Hmm. Alt formulation: “keep the number of forks/futures you have to consider in time period T non-trivially below n” The branching factor of a time interval
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One way to manage uncertainty is to expend a lot of energy to control all sources of uncertainty in the environment. This is the rapid monopoly growth strategy of unicorn companies. Commodity your complements, acquire all competition, buy up supply and distribution.
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For individuals, this translates to get rich/fu$. Money is energy in modernity. Two more accessible (and in many ways more interesting) strategies that can work with limited budgets are robustness (simplify/minimalize life) and adaptability (reorient OODA loop faster)
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Robustness or antifragility (distinction is irrelevant here) both attack uncertainty potential of modernity by striving for locally Lindy simplicity. Waldenponding and other defensive postures are uncritical special cases of this. All sacrifice performance for robustness.
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Adaptability is the most interesting. You just try to think harder and faster. Get inside the OODA loop of the environment to pwn it rather than either dominate it or retreat from it. Those are the 3 broad strategies for uncertainty regulation: spend more, do less, think harder
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Each strategy has merits, but only the last one can make life steadily more interesting and continue the infinite game. The first two define winnable games and try to win them. If you fail, you’re destroyed. If you succeed, you’re in an arrested development cul de sac.
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Replying to @vgr
Put in other words, the first two are convergent and the latter is divergent?
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Replying to @vgr
Reminds me of dune: there is only death in the convergence of the vision of the future. Uncertainty is a requirement for survival. The only certainty is death.
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Replying to @rafathebuilder @vgr
To be transparent, that is a core principle I live by. If uncertainty is low, I increase entropy by making large changes, for example network changes.
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Me too but I take a lot of breaks along the way
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Replying to @vgr
Interesting to think then of uncertainty regulation as a function of time / environment. If you plot optimal uncertainty over someone’s lifetime then there would be steady increase through adolescence and early adulthood, then some impact due to family dynamics.
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Replying to @rafathebuilder @vgr
Furthermore, the optimal uncertainty would be an interesting interaction experiment - would impact choosing a partner, and relationships with friends / family. High deviations would almost certainly cause destructive tensions, but could also stimulate creativity.
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