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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
the depth of social problems is largely derived from the “stickiness” of power. Power is the ultimate positive feedback loop: simply put, people in positions of power use their positions of privilege to stay there.
The Systems Work of Social Change
Cynthia Rayner and François Bonnici
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
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