Quotidian Address

Great post. Evolution is the source of many of our preferences, and I think it’s the culprit here: I can imagine there is a selection effect that prefers we get caught up in the hardscrabble day-to-day, rather than resting on our laurels. We’re hard-wired to believe that if we can just get one more promotion, one more achievement, we’ll be happy, regardless of the big picture. For me that’s why so many of us struggle to ever have enough: in times of scarcity, evolution selects those who always fight for more.  There’s more to it than that, though. Humans have evolved to be self-aware: we’re able to exert meta-preferences, step back and see the big picture. Just because something is good for survival doesn’t mean it is necessarily good for a person. Taking a step back, thinking about the big picture, putting more weight on those items in our utility functions as you put it: all essential. The problem is that when bad things happen, most of us don’t step back to see the ...

This is going to be a short post, after a long break. As you know, things are a bit hectic for me at the moment. However, I always find that difficult times make me reflect more deeply on the things that are going well in my life. Small blessings are magnified and it is paradoxically more easy to smile. One of my favorite professors was fond of Dr. King's quote "only in the darkness can you see the stars". What is it that makes us this way, do you think? So able to get caught up in the minutiae of our troubles and also so capable of being our best when things are falling down around us. Is it some kind of evolutionary advantage? A regularization mechanism that keeps us stable through rough patches? As you know, I have a pet theory that our utility functions are comprised of many small quick-moving terms (our quotidian concerns about our work, the weather, our life experiences, etc) and a few large slow moving terms (our overall level of health, the relationships we...

Hi Ymous,    Your post is, as always, fascinating.  You talk about diversity increasing resilience to shocks. I suspect you’re familiar with it, but Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, Anti-Fragile, makes much the same argument. He goes farther: he wants society to not just resist shocks and black swans, but to be stronger as a result. Like a machine learning system that uses new data to adapt and evolve, Taleb argues society should structure itself to do the same. As you say, a key part of that is accommodating and accepting diversity: having a lot of different experiences, worldviews, and backgrounds in society makes us better able to adapt in response to problems.  I don’t think that’s as easy as it sounds, unfortunately. When someone has a good idea, they understandably want to spread it: believers on both right and left want to convince others that they have found the one true path and that they can make society better off. They might even be right. T...

How can we know if we're ready for black swans, and change course if we're not? Great question. I like to reason about collective human systems (societies, organizations, etc) using the same set of tools I would for studying a machine learning systems. Partly, this is because when you've got a nice new hammer, everything takes on a distinctively nailish aspect. However, it also seems that despite humans being agents exercising individual autonomy, collections of humans are awfully good at climbing uphill relative to metrics you can get them to agree to care about. We are all living longer, children are dying less frequently, and we are on average more wealthy. Also like a machine learning model, we often improve these metrics to the detriment of things outside of our collectively agreed upon reward function (externalities) and we don't distribute the average across all people, but that is a discussion for another time. So, I guess my first answer to your question ab...