no, but these ideas have been percolating in me for a few months. What is new is how they're all related, how these ideas all fit together. But what I'm missing is how the world all connects together.
> An animal with eyes has very high evolutionary fitness. It will win at all its evolutionary competitions. So in order to produce the highest-fitness animal, we need to – select for fitness less hard? In order to produce an animal that wins competitions, we need to stop optimizing for winning competitions?
Which is the same thing pointed out by the authors Stanley et al
> This doesn’t mean that less competition is always good. An evolutionary environment with no competition won’t evolve eyes either; a few individuals might randomly drift into having eyes, but they won’t catch on. In order to optimize the species as much as possible as fast as possible, you need the right balance, somewhere in the middle between total competition and total absence of competition.
This reminds me of an experience I had in the army during my mandatory service.
We use the weapons in the armory for shot practice and so the weapons are basically like public property.
We had to have a few practice rounds to "zero" or adjust these weapons we were assigned for the day.
Occasionally, you will get a weapon where no matter how much you adjust, you can never hit straight.
If the shots consistently land a bit too much on one side, the logical thing to do since there's a limit to adjusting the weapon, was to "aim off".
meaning to say, deliberately aim wrongly.
If shots are landing too much to the left most of the time, then purposely aim a bit to the right of the target to have the shots actually hit the target correctly.
By nature or nurture, I have too much Zvi's Moloch in me. By Zvi's Moloch, I mean as used in this quote
> In the esoteric teachings, total competition is called Moloch, and total absence of competition is called Slack. Slack (thanks to Zvi Mowshowitz for the term and concept) gets short shrift. If you think of it as “some people try to win competitions, other people don’t care about winning competitions and slack off and go to the beach”, you’re misunderstanding it. Think of slack as a paradox – the Taoist art of winning competitions by not trying too hard at them.
I need to purposely aim off by being more "Slack" intentionally to hit the target correctly.
Some people need to do the opposite.
Another example on focusing on one side of the balance and "ignoring" the other side.
I have recently come across a Conan O'Brien interview with Jason Segel who said a great writing advice from Judd Apatow he got was to focus on the drama in his writing.
The reason being, Jason is the kind of person who naturally finds the comedy in any situation. The getting dumped by girlfriend while naked is from his real-life story. So that natural instinct to be funny, Jason doesn't need to focus on anymore. He just focuses on the drama in his writing which then made his writing even funnier.
By the way, I am going to "skive" for another 10 days in Thailand in late April to learn tennis and visit friends.
I hope to test out the weirdly productive periods I had with software dev customer work just like last August's Bangkok trip and this February's snowboard trip. See if this is actually a real pattern or coincidence.
Seeing overtones of Moloch vs Slack, RH vs LH, Relevance Realization in here. Also Small Bets, Daniel's latest newsletter has similar themes.
https://newsletter.smallbets.co/p/imagination-is-overrated
Did you find anything that went against your intuition?
no, but these ideas have been percolating in me for a few months. What is new is how they're all related, how these ideas all fit together. But what I'm missing is how the world all connects together.
Make your own version of how they fit together.
Even if someone gave me their version, it's always a little bit off.
Btw, I googled, Moloch vs Slack and found this Alexander's https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/
In particular,
> An animal with eyes has very high evolutionary fitness. It will win at all its evolutionary competitions. So in order to produce the highest-fitness animal, we need to – select for fitness less hard? In order to produce an animal that wins competitions, we need to stop optimizing for winning competitions?
Which is the same thing pointed out by the authors Stanley et al
> This doesn’t mean that less competition is always good. An evolutionary environment with no competition won’t evolve eyes either; a few individuals might randomly drift into having eyes, but they won’t catch on. In order to optimize the species as much as possible as fast as possible, you need the right balance, somewhere in the middle between total competition and total absence of competition.
This reminds me of an experience I had in the army during my mandatory service.
We use the weapons in the armory for shot practice and so the weapons are basically like public property.
We had to have a few practice rounds to "zero" or adjust these weapons we were assigned for the day.
Occasionally, you will get a weapon where no matter how much you adjust, you can never hit straight.
If the shots consistently land a bit too much on one side, the logical thing to do since there's a limit to adjusting the weapon, was to "aim off".
meaning to say, deliberately aim wrongly.
If shots are landing too much to the left most of the time, then purposely aim a bit to the right of the target to have the shots actually hit the target correctly.
By nature or nurture, I have too much Zvi's Moloch in me. By Zvi's Moloch, I mean as used in this quote
> In the esoteric teachings, total competition is called Moloch, and total absence of competition is called Slack. Slack (thanks to Zvi Mowshowitz for the term and concept) gets short shrift. If you think of it as “some people try to win competitions, other people don’t care about winning competitions and slack off and go to the beach”, you’re misunderstanding it. Think of slack as a paradox – the Taoist art of winning competitions by not trying too hard at them.
I need to purposely aim off by being more "Slack" intentionally to hit the target correctly.
Some people need to do the opposite.
Another example on focusing on one side of the balance and "ignoring" the other side.
I have recently come across a Conan O'Brien interview with Jason Segel who said a great writing advice from Judd Apatow he got was to focus on the drama in his writing.
The reason being, Jason is the kind of person who naturally finds the comedy in any situation. The getting dumped by girlfriend while naked is from his real-life story. So that natural instinct to be funny, Jason doesn't need to focus on anymore. He just focuses on the drama in his writing which then made his writing even funnier.
By the way, I am going to "skive" for another 10 days in Thailand in late April to learn tennis and visit friends.
I hope to test out the weirdly productive periods I had with software dev customer work just like last August's Bangkok trip and this February's snowboard trip. See if this is actually a real pattern or coincidence.
Thanks for pointing me towards Moloch vs Slack