So regulating uncertainty is about containing failure forks. Adding slack helps with this. Parallel uncertainty is worse but rare in personal decision-making.
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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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In last one: You view life as an asymmetric guerrilla warfare challenge. Kissinger’s “The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose” principle. Big upside of this is that you stay interested and interesting in the world. Not win+exit.
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Any uncertainty regulation strategy that looks like win+exit is a kind of acting dead. You can’t actually win against the universe in the end. We all die. Do you want to explore as much of it as you can in the time you have? Or hit a win condition and sit around feeling empty?
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This might be the lesson of the Cobra Kai show.
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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao
Gonna attach this thread on power output expectation, uncertainty, and stress herehttps://twitter.com/vgr/status/1305953459217117184 …
Venkatesh Rao added,
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