The Version 0.1 Problem

The Version 0.1 Problem is when someone who is predicting that a radical new technology will exist in the future forgets that even a very simple version of the technology (a version 0.1) will have such large disruptive consequences that it is very hard to predict which path technology will take after the version 0.1. 

An example. Suppose that you are living in the 1980s, and dream of a fully immersive virtual reality cyberspace. Your vision of the future looks like the 1980s plus VR cyberspace. The problem is of course that version 0.1 of this technology is to just have people looking at simple screen interfaces with text/wireframe layouts, i.e. the internet. And the internet alone is so radically new that it is hard for a 1980s person to predict what the next version will be after the internet-of-screens, if there will be one. 

Another example: androids. Necessary prerequisite technologies for androids are near-human AI and superior mechanic control technology. A step on the way to making a control and motor system that is agile enough to move like a human, is a robot whose control system is not quite so agile, but thanks to the greater configurability of the robot's strength, degrees of freedom of movement, extra sensors etc, the robot is still much more valuable as a manual labourer than a person. This is not science fiction, but rather the reality of industrial robots. The robots that actually look like humans are a small percentage of the value of the robot market. A prediction from this is that as robot technology improves, we will see a lot of experimentation with the form, and that the form will not converge to a human form in most cases. The same argument applies even more to the "brain" of the android. Once again, this is not science fiction but the reality of the artificial intelligence industry. The AIs that are supposed to mimic human thinking are a small part of the market, and I think this will keep being true in the future as well. Most of the time, users just want a specific problem solved (good search recommendations, efficient fraud detection, well-optimized production schedules, etc), and the AI having a personality is not conductive to that end. 

A third example: generation ships. Long before anyone ships humans off to a different star system at some immense expense, someone will have just sent some robots to do the same mission, at a considerably less immense expense. It is already true for Mars. Perhaps humans will be building bases on the Moon and Mars before remote-controlled robots can do it, but I don't think it's likely for any places after that. It is sobering to think that whatever planets humans ever set foot on in the future, they will have been preceded there by robots that built a relatively cushy life support system there for them. 

A fourth example: brain simulation. Simulating a human brain neuron-for-neuron seems extremely wasteful. A computer capable of simulating even 0.1% of the neurons of a human brain can most likely be used for much more valuable economic purposes than to simulate a mouse brain. 

Here is my explanation as to why the version 0.1 problem happens. Consider a 2x2 matrix, with hardness-of-imagination on one axis, and hardness-of-implementation on the other axis:

What is common of technologies that are easy to imagine, but hard to implement? Typically, they are just a copy or intensification of something that already exists in our surroundings. The idea of the android is obviously not very hard to think of, just "a machine that looks and behaves like a human". As a matter of fact, the motorized car, boat, airplane, and submarine were all in the easy-to-imagine/hard-to-implement category since at least the 1200s, since they were speculated by Roger Bacon. 

A summary could be that version 0.1 problem exists because it is harder to think of good businesses, than to think of popular science fiction. 

Morality badge

Suppose there was a badge that said "I am a Moral person", that you could put on your person such that everyone you met could see it instantly. Let's look at how some increasingly advanced versions of this could work.

The Free-for-all Badge

The badge is just a pin that you can buy for a dollar and put on your coat. No background check is needed. This is very exploitable. Even if the free-for-all morality badge got a good start and won a lot of social capital, it would lose its magic after just a couple of instances of people wearing the badge behaving badly in public. 

The Lame Badge

The badge is something that makes you seem very uncool, even once people realize that it is correlated with high morality. This way, the Lame Badge wearers are protected from posers, but on the other hand they do not reap any social benefits except from each other. 

The Cumbersome Badge

The badge is something that requires a lot of work to maintain, for instance a habit. The status value of the Cumbersome Badge is limited by the amount of work that it takes to maintain. If the status is increased, for instance by an authority figure advocating the Cumbersome Badge openly, then posers will move in. 

The Permanent Badge

The badge is something like a public vow or an alteration of the body. If the badge can't be backed out of or reverted, then others can rest assured that if the person behaves badly, then they will face the consequences of their actions. The power of the Permanent Badge is inversely proportional to how easy it is to back out of the arrangement. 

The Tribal Badge

The badge is something that affiliates the person to a tribe that is recognized as being of high moral standing. Others can then rest assured that the person fears the consequences of their tribe enough be careful not to ruin the tribe's reputation. The power of the tribal badge is proportional to the person's status within the tribe. 

Examples

Free-for-all: pink ribbon, slacktivist profile picture.

Lame: geek wear, Jehovah's witnesses attire.

Cumbersome: ostentatious recycling, churchgoing (partially).

Permanent: Monk vows, marriage vows (as they worked back in the day), tattoos. 

Tribal: Wearing a Google shirt (if you work at Google), political party pins.

A Cryogenics Story, the first 1500 years

Ruben and Nino are friends. They live average lives in a developed country. In their 20's, they study at the university and enter the labor force. In their 30's, they both start families. In their 40's, they raise their families, they travel, work, and read good books. From ages 50 to 80, they continue with their old habits and live peacefully with their families. Ruben's family signs up for cryogenics. Nino's family does not. When Ruben dies at age 82 in the year 2030, his body is frozen and stored in a facility. When Nino dies, his body is buried. 

