Action Figure Daniel

Category: Reading

  • “Chaos: Making a new science” by James Gleick

    • Science became really interesting when looking at weather
    • Warm coffee just cools; Hot coffee has convection
    • Modern scientist have iterated on the past but that assumes everything that came before was true
    • “Sensitive dependance on initial conditions”
    • Physics and maths divorced in the 30’s but started getting back together in the 60’s
    • When studying systems, scientists tended to assume oscillation was around a steady state
    •  Measuring non-standard shapes requires an infinitely small measuring tool
    • Fractals allow for infinite length in a finite space
    • “Dimensions” are the number of identifiers needed to identify a single point
      • At a distance, a ball of string is a point and so one-dimensional; up close it is a one-dimensional object arranged to occupy three dimensions
    • All physical touching is described by fractals
    • Turbulence is very poorly understood and may be unknowable
    • The Manhattan project was really about turbulence
    • Attractors bring stability, even if not predictability
    • Poincare return map
      • Cross sections of the transit to track movement over time
    • In order to be universal, it has to have scale
    • Universality was originally rejected from publication
    • Flow = shape +  change or motion + form
    • Control the space so you can manipulate time
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set
    • “In biology, randomness is death”
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnsley_fern
    • Computer experimentation really let fractals take off
    • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_system
    • Random (spread out and undefined) vs chaos (deterministic and patterned)
    • Chaos brings a wealth of information (because steady states can have their information compressed)
    • A map needs to simplify the things it maps
    • Giving mosquitos a photo burst at midnight will destroy their circadian signals
    • Mode locking is when things lock into frequencies
    • “Is it possible that mathematical pathology, i.e. chaos, is health and that mathematical health, which is the predictability and differentiability of this kind of structure is disease?”
    • Snowflake’s non-equilibrium phenomenon
      • They have 6 sides based on the stress of surface tension

  • “The Chaos Machine” by Max Fisher

    • People who trust the system do not spend much time researching
    • Intermittent Variable Reinforcement
      • Abusers veer all over making them unpredictable and alluring
    • Self-esteem is a gauge of how much we are accepted and valued by our peers
    • Facebook subsidizes mobile data charges in developing countries
    • Silicon Valley took “anti-social drop-out” to mean “genius”
    • The core ideal is, “free, unfiltered speech.”
    • While young male gamers?
      • In the 80’s, the American video gaming industry collapsed
      • Reagan cancelled regulation that prohibited advertising to children
      • Toy companies started pushing gender self-engagement
      • Japanese game companies picked boys because parents spend more money on them
    • Larger social groups tend to become more violent and strengthen hierarchy enforcement
    • Twitter started as a text message rely service
    • Morality is emotionally triggered, not rationally triggered
    • Global shaming can easily spin out of control
    • Domesticated animals have shorter tails, softer ears, shorter faces, and a star-shaped pattern on their forehead
    • Communication allowed for the “tyranny of the cousins”
    • Moral signaling scales with audience size
    • Machine Learning built SPAM filters that were better than any human built filters
    • ML super-powered YouTube’s algorithms
    • Additionally, Google set a goal to 10x view in several years around the 2020 election
    • Humans tend to accept things that are similar to things we have already accepted
      • (This is why Slippery Slope fallacy gets so dangerous)
    • Repetition makes things more believable (and comforting)
    • Mashing together people who disagree does not boost tolerance
      • You have to compel them to engage together
    • Having user comments adds a social context to media that detaches our rationality
    • People generally do not want to share misinformation, but want to be social; once they decide to share, they decide it must be true
    • Motivation, attention, design
    • Moral words overwhelm almost regardless of the context
    • Morality is actually tied to what we thing our peers think
    • We use a subset of people, social referents, as a short cut
      • “If <insert name> hates it then it must be bad”
    • “Everyone feels this way”
    • YouTube recommendations really quickly go to the fringe and never come back (because these illicit the most responses)
    • For the algorithms, watching is endorsing
    • Terrorism is in part a theatrical display
    • Citizen movement has dropped as Social Media raised
    • “We’re a society, not just a market.”

  • “Making Sense of Chaos” by J. Doyne Farmer

    • Complexity Economics shift from “as if” models to “as is”
    • Models should fit the facts with plausible inputs
    • ‘Complicated’ (many moving parts) and ‘complex’ (outputs are not easily calculated) are not synonymous
    • Modern economies are ecosystems
    • Money is a contract, contracts live on balance sheets
    • “What are the nodes? What are the communities?”
    • Only 35% of improvements come from within the industry, the rest come from the supply chain
    • Technology typically shifts unemployment between industries
    • Risks are about known events, uncertainty is about the unknown
    • Chaos pervades complicated systems but is rare in simple systems
    • Data that look chaotic can have solid, short run predictions
    • Games enter a static state when they are not competitive
    • Leverage adds volatility that lead to crashes
    • When pressure is applied to a fluid, it is stable. When extreme pressure is applied, turbulence occurs.

