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It’s sad because they’re all just systems. People in a particular circumstance behave in a statistically predictable way given a system of incentives. If a beha

It’s sad because they’re all just systems. People in a particular circumstance behave in a statistically predictable way given a system of incentives. If a behavior is unexpected, you’ve encountered a bug in your mental model and you should just chase it down like any software bug. Making a change to the system requires the same set of programming and analytical skills of navigating any complex code base. There’s a reason why nerds who grokked this became masters of the universe for a few solid decades.

makeitshine 3y ago
People behaving in non-predictable ways is a bug is such an odd notion considering so much is created by people doing just that.
- concordDance 3y ago
  It's a bug (more accurately a lack of feature) in your mental model, not in the people.
- v-erne 3y ago
  I have this intuition, that we (people), even the really bright ones, are really bad at predicting emerging properties of systems. This phenomenon might be seen almost everywhere, but I find it that using cellural automata (Game of Life anybody?) and abstract board games with limited rules is the easiest way to show people that they are actually really not that far from children if it comes to imagining consequences of few rules interacting with each other on scale greater than 10-20 moves ahead. Go board game is my favourite example - few almost self explaining rules and if you show this to someone that did not play it before and he will be lost for days or weeks at a time (if it comes to predicting consequences of two players laying stones according to those few simple rules). And then, after they learn anything about this game, change one rule (allow for two moves in a turn for example) and see how they are lost again... It's almost like in the quote from Feynman (this is more a paraphrase because I do not remember correct phrasing, only the general idea) - "People do not understand what it really takes to know anything".
hef19898 3y ago
People, well rather any given individual, might react in a predictable manner. Guessing this manner woupd require to a) build a modelnfor said individual and b) put all the input into that model that the person has at any given time. A) is close to impossible while b) is deeply in the realm of never ever not even close. Now imagine that for any number of individuals across a complex network of social connections.
- shalmanese 3y ago
  People who optimize for effort look for truth. People who optimize for impact look for effectiveness. Unless your need is to predict to an individual level to high resolution, this is wasted effort. People are largely a statistically predictable bag of attributes in many areas that matter for impact. The small amount of areas where humans are wildly unpredictable is what makes us beautiful and we focus on that as the "soul" of a human but they're also not usually the ones that intersect with how we care about impact. There will be a statistical prediction of all the ways people will choose to get to a train station based on distance, weather, percentage car ownership, quality of sidewalk etc. Something as simple as improving the lighting of the right road to the train station can increase the ridership to a significant degree because it helps people feel safe walking home in the evening which means they also feel safe heading to work in the morning. You spend enough time with a sensitive enough radar in a large organization and you see the same statistical patterns. People are milling around and impacted by their environment and things you want to make happen aren't happening until you notice the corporate equivalent of the unsafe road and you put down a couple of lights and rapid change occurs. You do it enough times consistently and you get promoted and the patterns become subtler.

makeitshine 3y ago

People behaving in non-predictable ways is a bug is such an odd notion considering so much is created by people doing just that.

concordDance 3y ago
It's a bug (more accurately a lack of feature) in your mental model, not in the people.
v-erne 3y ago
I have this intuition, that we (people), even the really bright ones, are really bad at predicting emerging properties of systems. This phenomenon might be seen almost everywhere, but I find it that using cellural automata (Game of Life anybody?) and abstract board games with limited rules is the easiest way to show people that they are actually really not that far from children if it comes to imagining consequences of few rules interacting with each other on scale greater than 10-20 moves ahead. Go board game is my favourite example - few almost self explaining rules and if you show this to someone that did not play it before and he will be lost for days or weeks at a time (if it comes to predicting consequences of two players laying stones according to those few simple rules). And then, after they learn anything about this game, change one rule (allow for two moves in a turn for example) and see how they are lost again... It's almost like in the quote from Feynman (this is more a paraphrase because I do not remember correct phrasing, only the general idea) - "People do not understand what it really takes to know anything".

hef19898 3y ago

People, well rather any given individual, might react in a predictable manner. Guessing this manner woupd require to a) build a modelnfor said individual and b) put all the input into that model that the person has at any given time. A) is close to impossible while b) is deeply in the realm of never ever not even close. Now imagine that for any number of individuals across a complex network of social connections.

shalmanese 3y ago
People who optimize for effort look for truth. People who optimize for impact look for effectiveness. Unless your need is to predict to an individual level to high resolution, this is wasted effort. People are largely a statistically predictable bag of attributes in many areas that matter for impact. The small amount of areas where humans are wildly unpredictable is what makes us beautiful and we focus on that as the "soul" of a human but they're also not usually the ones that intersect with how we care about impact. There will be a statistical prediction of all the ways people will choose to get to a train station based on distance, weather, percentage car ownership, quality of sidewalk etc. Something as simple as improving the lighting of the right road to the train station can increase the ridership to a significant degree because it helps people feel safe walking home in the evening which means they also feel safe heading to work in the morning. You spend enough time with a sensitive enough radar in a large organization and you see the same statistical patterns. People are milling around and impacted by their environment and things you want to make happen aren't happening until you notice the corporate equivalent of the unsafe road and you put down a couple of lights and rapid change occurs. You do it enough times consistently and you get promoted and the patterns become subtler.