The year is 2230. Thawing of patients frozen before a major breakthrough in freezing technology 2090 is finally possible. Aging reversal has been possible for 100 years. Ruben's body is thawed, and he is given an aging reversal therapy over a couple of months in a hospital. His body is soon as it were in his 20's. His family is also thawed, and they are reunited. 

In the first years after his thawing, Ruben feels very out of touch. The world has changed very much. Physically, he is now the same age as his children and his grandchildren. The people who have been thawed generally do not have skills relevant for participating in the economy. The number of jobs that thawed people are specifically suited for, such as recounting an oral history of the past, are much fewer than the number of thawed people. Ruben and his family live on a welfare program while educating themselves about the developments of the past 200 years. 

Life in the 2230's is not great for them, but not terrible either. Ruben and his wife are two of the oldest people alive in the world, so they are a bit special. But being a thawed person does not particularly impress most people. They typically socialize with people from their own era. 

The community of people who were frozen before 2090 is quite small and closely knit, since they are people who in the first part of their life shared an optimism for the future. Most of them are also open minded to strange sounding ideas. 

After updating himself on the technology and society of the future for 10 years, Ruben finds something that he thinks that the society of 2240 lacks. He starts working on supplying this missing service. His first business fails, so he has to fall back on the welfare program. His next venture is more hobbyistic, but it also fails to get traction. Still, he enjoys the work for a couple of years before abandoning the project. After giving up his second business, the decides to try a life of scholarship. His studies are fruitful, and in 2250 he writes a book that becomes quite popular. 

In the 2250's, the spends a lot of time with new friends that he met through his research. The years pass quickly, and soon he finds himself a veteran researcher of 20 years. In the 2270's, a new finding revolutionizes his field. The new finding makes new methods necessary, methods that Ruben does not find very interesting to work with. He decides to go into temporary retirement. Ruben and his wife spend a couple of years traveling and in recreation. His intention is to start a new career soon, but he procrastinates and the years pass quickly. 

In 2290, Ruben has been retired for almost 20 years. He feels very old and tired of life. However, he is still physically 20 years old and he is not actually aging. He thinks that Nino was in a sense lucky since he never had to make an active decision to die. Of course, he also thinks himself lucky to get a second chance at life. 

A chance meeting with a new friend revitalizes his lust for life, and he decides to move to another country. Ruben and his wife have drifted apart, and they decide to separate. Ruben builds a house in a rural area in a country that he never thought he would live in. As he settles in to the new part of the world, he is stricken by emotional realization of what is possible with immortality. No project can take too long. He knew it intellectually before, but it took him 60 years of mortal impatience and boredom to emotionally accept the consequences of his new existence. He starts painstakingly chiseling stones into smooth round shapes. He moves on to rocks, and later boulders. Natural environments are strictly protected in the 2300's, but he has exploitation rights for a layer of 20 meters of bedrock beneath his country house lot. 

Ruben starts excavating a large cavern by chisel. He carves countless details and patterns in the stone. Some reliefs take years to chisel. He works in a deep concentration. While chiseling, he meditates on his place in the universe, and on the fate of the world. He finds that after a long while without new impressions, new memories come back to him. He thinks a lot about the metaphoric nature of his enterprise: he is excavating a cave of stone, while at the same time excavating a cave of memories. 

Ruben's house lot is 10x10x20 = 2000 meters. Before Ruben feels that he is done with his excavation, he had chiseled away 500 cubic metres of stone. Every day, he removes three cubic decimeters of stone. Therefore, the chiseling takes him 500 years. 

The year is 2800. Ruben feels that he has finally achieved the patience necessary to do something well. He takes a break to visit the grave of Nino. Nino feels to him now like a childhood friend who died while they were still very young. 

He thinks about what to do next. In the future, it has been proven that there are no fast general solutions to computationally difficult problems (P =/= NP). Therefore, there are still plenty of unsolved puzzles. Ruben chooses a colorful tile problem and attacks it with the patience of immortality. The challenge is to place 256 tiles in a way that obeys certain rules. He moves into a monastery in a remote area. He spends his years on a cool floor, the tiles spreading out about him. He discovers plenty of methods and observations. He does not know whether a computer or another person has already thought of the same things, and it does not concern him. After 1000 years, he has laid 255 tiles in a legitimate pattern. But he cannot place the 256th tile in a way that obeys the rules. He stands up and walks out without finishing. He writes a computer program that uses his methods, that is able to solve the problem in an afternoon. 

The year is 3800. Every 10 years or so, Ruben has to get a genetic therapy in order to be physically rejuvenated. It is getting harder and harder to get a genetic therapy that restores the body to that of a human, as they originally evolved. Most rejuvenation therapy includes some update to the body's physiology that makes maintenance cheaper. Most people just get entirely new bodies. The new body also comes with an intelligence upgrade. Ruben has not been in a hurry with this, since he reckons that immortality is a long time. However, after his work with the tiles, Ruben decides to take the next step of his life and get the upgrade. He is one of the last people to do so. 

