Exploring The Adjacent Possible

Loss Aversion and The Zombie Clicking Trap

by Greg on January 26, 2012

I am the victim of a certain affliction. Most of you probably share it. I call it the zombie clicking trap. From time to time I find myself in front of a screen, not exactly sure why or how I ended up staring blankly at some random webpage. Periodically I will pause for moment and consider my situation…that moment is typically brief. Within a few seconds my eye catches on something and before I realize what has happened I am clicking again. Some minutes later I might pause again and note that the behavior has repeated itself.

At each pause there is some probability I will break the cycle, but these probabilities do not accrue linearly. A 20% chance of breaking the cycle does not imply that by the fifth cycle I am sure to stop. It feels more like a coin flip – each time the probability is the same and sometimes you come up heads ten times in a row.

Last night I nearly fell into the zombie trap. I was ready to go to sleep, all my electronics already shut down, when some vague hint of a thought about twitter popped into my head. Because my defenses were primed I was able to resist the impulse, and I decided instead to rewind my memory and analyse the preceding thought process. This is what I found…

The momentary association with twitter wouldn’t qualify as a legitimate thought. There wasn’t any real content to it. Nevertheless, it was immediately followed by a mental image of me picking up my phone and opening the twitter app. Again, this image didn’t contain any conscious intention. It was merely an automatic visualization of the next pre-programmed step.

I then decided to project my memories forward to see how this sequence might have played out. I envisioned myself staring at twitter wondering why/how I had ended up there, then setting the question aside and succumbing to some further automatic behavior like checking for new direct messages or mentions.

Why not just stop after the first befuddled pause?

While reviewing my thought process I realized the psychology is analogous to the loss aversion that compels us to follow stock market investments down rather than cut our losses.

The large majority of all human behavior is controlled unconsciously. The capacity of conscious awareness is quite limited. Because conscious awareness cannot keep tabs on everything the unconscious mind is doing, we remain relatively uninhibited when engaging small, trivial, habitual behaviors. We mindlessly proceed from one pre-programmed action to the next. If you find yourself in the bathroom with the shower running you won’t often pause to reconsider how you got there. Rather, you will habitually undress and jump in.

Review and Reactions to: Debt – The First 5000 Years

by Greg on January 19, 2012

David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years is a difficult book to review. Is the standard for evaluation the quality of Graeber’s scholarship of the coherence of his narrative? Do you judge a book by its ability to spark independent thinking or by the soundness of its own arguments? Debt is a book that will appeal to the sympathetic reader and annoy the skeptic. Critical readers will find a grab bag of intriguing bits and pieces to play with. Unfortunately, the whole is less impressive than the sum of its parts.

The Good

As a historical survey Debt provides valuable perspective to the contemporary ideologically driven economic debate. Graeber convincingly demonstrates that that markets have not historical been opposed to government planning so much as they are a product of it. Modern markets and financial mechanisms emerged most readily when and where governments encouraged them, usually as a means to coerce citizens into funding and supplying military campaigns. Monarchs, despots and warlords throughout history have instituted taxes, payable only in official currency of the realm, in order to force captive populations to produce goods salable for currency of the realm – typically weapons and other war supplies.

Mapping The Economic Landscape

by Greg on January 12, 2012

This post is an update to the model I first introduced in Unifying the Value Universe, offering a couple revisions in preparation for an in-process significant extension.

The two updates both derive from discussions related to gift economies. When I first introduced the four quadrant model I expected that gift economy would stir up the most debate and as a result I avoided addressing the subject until some time later. As expected, numerous people weighed in, offering disparate perspectives on what gift economies are and are not. The obvious conclusion became unavoidable – gifts can take many forms and are proffered in many disparate contexts. The act of gifting, of giving generously, is clearly not isolated to any categorical form of exchange. My attempt to shoehorn gift exchange into one specific quadrant produced an unnecessarily fragile model.

