Brain Dump n. 3

Criticisms of capitalism are poorly conveyed: Capitalism, defined as the overall overhead societal and economic structure most of the world is in, intuitively needs correction: over-consumerism, income inequality, inequality of opportunities, etc. Loud critics of it are right to denounce it.The way the critiques are communicated, however, leaves a lot to be desired.For most things, people are quite rational and pragmatic when something needs correction. If a child behaves 70% of the time just fine, the parent will easily recognize the merits of that and will try hard to fix the remaining 30%, knowing it will take time.But when it comes to the current system, which has obviously huge merits for a huge part of the population (even the lowest earners have a higher quality of life than their counterparts 50 years ago), current narratives suggest that everything sucks and a reversal of the system is often suggested.This is the opposite of pragmatism. It polarises the argument and makes it harder for everybody to imagine a brighter future. At least, for me, it’s harder to imagine a new system with no flaws compared to the current system tweaked. Let’s take the problems we have one by one and fix them as singular (yet interconnected) pieces, rather than wasting time philosophizing a new world order (which by the way, seems to be always suggested by doomers but never outlined in detail how that would work).

Songs are pessimistic: Can you recall the last time you heard a song celebrating something outside of love? Am I wrong, or basically all songs either talk about love or about how society sucks?

Stolen thoughts I gathered from others:

1. Reading a great book twice is more valuable than reading ten average books. This is something I have been a victim myself. It feels good to the Ego when, at the end of the year, you have read 40 books. But in the end, great books are hard to find. I don’t have yet a solution on how to approach the problem.

2. There should be a well-defined distinction between success and failure. Don't fall in the messy middle. If the hypothesis fails, make sure it fails clearly and unambiguously. If it succeeds, make sure it succeeds equally clearly and unambiguously.Unfortunately, there’s a natural human tendency to mitigate risk and hedge our bets—to make design choices in our experiments such that mediocre success is the most likely outcome.

3. Decisions should be made at 70% of what you need to know, even less, rather than 90%. If you try to gather too much info, then you’re too slow.

4. Idiot Index: the ratio of the total cost of a component to the cost of its raw materials. Something with an index, ie. a component that cost $1,000 when the aluminum that composed it cost only $100, was likely to have a design that was too complex or a manufacturing process that was too inefficient. As Musk put it, ‘If the ratio is high, you’re an idiot.’”

5. The more obvious a problem, the more likely it is that everyone assumes that somebody else is working on it.

6. Allow yourself to experience what’s hard.

7. B.F. Skinner, the father of modern behaviorism, taught that we act either to move toward pleasure or away from pain. Everything we do in life comes down to one of these two motivations.