With the intelligence upgrade, Ruben's life changes dramatically. He will later look back on the upgrade as just the beginning. 

The single reply rule

The single reply rule says that you are only allowed to make a single entry to an online thread or comment section. That is to say, not more than one comment and no replying to replies. 

What assumption is hiding behind the decision to adopt such a rule? It is the assumption that the kind of people who like to maintain a back-and-forth sequence of replies with a stranger online are not worth talking to. It's just wasting time. It's not even interesting to the readers. This is a bleak take on the internet, but I'm afraid that this is what online communities inevitably become when people who receive criticism are allowed to return criticism [1]. The only way to stop it is to not take the bait, to never reply to replies. This will not stop other people from jumping into the conversation and start wasting each other's time. At least you're not wasting your own time or energy.

Ego

When someone criticizes us online, the first instinct is to interpret this as an attack, and to return the attack. Why does it feel so important to not let a public attack to oneself stand unanswered? I think it has to do with the kind of "public" we are used to. We are used to small communities where everyone knows everyone and reputation is persistent. Coming out as the loser from a hostile exchange in such a setting can cause a permanent stain on reputation. So the instinct to defend the ego makes sort of sense in pre-urban societies, and also in artificially small communities like schools. 

In the online world, where people are more flexible to move around and switch communities, it is less important to keep up one's reputation in a specific community. So even if reputation was persistent within online communities, defending ego would be less important. The thing is, the online communities that work like like school classes are really not worth being part of. They are the bottom trough that capture all the insufferable people from school

Content

Why write anything at all? Why not adopt a rule of never ever contributing stuff online? I wouldn't blame anyone for doing that. But for me, the reason for choosing to contribute something worth reading has to do with a sense of wanting to give back to the parts of the internet that have given me endless entertainment and information. I want online communities to be fun and interesting places. The way to achieve this is not by 'saving' toxic communities by arguing with the arguers [2], but by building new ones with better culture. A sign of a good culture would be that the most honourable thing is to provide succinct, entertaining, and interesting points or counterpoints. Another sign of a good culture would be that the most shameful thing is intellectual dishonesty, and that attitudes below intellectual dishonesty (such as name-calling) do not even appear in conversation, but are blocked by everyone. 

Completeness

An additional consequence of adopting the single reply rule is that one has to make entries complete, in the sense that they can't leave obvious room for misinterpretation or misrepresentation. This increases the value to the reader. 

An exception

An exception can be made for replies that are well-meant, charitable, and are asking for clarification or more information. Such replies are constructive to the conversation and help build a positive and learning-oriented atmosphere. Note that the exception does not cover replies such as "Great post!" or "Genius comment!", since they are not asking for more information. For such cases, one can use the like button to say thanks. However, it should be noted that indiscriminate positive feedback is just the other side of the coin of indiscriminate negative feedback. 

[1] Actually, 'criticism' is a huge euphemism for most of bad faith online exchanges. 

[2] The idea of making a community nice by shouting down the trolls sounds so absurd that it's laughable to anyone who has used social media. 

Vad några svenska folktroväsen kan lära oss om riskmedvetande

Näcken, brunnsgubben, tjässan. Kanske även skogsrået, bergsrået, och bäckahästen. Låt oss gå igenom vad de är:

Näcken: sitter naken i bäcken och spelar sin fiol. Lockar till sig barn och ungdomar som går ut i bäcken. Då drar näcken ner dem i vattnet så att de drunknar. 

Brunnsgubben: sitter i brunnen och drar ner barn som lutar sig för långt ut.

Tjässan: sitter i gödselstacken och ger sig på barn som går för nära den.

Skogsrået: ett vackert kvinnligt skogsväsen som lockar unga till att följa efter henne så att de går vilse.

Bergsrået: likt skogsrået fast i klippiga områden. 

Bäckahästen: en vacker vit häst som lockar barn att stiga upp på honom. För varje barn som stiger upp så blir bäckahästen aningen längre, så att det alltid finns plats för en till. Plötsligt rider bäckahästen rakt emot en sjö och hoppar rakt ner i den, så att alla barn som rider på den drunknar. 

När vi på detta vis radar upp våra folktroväsen så framträder ett tydligt mönster. Samtliga verkar ha kommits på och spridits med syfte att skrämma, snarare än att roa. Dessutom förefaller de vara till för att skrämma unga från högst verkliga faror, snarare än att vara baserade på skrock. Dessa väsen triggas av beteende som verkligen är riskfyllt. Låt oss lista de associerade farorna:

Näcken: om man vistas i en bäck med hala stenar och kallt vatten så kan man lätt halka och drunkna. Detta var ett otroligt vanligt sätt att dö på, se: https://youtu.be/F6Y22rIyLrQ

Brunnsgubben: om man lutar sig över brunnen så kan man plötsligt halka till och falla ner så att man drunknar i brunnen, ifall man inte slår ihjäl sig först. 