Exploring and Exploiting

by Greg on January 5, 2012

All organisms balance their energy expenditures between exploring and exploiting. Last night I watched a National Geographic documentary about the forest elephants of Gabon so I will use that as an example. These elephants roam hundreds of kilometers from the inland rainforest to the coast. They forage across numerous ecosystems and in some cases even reform the environment to suit their needs. The opening portion of the documentary focused on a clearing that the elephants had created by trampling the vegetation over many generations. The pools in that clearing now collect highly concentrated minerals necessary for the elephants survival and also support plants that can’t be found in the elephants’ “natural” habitat.

In a sense the jungle elephants engage in an instinctual (naturally selected) form of agriculture. But of course, this limited form of environmental engineering is not sufficient to meet the nutritional needs of an animals that can consume hundreds of kilograms of vegetation a day.

Structural Change, Learning Curves and The Dual-Mind Limitation

by Greg on December 12, 2011

A bit of housekeeping: I promise to get back to more typical economic/market oriented fare in the upcoming weeks. I am in the process of detailing several revisions to the four quadrant economy model to be followed shortly thereafter by the addition of several new layers to that model. I am also finishing up David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years and have committed to writing a review. That will prove an interesting challenge as Graeber offers an endlessly fruitful reference to draw upon wrapped up in a perspective that is highly divergent from the approach I have taken in my own writing.

Before I get to that I am going to indulge my current fascination with learning and productivity curves one more time. I’ll make some effort to keep us on topic at the end of the post by relating this theme back to the current economic malaise.

Cultivating Fractal Knowledge Flows

by Greg on December 1, 2011

Does strict focus lead to highly productive deliberate practice or disconnection and myopia?

Does engagement lead to productive collaboration or distraction?

…

I faced a curious conundrum recently when someone pointed out that I was equally supporting two apparently contradictory positions. A few weeks ago I wrote a long essay exploring the phenomenology of continuous learning. That was largely a story about developing one’s own internal capabilities. The implied hypothesis was that by focusing deliberately on certain forms of creative discipline, an individual can develop exponentially superior capabilities in the long run.

On the other hand, a common theme throughout much of my writing has been the value of collaboration, intellectual diversity, and knowledge sharing. The basic hypothesis underlying this line of thinking is that individuals can develop superior results in the long run by actively engaging with communities of similarly enlightened confederates. As such, learning is conceived as a social activity.

Learn From People Like You – Learn By Observing People Unlike You

by Greg on November 21, 2011

I have been doing a deep dive on personality types recently. The transition to a free agent career path has imposed a steep learning curve. Lot’s of people will tell you that working independently requires more self discipline. What they won’t tell you is that working independently demands an entirely different sort of self discipline.

The hacks and habits that I had learned previously have not only proved insufficient; in many cases they have proved counter-productive. The habits that lead to success as an employee generally entail suppressing your unique strengths and emphasizing the strengths demanded by your employer. In fact, the ability to (on demand) suppress your areas of divergence and emphasize your areas of convergence is an employment skill in itself. The ability to thoughtfully choose between convergence and divergence is a free agent skill. That may be less true for people who have found particularly fitting professions, but of course the dream-jobbers are not the people adopting free agent life-styles.

A Pilgrimage Through Stagnation and Acceleration

by Greg on November 2, 2011

Why does success so often lead to anti-climax and a sense of stagnation?

Why is creative work so perpetually frustrating ?

Why do you constantly feel like you are falling behind?

In an effort to recover from my recent mini-rut I spent quite a bit of time consuming material that, in retrospect, revolved around these questions. I will try to synthesize several of the more promising items and see if I can’t push them a bit further.

Thrust and Drag

Venkat Rao, attempting to explain the phenomenon of the 10x engineer, proposes a model of creative work based on an analogy to the mechanical concepts of thrust and drag:

He defines thrust work as those tasks with the potential for super-linear performance improvements as a function of consistent extended blocks of deliberate practice:

…such exponential gains always involve positive feedback loops, and thrust tasks contain two of them: the autotelic loop within a session, and the longer-term deliberate practice benefits that carry over between sessions. These two positive-feedback loops together basically create an addiction.

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