Returns (ROI) to hedgehogging!
Conversation
Actually it could go either fox or hedgehog or what calls turtles. The key is to stay in a compounding interest epistemic bunnytrail for long enough, not the cognitive style.
Fox = make 100 pots
Hedgehog = make the best pot
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I think is on to something here. The key to being an effective hedgehog (vs cactus) is the open-ended way that the hedgehog pursues the singular wild idea. The key to being an effective fox is not volume of ideas, but skillful curation of ideas.
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And this assumes ergodicity. Only ergodic challenges can be met by either a fox or a hedgehog. If non-ergotic, it is probably better suited to one or the other.
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Tagging the right Joe Edelman this time and untagging the wrong one. I think Joe's turtle archetype refactors the right bits of fox and hedgehog into one actually notion.so/Turtleocracy-4 so you could say we're talking 2 flavors of turtle
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I think of hedgehogs over long time horizons as people with a pet theory for which they seek confirmation/disconfirmation over time, with a scientific mindset of quality dependent on talent ranging from crackpot to effective. INTJs trying to build a theory of everything for eg
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Foxes over a long horizon otoh are more like training a pattern recognition for long-term patterns, placing small bets along the way, and doubling down on the ones that pay off.
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So I think ergodicity applies more to foxes than hedgehogs here, because hedgehogs have a more totalizing/systematizing filter that creates a kind of tunnel vision.
Taleb has elements of both hedgehog and fox turtleness.
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If the challenge is perfectly ergodic, the fox (n pots over time t) and hedgehog (1 great pot in time t) strategy should be equivalent for effective hedgehogs (pursuing open-ended enough, ie not cactus) and effective foxes (good curation/pattern recognition, ie not weasels)
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Either strategy requires "turtleness," or they turn into cacti / weasels.
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"Open-ended enough" is the key phrase there. The constraint of totalizing framework AND open-ended enough is kinda hard to meet. I'm reminded of Von Neumann's work on open-ended evolution in cellular automata, which showed that you need a noise input.
If I were to wade into this, I'd make distinctions between theory-hedgehogs, value-hedgehogs, and ideological-commitment-hedgehogs. T-hogs are crackpots; V-hogs turtles; I-hogs, zealots.
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