Sometimes it takes months for an idea to come together in my head, and I don’t quite realize it until the thought is articulated - then I feel this relief, this release of muscular tension that I couldn’t even perceive before - like the surprise quiet when the fan is turned off
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I think I have two big ideas competing for my headspace right now
One is something about politics and persuasion, “people will fight by any means”
Another is about “weightage”, as in “good and bad things are underweighted”
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Weightage is the simpler idea
Basically it seems to me that we underestimate variance
I guess Black Swan and Antifragile talk about this a lot, but still I feel like... I never quite appreciated just how much variance there is in everything. Procrustean bias maybe
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Like... just consider, say, movie ratings
It doesn’t make sense to rate movies on 1-10
It just doesn’t
The best movies are much, much, much better than good movies
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Replying to
I think that’s great heuristic for individuals trying to weight their own reviews, and/but there’s something fishy about the broader review marketplace - something related to this
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The economy is like a deep learning AI in that it cannot “see” or price the part humans find valuable directly. It can only price the metadata so to speak: revealed preference patterns evident in memetic spread. So if you can hack that, you can hack price, demand, and supply.
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