There's 3 things you can do to regulate uncertainty: increase risk taking, decrease risk taking, and change your operating beliefs. The last one is the most interesting one since it is the foundation of all subjective construction. We design our delusions to regulate uncertainty.
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I tend to shut down at fairly low levels of uncertainty compared to many people, especially in certain areas. Bureaucratic uncertainty is especially toxic for me. If I'm waiting for more than 3-5 things like some government document or a financial or opsec thing, I freeze
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I regulate this primarily by simply minimizing my surface area for such things. So for eg. I never got into SBIR/STTR type funding sources for small businesess, and tend to avoid using any service that involves interacting with highly involved UXes.
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There's a hierarchy here. Minimize energy use is the foundational drive, but is rarely directly triggered, since we're rarely at the limits there So in practice regulate uncertainty is the dominant one. It modulated by our sense of the maximum energy we *could* put out
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So for example, I react to the potential for traffic delays by getting to the airport extra early, but that in turn is driven by my sense that I hate sprinting for the gate, and extra-hate the energy demands of rearranging plans if I miss a flight. I do not like having to spike.
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"Minimize energy" is a very illegible optimization problem, since our energy efficiency is a complex function of physiology, cognitive style, and output efficiency. I'm more wasteful in sprint/spike mode. Otoh, I both hate planning and am inefficient/chafing in working to one.
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So I end up solving for minimal energy use/least resistance by a) adopting a highly improv style b) building in lots of time for everything, so I can figure things out by trial and error in a *relaxed* unhurried way. I like to iterate, but not fast.
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A preference for improv over planning is about narrowing the uncertainty band (improv uses more up-to-date info) but also about limiting rework energy (since waterfall plans need higher-energy reworking when they fail, where improv is typically just 1-step backtrack)
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This seems like a good mathematical version of it
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Replying to @vgr
Karl Friston's Free Energy principle is a variant of it (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_ener)
There are other formulations that are easier to understand, I'll reply with some refs later
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Replying to
You might also like the causal entropic forces framework for the maximum entropy production formulation of agency, deeply related to FEP/least action/uncertainty reduction/etc.
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Iirc wisner-gross was debunked as vapor ware math bullshit
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Hmm, I am very skeptical about this article. Seems to me a deliberately uncharitable reading. Could we apply the same critique ("isn't sufficient to build GAI") to Friston's FEP? Similar aims: a theoretical foundation of agency. Maybe I'm wrong, have you seen other critiques?
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Not published but general academic grapevine gossip from reliable sources
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