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

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

"What Information Consumes Is Attention" and The Thermodynamics of Communication Summary: Herbert Simon's quote about information consuming attention is a crucial point to consider. Emails can be overwhelming, as there is a limit to the amount of time and attention we have. It is important not to solely rely on the internet as a copying machine, but to acknowledge the real material scarcities and limitations. While there is room for improvement, there are still real world limits to communication effectiveness. Transcript: Speaker 3 Herbert Simon's famous 1971 quote that what information consumes is attention feels like such a crucial point that I made it my email signature you know because like you said earlier Glenn that you know the value is really in in the relationships and there are differentially scalable qualities here I think a lot about the way and Doug Rushkoff and others have pointed Out that you can have at least you know indefinitely many emails a day but you only have so much time and attention to read them and that this is part of the argument for the importance of Not just following the sort of logic of the internet as a great copying machine off a cliff right where we're imagining an abundance that is nonetheless still founded in real material Scarcities you know like David Wolpert talks about you know the thermodynamics of communication and there being a theoretical limit to how effective that can be and while we still Have plenty of room you know orders of magnitude to improve on that you know that there are these real world limits that we're eventually going to bump up into

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

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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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