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 Once published, such as a memo, it begins to become outdated.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 It is already going to be out of date.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

People have more accurate models of people in close proximity than they do of people far away (socially) Summary: People have a good understanding of their friends and are accurate in predicting their behavior. This is shown by their ability to accurately predict election results based on their friends' voting preferences. However, biases arise when people are asked to judge unfamiliar populations. These biases can be attributed to the structure of their personal social networks. The more biased their social networks are, the more biased their estimates of the general population will be. Transcript: Speaker 1 Oh yeah, after seven years of research on this paper, that people actually have a quite a good idea about their friends, family, acquaintances, people that they meet on every day basis And then we'd whom they need to cooperate with, learn from or avoid. And that they're actually not that not as biased as a traditional social psychology would like us to think. And we see that because when we ask people about their friends, we see that this predicts societal trends quite well. So in one line of research, we asked a national probabilistic sample of people to tell us who their friends are going to vote for. We average those things across the national sample and got better prediction of election results than when we asked people about their own behavior. And this would not have happened if people were biased in reporting their friends. They must have told us something that must have given us information that's accurate and that's goes beyond their own behavior in order for that to happen to predict the elections better. And by now we saw that in four further, so we five elections all together in the US 2016 in France, the Netherlands, the Sweden and US 2018, and we hope to predict again 2020. So things like that tell us that people are actually pretty good in understanding their social circles and then the apparent biases show up when people are asked to judge people that They don't know so well. So when I'm asked to tell you something about people in another state or another country or people from another socioeconomic cluster, which I don't know well, then I am likely to have Some biases. But these biases we show can be explained by what I know about my friends. So if you ask me something like that, I will really try to answer your question honestly. And to do that, I will try to recall from my memory everything that I know about our social my social world. But you know, if I'm surrounded by rich people like here on the East side of Santa Fe, it could be very difficult to imagine in what poverty people can live in other parts. And so even if I'm trying my best to recall, you know, the most poor person I know, I might never recall such poverty that actually exists in the world. And when asked about the overall level of income in the US, I'm likely to overestimate the overall level. And similarly, if you are poor, you're people who are poor might have problems imagining the wealth of really rich people and they will typically underestimate the wealth of the country. So okay, so let me let me summarize this. So this piece actually suggests that people are not that biased when it comes to judging their immediate friends. They have a lot of useful information about their friends and pretty accurate. The bias is show up when people are asked about other populations that they don't know so well. And they can be mostly explained by the structure of their own personal social networks. The more biased your social networks are, the more biased your estimates will be about the general population.

Mirta Galesic on Social Learning & Decision-Making

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Prediction Markets Are Built on the Principle of Adverserial Engagement Transcript: Speaker 2 There the first is what you're describing is precisely the reason why i am a bit of a skeptic of prediction markets not to say that they don't have a role but i don't think that they are nearly The solution that many believe they are and it's because they set us up in an adversarial relationship with regards to determining the truth it's not at all the say i don't think incentives Have a role or that it isn't worth a listening information for me i believe in all those things but the notion that the way that we should do it is betting against each other so that we want Everyone else to be as wrong as possible so we can be right and we want to get like one big payoff for like the person who's most right and anything that can be like too easily analogized To some sort of like dick measuring contest is not something that like excites me as a mechanism for like coming to good social outcomes and i think that prediction markets have an important Element of that

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

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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