Dose of disorder #2
Dose of Disorder is a collection of links about change, uncertainty, and chaos
Can you resolve to rethink about how you think about change?
New mental model just dropped! Thinking about change in three levels of intensity, based on the outcome:
Small incremental change - something changes for a little while but eventually melts back to the status quo.
Small disruptive change - A change creates a new status quo similar to the original.
Total disruption - the old status quo is gone forever.
What are some changes you’ve experienced that were incremental? What were some that were total disruptions?
How do AI’s political opinions change as they get better trained?
Large language models tend to get more opinionated as they get better trained.
"Here, more intelligence and training make AIs more likely to endorse all opinions, except for a few of the most controversial and offensive ones. Smarter and better-trained AIs are more liberal and more conservative, more Christian and more atheist, more utilitarian and more deontological."
Tools like ChatGPT have a strong sycophancy bias - they tend to be agreeable to the person answering their questions. AGI gets rewarded for giving answers the reader likes, not for correctness or usefulness.
Bitcoin is the detector of imbeciles
I’m not anti-crypto, but I wanted to highlight this quote from Nicholas Nassim Taleb. He summaries why low-interest rates were responsible for an extended fuck around season:
“What we have been experiencing for fifteen years is a kind of Disneyland, with near zero, sometimes negative, interest rates and therefore without real market functioning. Lowering rates creates asset bubbles without necessarily helping the economy. Capital no longer costs anything, risk-free returns on investment become too low, even negative, pushing people into speculation. We lose our sense of what a long-term investment is. It is the end of real finance.”
Complexity bias - why we prefer the complex to the simple
We tend to prefer complicated answers to simple ones. We would rather try an experimental weight loss drug or new workout system instead of eating fewer calories. We assume that if something is complicated, someone must have put a lot of thought into it. We release ourselves from the responsibility to understand by choosing something over our heads. We crave complexity in entertainment. Simple is dull. As you build expertise, you need more complex problems to satisfy you.
Complexity bias can help us understand why conspiracy theories exist - most people cannot accept the simple fact that problems happen because people are flawed and selfish – and that chaos and disorder are the natural state of reality. Instead, they look for complex, wider explanations of things involving deep states, space lasers, and lizard men.
“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.” – Edsger W. Dijkstra
What’s next? I don’t know and that’s the point
Uncertainty is not something to be managed or avoided. It can be useful, and in some situations, we should embrace it. With uncertainty comes potential, innovation, and wonder. We will never have full certainty in life. Sometimes you need to try something because you don’t know what will happen next.
The complexity bias is spot on. I've discovered that my happiness goes up when I simplify things in my life. It's not easy but it's worth doing.