Tjässan: om man går för nära gödselstacken så kan man råka andas in en stor mängd ammoniak och svimma. Svimmar man med ansiktet nere i gödselstacken så kan man dö av syrebrist.

Skogsrået och bergsrået: om man planlöst vandrar ut i naturen så kan man gå vilse. Bergsrået kan också ha haft en koppling till drunkning, hon finns omskriven i Bohuslän. 

Bäckahästen: kan vara en varning för att gå för nära vilda hästar. Eller helt enkelt drunkning. 

Något som dessa faror dessutom har gemensamt är att de alla innehåller en skarp tidpunkt, när det inte längre är möjligt att rädda sig. Detta till skillnad från faror som har med skadlig livsstil att göra. Jag gör en förutsägelse om att det inte finns något väsen som tar barn som äter skämd mat. 

Dessa väsen är också någorlunda lömska, osynliga dator. Jag gör ytterligare en förutsägelse att det aldrig funnits något eldsrå; elden är uppenbart farlig. Samma med mörkret och kylan: det behövs inget väsen för att varna unga från att ge sig ut en kall vinternatt. Även gårdens djur passar in i denna kategori: det behövs inga sagor som varnar en för att gå föra nära hästar, svin, och tjurar.

Syftet med att skapa och sprida en historia om ett väsen är alltså att ge en inkarnation åt en fara som är plötslig och lömsk. Ett väsen gör att faran uppfattas som aktiv, snarare än som en passiv risk. Det blir ett sätt att kompensera för somliga barns övertro till sin egen förmåga. 

Vad kan vi lära oss av det här idag? Att tänka igenom det här har ökat min respekt för riskmedvetande i bondesamhället. Att dra en saga om ett väsen är ett smart sätt att rädda sina barn från vissa faror, tills de vet bättre. I upplysningens tidsålder tycker jag dock att man ska kunna göra det bättre. En saga om ett väsen kan gå i baklås och tvärtom locka barn att gå och försöka söka upp till exempel Näcken. 

En förälder som vill uppfostra barn som tänker själv, bör inte börja med avsiktliga lögner. Istället kan man berätta om barn som till exempel har gått ut i bäcken, halkat på en sten och drunknat. Det är inte en vetenskaplig studie, men vetenskapliga bevis är inte heller nödvändiga för att motivera varför man ska undvika livsfaror. Det räcker med ett anekdotiskt men verkligt skäl.

The Problem with Nostalgia

The problem with nostalgia is that nostalgia itself is not much to be nostalgic about. If we spend the 2020's reliving the 90's or the 00's, our decade will not be a very interesting time period for future observers. I think this was already a problem in the 10's. There is a tradeoff between cherishing old memories and creating new ones. Right now (October 2020), I think we'd be better off by being less nostalgic, on the margin. 

The Annie Hall Effect

Negative feedback of compatibility. In other words: when the process of being in a relationship with someone makes that person become less compatible with you. 

Named after Annie Hall (1977), where the eponymous Annie is initially very attractive to Woody Allen's character, except for the fact that she is not very educated. When they live together, he convinces her to take some courses at the university. This makes her conspicuously more like him, a shock that their relationship is not strong enough for.

Lack of fences: an underrated aspect of walkability

Walkability is not only sidewalks and bicycle lanes. These structures make pedestrians and cyclists use the same way from A to B as a car would. This can be unnecessarily long, if that is the only option. 

A neighborhood designed with walkers and bicyklists in mind should not have fences on the best best shortcuts. It could be a concrete wall walling off one end of a parking lot. It could be a fence between two condo apartment houses with different owners. It could be a thick row of hedges in a single family home area. 

To a walker, this makes a big difference. Walking is slow, so walking a couple of hundred metres just to find oneself in a dead end is annoying. This discourages discovery, and decreases walking in the area. Dead ends and fences also drastically reduce the number of possible good routes from A to B in an area. So walking in the same area becomes repetitive, which further reduces walking. 

Maybe this is not an unfortunate outcome in some cases, but the intended one? Do planners and owners expect that walkability will increase crime and loud street life? About crime I say that for each criminal who finds their way into a walkable neighborhood, ten witnesses also do. A dead end will attract zero witnesses, but may attract a nonzero amount of thieves. About loitering: it's often enough to ask people nicely to keep it quiet. A really successful walkable area will be so nice that parents let their young kids play outside. This makes it a "kid area" which can even repel noisy teenagers.

The benefit of pedestrian and bicycle traffic is that it's less bothersome to the people next to it. Pedestrians also have less range, so one can afford to let pedestrians cross straight through one's neighborhood, without worrying that a bunch of people will come from far away and make a lot of noise, as is the case with a large road. 

A heuristic for finding interesting places to walk

When going away from home: bias towards the smaller road. To find the way back: bias towards the bigger. 

Economics of geeks and hipsters

People want as much out of life as possible. One way of doing that is to maximize lifetime earnings. Another way is to maximize consumer surplus. When a marginal increase in earnings become too costly in time and energy, it is more efficient to start increasing consumer surplus. This leads to fragmentation of how people consume things. Hipsters and geeks are examples of this. The markets also respond by fragmentation.