  • “15 Lies Women Are Told at Work” by Bonnie Hammer

    • (the lie/the truth)
    • Follow your dreams / Follow the opportunities
      • Recognize when dreams hold you back
      • Your worth is ever changing
      • Ask where your dream came from
      • (They often come from guardians in our lives)
      • Stay curious
      • Distinguish between what you want to be vs what you want to do
    • Know your worth / Work on your professional worth
      • Your work worth is different from your personal worth
      • “…so is work. There is a reason we don’t call it play.”
      • Starting from the bottom gives good perspective
    • Have friends in high places / Find truth tellers in all places
      • Let mentorship grow organically
    • It’s what’s on the inside that matters / What’s on the outside matters too
    • You can have it “all” / You will have choices
      • All does not exist
      • We have choices today that did not exist before
      • We are all allowed to change our minds
      • Own your choices
    • Fake it ’til you make it / Face it ’til you make it
      • “Imposter syndrome” is different from “imposter phenomenon” (the common feeling that most feel they are inadequate)
      • Faking is living a lie
      • “Are you out of your depth or just afraid of heights?”
    • It’s a man’s world / Even if it’s not
      • Leverage your gender
      • “Care like a woman”
      • Know what you’ll compromise on and what you won’t
    • Talk is cheap / Talk is a valuable currency
      • The absence of “yes” is not “no”
      • “Use your words” and “ask for what you want”
      • “There are always receipts”
    • Good things come to those that wait / Great things come to those who act
    • There’s nowhere to go but up / Success has multiple directions
      • Diagonal movement lets us gain more depth
      • Change perspective before changing location
    • Trust your gut / Check your gut
      • Your gut prefers the status quo
      • Decision making
        • Analyze, meditate
        • Brainstorm
        • Compare
        • Devil’s advocate
        • Expertise
        • Gut
    • Don’t sweat the small stuff / You should sweat all the stuff
      • If you do not manage the small things, why would should you be trusted with the big things
      • Sweat, but don’t stress
    • The winner takes all / Nope, winning isn’t everything
      • When you mess up, apologize quickly
      • Read the room
    • Don’t mix work and play / All work and no play makes everyone boring
    • If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it / If it could be better, it might be broken
      • The status quo is always at risk at being disrupted
      • Keep eyes forward to what comes next
      • Ask, Answer, Address
    • The only constant in life is change

  • “Misbehaving” by Richard H Thaler

    • Brainpower is a limited resource so we use things to be more efficient, such as heuristics
    • We notice changes more than facts; but the changes need to meet a perception threshold
    • Sunk costs (money spent that cannot be retrieved) drives our consumption
    • Consumption related to Sunk Costs dissipate over time
    • To an “econ”, money in fungible and budgeting is irrelevant
    • When we are losing, we favor small bets with long odds over larger bets with better odds
    • We tend to diminish the value of future pleasures (“Ice cream now? Yum! Ice cream next year? Meh.”)
    • “Theory-induced blindness” is being blind because you have a reasonable theory
    • Self-control is about conflict, conflict takes two to exist
    • Behavioral solutions are good for behavioral problems
    • Windfalls should be reallocated rather than splurged
    • People do not make large purchases often enough to gain useful experience
    • The 2008 housing bubble was so painful because people were leveraged against their equity; the 2000 tech crash was much less painful because few had leverage their paper gains
    • We get very defensive when we start losing money
    • “Secret sales”–unadvertised sales–are bad for revenue because the customer was willing to pay full price when they walked in
    • People think about rebates differently than a discount
    • “… the perceived fairness of an action depends not only on who it helps or harms, but also on how it is framed.”
    • Removing discounts is usually perceived as more fair than raising prices
    • “Unfair” maneuvers are less noticeable so are not well noticed when competition follows suit
    • “Paradigms change only once experts believe there are a large number of anomalies that are not explained by the current paradigm.”
      • “Inside views” lock our perspective to the team’s optimism
      • “Outside views” let us reference other, similar projects
    • It is important to reward people for making good decisions based on the information available at the time, regardless of subsequent learnings
      • (This is really important in business and with children. Punishing either for not knowing something damages confidence.)
    • In the “beauty contest” game, it is important to ask who the other players are so you can guess at their beauty standards
    • Stock market trading volumes should be lower if everyone is rational
    • “But nothing attracts attention more than a good fight.”
    • “When people are given what they consider to be unfair offers, they can get angry enough to punish the other party, even at some cost to themselves.”
    • Fallacies of decision making:
      • People are overconfident.
      • People make forecasts that are too extreme.
      • The winner’s curse. The auction winner is the one who most overvalued the object.
      • The false consensus effect. People tend to think that other people share their preferences. (“Everyone is just like me”)
      • Present bias.
    • People become risk seeking when they are way ahead (“house money”) or way behind (“breakeven”)
    • People are more risk adverse in public than in private
    • It is more common to lie through omission than commission
    • “By convincing his fellow contestant that picking split would be his only hope of getting money, Nick ensured that he wouldn’t be alone in choosing the split ball.”
    • Softening risks can be more beneficial than boosting payouts