Experimenting with Content
I shared my first content list last week, and I’m keeping it up this week.
For those who missed the last one, in these posts I want to share three pieces of media that have made an impact on me and why you might want to check them out too.
Antifragile by Nassim Taleb (A Book)
I stole this book from my friend nearly a week ago. I like it a lot. Taleb’s writing is very engaging, although I’m unsure if he takes extreme positions on issues merely for the provocative pose or because he really believes in them.
My Takeaways:
Our society is over-indexed to credentials and under-indexed to experience.
Who’s going to have a better chance of breeding a stronger tree?
Someone with an incomplete but formal understanding of genetics
OR someone with no explicit understanding of genetics whatsoever but plenty of experience breeding trees?
Taleb would argue that the latter will be more successful because he possesses a lot of implicit knowledge. But our society too often empowers the former to make decisions.
Taleb’s broader point is that all theory is necessarily incomplete. So even the most credentialed individual will necessarily under-perform.
Another of Taleb’s better points is that our society’s mental model of how scientific or technological progress occurs is flawed.
Taleb asserts that generally we think that basic science → ideas/models/equations → applied science → machines
Taleb says this is wrong. Instead, new machines often result from trial and error, tinkering, random experimentation & often we don’t even know why these new machines work.
This is an even more interesting notion in a world with LLMs where even if we know what’s happening on a macro-level, we certainly don’t have a good model of how the computer “thinks”. Indeed, a lot of progress is being made right now precisely by tinkering around.
I’m not sure that I agree with Taleb entirely here. I think that advances in theory help us understand where to tinker in the first place. In this way, theory is prior and while it may be distal to the final result, theoretical advance is a prime mover of progress.
I’m more sympathetic to a feedback circle, where tinkering leads to new theory and new theory leads to new tinkering.
But I totally agree that our society over-invests in generating theoretical advance from the same handful of institutions that have generally stalled out in a very many number of academic fields, and our society dramatically under-invests in tinkerers.
Convexity (or things that get big quick)
Taleb seems to think that human beings are fairly bad at predictions, so we should overweight our decisions by payoffs rather than probabilities (which we seem bad at calculating anyway).
Convex things benefit from variance. For example, if you plant a windmill in a beach, and that beach starts to get much faster winds than you expected, your payoff isn’t linear at all.
(Wind power grow proportional to (wind velocity)^3.)
Taleb argues that in a world of disorder, you should try to invest in convex things. So that if random things (like faster winds) happen, you benefit dramatically BUT if they don’t, you don’t lose as dramatically.
Convex things can be hard to find, as most things are fragile and very few are anti-fragile (which Taleb defines as benefitting from variance).
Interview with Argentina’s Javier Milei
My Takeaways:
Milei ran against inflation and now has to figure out a way to push through his dollarization plans.
Milei says he wants to bring his plan up for a plebiscite (we would call this a referendum in the US) if he can’t get his legislature to support him.
This is what populists should do more of. Take the big institutional reforms straight to the people (win, lose, or draw).
You may disagree with Brexit as a policy choice, but it seems to me that populists have generally been successful with plebiscites more often than with maneuvering within legislatures.
Succession Rewatch
My Takeaways:
This show is really good at showing you why so many Americans vote for Trump or root for people like Logan Roy. These types of business tycoons are perceived as more honest precisely because they don’t hide their self-interest.
Trump is a show-pony try-hard. Trump thinks everyone else is an idiot loser that he can extract value from because he’s a winner. But Trump is so obvious in his self-interest that you can’t help but feel that he’s treating you with respect in how much he’s treating you with disrespect.
Straussian elites like Nan Pierce are different. People like Nan Pierce are so falsely respectful that you totally feel the disrespect. People like Nan Pierce think that they know better than you, so they should be in charge. And, its not enough for them to be smarter than you. They also justify their power by claiming to represent your best interests which they can do better than you can because they’re smarter than you.
In the end, the Straussian elites are just as bad (or certainly in the same league) when it comes to self-interest. But perceptually, masked self-interest is just more of a turn-off than naked self-interest.
Simply put, people would rather cheer while being stabbed from the front than have to hear well-drafted apologies whispered in their ears while a Straussian elite stabs them in the back.