Consumer surplus is the maximum price you would pay for a thing, minus what you actually paid for it. A person who likes standard milk chocolate, loves it even more than expensive chocolate, makes a killing in terms of consumer surplus, since milk chocolate is quite cheap. Appreciating second hand apparel could likewise make living in a first world country satisfying and affordable at the same time. Or old vinyl records. So that's an economic rationale for hipster culture. The advantage of consuming forgotten things (that are still commercially available) disappear when those things become retro, and price increases. A hipster who buys an overpriced item has in a sense failed (if the item was actually unappreciated, then it wouldn't be expensive). Then, that person is not a hipster but just someone who follows fashion. 

Now to geek culture. Being a geek is about doing one thing intensively at the expense of ignoring other things to the point that the it becomes problematic or embarrassing [1]. Sacrifice plays a part in geekiness. Hipsters don't want others infringing on their thing because it decreases consumer surplus, and geeks don't want it because it decreases the value of something that they have sacrificed for. When this happens, geeks either shrug and keep doing their thing (may be a sign of social illiteracy), or move into even geekier territory. This creates a market for even more specialized things. 

[1] Famous people who became famous through their own efforts are geeks who were lucky enough to be geeky about something that others became interested in later. Applies to arts, including science and development.  

Bottom-up and Top-down

The great insight in the theory of natural selection is that nature is bottom-up optimized rather than top-down optimized. 

A bottom-up optimizing system is characterized by local equilibrium equations. A top-down optimizing system is characterized by a global objective function. 

Top-down paradigms are popular among both scientists and mythologists. Here is an anecdote told by my astronomy professor. Why does Jupiter have so many moons? Top-down philosophers in the 1600s said that the reason is that the people on Jupiter are great scholars who like to read at night, and the many moons are there to provide them with plenty of reading light around the clock!

It takes a great effort to wean oneself from the impulse to apply top-down optimizing models to systems that are actually bottom-up. Genetic populations are bottom-up optimized. A genetic population stops evolving when there is no variation in the population that has a higher or lower relative fitness. This is not the same as the population having achieved perfection in any sense. Likewise, a variation that has a high relative fitness in the population, at the expense of decreasing the fitness of the species as a whole, can still prosper. 

Free markets are also bottom-up optimized. A market stops developing when there is no way to get an investment to create a company (or modify an existing one) that will produce the product with a margin that will yield a higher return on investment than the current interest rate. This is not the same as optimally converting given limited resources into the product. 

Now we get to looser ground. Something I've learned in my working life is that large organizations are also bottom-up optimized. A large organization stops changing when there are no changes that can be done within any manager's budget that will increase that manager's power. This is not the same as the company producing its product optimally. It's not entirely true that large corps are bottom-up. There can still be heroic figures who do things that help the company that get ignored, or worse. Small companies have a coordination boost relative to large companies because "stuff that increases an employee's status" and "stuff that is good for the company" are much easier to align in small companies than in large ones. 

So, can markets and large organizations be made to behave in a more top-down manner? Yes, if they are in the presence of a large source of energy. The word energy will have to do here, for lack of a better word.  For the market and the organization, the best example of an energy source is an unexploited innovation. In the presence of many great unexploited innovations, bottom-up systems can behave in a very harmonious and coordinated way. When the innovations run out, chaos, inefficiency, and stasis returns.

Something that should always be asked: what does the above model of reality predict and, more importantly, what does it prohibit? First of all, this should reduce our trust in institutions that were put in place during great ages of innovation. It's possible that they were always broken, but that their brokenness wasn't noticed because everyone was high on innovation-dope. 

The most important use of the bottom-up view is as a tool to analyse possibly broken organisations. When looking at an organisation we can ask "is this organisation behaving as if it had a single goal, or is it behaving as if it consisted of several semi-independent parts with possibly contradictory objectives?". The most apparent red flag is that one part of the organisation is working against another part. Another red flag is that one part is impeded by another part for a long period of time.

Philosophy test

 A single question test to determine whether someone has a philosophical mindset.

The question is: "Where would you like to go, if you could go anywhere?"

Failing answers include: Athens, Boston, Mars. Any specific location.

A person who likes thinking, and who plays around with ideas all the time, will recognise the question as being very underspecified. What is meant by "going"? Is it by conventional travel or through magic teleportation? Can any equipment be brought? Is the return trip included in the hypothetical offer? Can one stay for an unlimited time? 

Asking for clarification like this is necessary to make sure that the inquirer and respondent are both agreed on what is being asked. The asking of clarification questions is also an opportunity for the inquirer to be surprised: the respondent may have thought about something that the inquirer did not. A clarification process like this is such a valuable feature of dialogue, and it can be done in a few seconds.

A tip to feel more at home in a new neighborhood

Suppose you are walking in a neighborhood that you have moved to recently. You still feel like a stranger. A way to marginally overcome that feeling is to pick up a small piece of litter, and throw it in a wastebin. Preferably something that is not too icky, but say a dry ice cream paper. If you do this, you will feel a little bit of ownership of the place. 

This has worked for me several times. Other people are convinced as well.I recently took a walk in the neighborhood of my new office. I found a large piece of cardboard on the street. I tucked it in behind a wastebin so it wouldn't blow away, and kept walking. After about 20 meters, and old lady stopped me and asked about where to find a parking meter. "I'm afraid that I don't live here", I answered. "Really?", she said with surprise "it looked like you did".

NPCs

When you call someone an NPC, you are essentially saying that their behaviour is easy to program. It should be noted that the easiest behaviour to program is a person who is always passive. 

Solid capital

GDP is supposed to measure the economic activity in a country. The degree to which GDP manages to do that is not going to be discussed here. We will just assume that GDP is simply a fair measure of what it purports to measure, namely the total value produced in a country during a year. Rather, it is the logical leap from "economic activity" to "wealth" that I have a problem with. Wealth, in contrast to activity, is not a measure of intensity, but it is an accumulative measure. If we want to measure wealth however, we need to look at not only production of value, but also deterioration.

To take an example, say South Korea produces 100 million smartphones one year, valued at $100 each. Total value is $10 billion. In Germany on the other hand, let's say that 100 000 houses are built, valued at $100 000 each. That is not accounting for the land value, but only for the value of the structure. Nevertheless, total value is $10 billion here as well. In both cases, this economic activity adds $10 billion to the respective country's GDP. As far as economic activity goes, I suppose that I can't deny that the these two activities represent roughly the same value. The difference becomes obvious however, when we move 5 years into the future. What are the smartphones worth now? If the smartphone has been used, we can get maybe 20% of the original value. If not, and it's a model that has not entirely gone out of fashion, then maybe 50%. The houses on the other hand, need only 1-4% annual maintenance to stay fresh [1]. The equivalent maintenance rate for the smartphones would be 20%, if there was a business for smartphone upkeep.

So there is a big value term that is missing from GDP, namely how much value that is destroyed by wear and tear each year. Why is this important? The accumulated value is important when we're not just using economics to measure geopolitical johnsons, but when we're thinking about what it is that we actually want the economy to produce for us. And that is not only fast consumption goods, but also real estate, roads, railroads, water supplies, and power plants. The quality of the solid capital in one's country has a large impact on how wealthy it feels. And good quality solid capital is not only important for the feeling of well-being, but it is also the best insurance against crises. Imagine a country with no solid capital whatsoever. All their real estate is literally air castles, inflated by foreign companies for a rental fee. The water pipes and power lines are likewise rented from an entrepreneur. Come a global finance winter, and these people are sitting on the bare ground within a year!

This example is obviously a hypothetical extreme. How close do we get to this in reality? Apparently, Dubai does not have a network sewage system for their skyscrapers, but rely on septic tanks and regular offloading by trucks [2]. I can't universally diss this system: it has no pipe ruptures, that might render whole blocks without sewage, instead of just single skyscrapers. Actually, the downside of this system is mainly in the normal case: the cost of renting dozens of truck drivers regularly must be much higher than paying a couple of guys to do regular maintenance on pipes and be on standby for ruptures. But fair enough; for these rich people, the extra cost is not so painful. However, such systems are not only for the very rich: it can also be a poverty trap. In Mexico City, for example, major parts of the population rely on water tankers to supply their needs [3]. In the case of Mexico City, however, there is a municipal water system, but it is leaky for large-scale engineering reasons [4]. In Slagskuggan (1969), Swedish author Sven Lindqvist points out that the great tragedy of Latin America is that unemployment is sky high, while at the same time the there is no shortage of work to be done; the countries badly need roads, hospitals, and schools. All these examples go under the label "underinvestment in solid capital".

So much for underinvestment. What other problems are there with ignoring the value of solid capital? One problem is that if governments use GDP as their compass, then it is very easy for them to miss that their country is quietly losing wealth. If the population also happens to be highly educated so that they also look at GDP rather than at the ground in front of their feet, then even the people can miss this. In a country where a measure of the solid capital is not a part of the evaluation of governments, a government can balance a poor budget by shuffling over long-term costs to future voters. In this way, deterioration can be hidden for decades, while on paper it looks like the economy is growing. There is a saying that when a measure becomes a target, then it becomes a bad measure (because people will start to hack it). This has surely happened to GDP at this point.

Let us also look at an example of successful solid capital investment. Consider the value added to the European continent by landscaping over the last 1000 years. Barely a stone lies there, or a tree grows there, except that it is for the service of humans.

Now for the self-criticism. Is there such a thing as overinvestment in solid capital? One example I can think of is Göta Kanal, a canal which was built from 1810 to 1832. It connects the Swedish west coast to the east coast. The point of this was to reduce travel time from industries on the east coast to the Atlantic, and to avoid Danish tolls. The problem is that the canal was almost immediately rendered obsolete by the railroad [5]. The Danish tolls were also abolished in 1857 (upheld since the 1400s, the tolls disappeared soon after the US refused to pay) [6].

Göta Kanal, an example of overinvestment in solid capital. The canal was rendered obsolete by the railroad soon after its completion. 

Herein lies the problem with solid capital: if its original use is obsoleted, then the possibilities of using it for something else are often limited, and the value decreases. Solid capital can also have a negative value by being in the way, such as a defensive wall around a city, after it is made obsolete by modern gunnery.

It is ironic that Göta Kanal, a large investment in solid capital, was made obsolete by the railroad, another large investment in solid capital. The case of the cannons vs walls is more asymmetric. In another asymmetric example, the growth on Amazon and other online retail shows that investments in physical retail can be disrupted by on-demand services. At the same time, the dominance of Amazon itself compared to other online retail, is in large due to large investments in solid capital by managing their own fulfillment centers [7][8].

One final note about the completeness of solid capital as a measure of wealth. An arguably even more important hidden value term is institutional and human capital. Both are very hard to measure directly. What is the economical value of having the world's best schools, for example? The value of a country's schools in terms of added human capital can be measured indirectly with a large time lag (about 15 years), and even then it is very uncertain what the value added by the school is. Schools deteriorate very slowly and silently (the students can't vote, and don't have a reference frame), so of course they are underinvested in.

Let us end by saying something actionable. How to avoid the trap of underinvesting in solid capital? (Not to mention institutional and human capital). Should we rely less on electable politicians to take decisions about long-term investments? Maybe shift those decisions off to experts? That strategy is itself vulnerable to institutional rot, however, and when that happens it creates popular rage and it's very hard to fix from within a democratic system (actually, from within any political system).  The one action that seems most positive to me is to just start measuring the solid capital, and to start using this measure as part of the conversation. Perhaps as an extended GDP, that also included deterioration of capital. If this measure becomes an often-used figure to compare countries, then undoubtedly governments will also try to hack it. Still, it should attract investment to more long-term projects.


References
[1] Annual house maintenance
[2] Dubai sewage trucks
[3] Mexico City water tankers
[4] Mexico City water infrastructure
[5] Göta Kanal wikipedia
[6] Öresundstraktaten wikipedia
[7] The Everything Store (2013 book)
[8] All about lean: fulfillment centers

What defines culture

Here is a model. Culture is defined by how behaviour is evaluated. In the extreme, a culture is defined by the actions that are considered most honorable, and most shameful.

What is the consequence of this? It means the most succinct description of a culture is to say the most honorable and most shameful acts within this culture. Example, explaining hacker culture to my mom:

The most honorable thing a hacker can do is to make software that solves a problem that a lot of people (especially other hackers) have, and then give it away for free. The most shameful thing a hacker can do is to steal someone else's work and pass it off as their own. [1]

A description of science culture would be similar, replacing 'software' with 'insight'. What other cultures can we describe this way? Scouting culture:

The most honorable thing a Scout can do is to maintain a long and faithful service to the group, and to the well-being of the surrounding community and nature. The most shameful thing a scout can do is to betray the group, society at large, or destroy nature. 

I would say that scouting as a culture is less self-centered than other hobby cultures, in the sense that the well-being of things outside the culture itself, weighs so heavily on the scale. If you're reading this, objecting that "my hockey team helps the homeless in the community!", then you may be right that your group cannot be called self-centered. What I would ask as a follow-up question however is: "To what extent does helping the homeless raise your status within the hockey team?" It is this internal status measuring, rather than the outside world consequences, that I'm interested in right now.

(A common theme in all cultures taken as examples so far is that altruistic behaviour to the in-group is very rewarded, and egoistic behaviour is punished. Can we think of counterexamples to this? I would say that competitive cultures such as competitive mathematics and programming, and business and law are counterexamples. In cultures like this, it can be honorable to trick or outwit someone in the in-group at their expense. However, it usually comes with some unspoken rules about what is considered fair play. The culture here is more iron-law: it is more shameful to allow oneself to be brought harm to, than to be the one who passes out the harm. Is this the default? Actually, I doubt it. The most competitive cultures have something else in common: they have an external evaluating agent. One's 'score' is not set by the peers, but by a central authority. The honor passed out by the central authority is not absolute, but relative, and therefore a finite resource. So the cruelty of the most competitive cultures is the cruelty of zero sum games. I'm making a prediction: even prehistoric nomad cultures, that occasionally attacked and killed each other, were not as competitive as Harvard Law School. The bounded consequences of competitiveness at HLS does enable more egoistic behaviour, however.)

What can we say about online culture, on say twitter or reddit? Not much in general, since the same comment can either yield praise or raise a mob depending on which subreddit/ twitter cluster it is posted. So according to this model, online culture is very fragmented, which sounds about right.

Why are honor/shame markers good definitions of culture? For one thing, they are very actionable. They tell you what to do in order to be accepted by a culture. Do the honorable things, and do not do the shameful things. It is very direct. Even if the actionability is not relevant, for example if we are investigating an ancient culture, it is still very relatable. Knowing that cattle and horse theft was considered a worse crime than manslaughter in the Old West tells us more about what life was like on the frontier than seeing a bunch of boots and revolvers, I think.

A problem with culture-as-behaviour evaluation is that it is not easy to infer from archaeological evidence. Well, measuring culture as behaviour is perhaps not a mean, but an end, for archaeology.

Let's take a negative approach for a minute and consider: what measures are bad, or inefficient, at defining a culture?

[1] How to Become a Hacker by Eric S Raymond

The Value of Formalization

Suppose someone hires us to solve a problem that is currently being solved by trial and error, rules of thumb, or by professional tradition. We are supposed to solve this using math, or programming, or something similar. Or as we say between you and me: using formal methods. Here is a naïve description of where the value comes in to the problematic system when using a formal approach:

First, we take a description of the problem and turn it into an equation, or whatever. Then we calculate the logical consequence of the equation and Oh My God: look at the Result! Now we know; we put this piece of information back into our process helps us save money. 

Today, the "equation" part is almost always realized as software. But the thinking still applies: the value is expected to come at the end. Here is a more realistic version of what happens:

First, we take a description of the problem and turn it into an equation, but wait... this description contains a lot of holes. It's not that the computer has a hard time crunching the numbers, it's that we can't even tell it what to do in the first place. The way the problem is currently understood makes no sense, logically. Parts of the process that are thought to be clearly prescribed by rules actually require a lot of human judgement and discretion to work, and this is a large variational factor in practice. Before we can even begin to optimize this in software, we need to gain a more exact understanding of the process than anyone has had before. 

In this version, the value starts coming in at the beginning, and it's a different kind of value. A better understanding of one's process is not always actionable. On the other hand, it can be actionable in very unexpected and profitable ways. Knowledge has that property. Currently, knowledge has to pass through a person's brain to have a chance at being used at its full value. So when given the task of formalization, take the chance to discover something new about a familiar process. It's often not an option.

What to remember

Prioritize Invariance

Only remember things that are true now, and that will always be true. An example of a statement that will not always be true:

Donald Trump is president.

An example of a statement that will always be true:

Donald Trump was elected president of the USA in 2016, and as of the 5th of February 2020, he held the position. 

So a statement that is not invariant can be made invariant by specifying a context to it. Why prioritize invariance? Simply put: so that you can trust your own memory. If you do not couple a conclusion with its assumptions in memory, you may miss when the assumptions change, and your knowledge is outdated. If you go to the movies and see The Wolf of Wall Street and come out unhappy, something like this can easily become a cached decision:

I do not like The Wolf of Wall Street. I will not agree to rewatch it.

Consider specifying this as an observation (about yourself)  instead:

When I came out of the cinema after seeing The Wolf of Wall Street, I remember feeling that the movie was too long. Also, the main character seemed unbelievable in the final 45 minutes.  

Suppose now that you are offered by a friend to rewatch The Wolf of Wall street some years later. The friend has a re-edit of the film with a shorter ending, that is meant to be more true to what really happened. With the first, emotion-based memory, you would not notice that this re-edit addresses exactly the issues you had with the movie. Furthermore, remembering things this way makes your opinions more interesting to others, since they are less subjective. Remembering reasons rather than personal general impressions makes it possible for people who hear your opinion to determine whether it applies to them as well. This is an example where the consequences are of little significance of course, but suppose the same thinking is applied to for example one's impression of a person, a new piece of technology, a travel destination, a political party, or a potential employer! One could easily miss things becoming desirable (or undesirable), despite having seen enough evidence to change one's opinion.

Years

When opening a book, the first thing one should do is to check the year of publication. Why? If you know the year of publication, you know the information that was available to the author when writing the book. How do you know what information was available in such and such a year? By knowing the year of publication of other books! So by remembering a linear amount of information (i.e. one integer per book), it becomes possible to consider a quadratic number of connections (i.e. between any pair of books).

The same argument can be applied to people (knowing their birth and death year) and movies (year of release). I have found it less useful to remember years for music. Perhaps it is because I do not know enough music, so that I have not been able to see the effects of the quadratic number of connections. Another reason may be that since I am not trained in music, I do not realize that there is an interesting connection between two songs. In that case, becoming more learned in music would open up a world of interesting observations and conversation topics for me. A third possibility is that the people who do claim that there are interesting connections between different pop music songs for example, are just kind of faking it. But even with this suspicion, it might be worth it to practice a better ear for music.

Another field where I do not find it particularly useful to remember years, is in technology. There are some key inventions such as the transistor in 1947, that one should know. A reason why it is not so useful to remember certain years is that the important inventions were often created over some time. So an approximate year or decade is fine. Big inventions also take time to reach their potential. An example is the transistor radio that was released in 1954, seven years after the transistor was invented. The first neural network was demonstrated by Frank Rosenblatt in 1958. But of course, the neural network was not very important until 2012. Another reason why years are not so important for inventions is that it is more specific to remember things about the invention itself, that explain why they were able to replace the previous way of doing things. The problem with the 1958 neural network was that it lacked multilayeredness and backpropagation. This was fixed around 1978. The next missing features to greatness for neural networks was perceptive fields and layerwise training, which was introduced in the early 1990s and 2006 respectively. The final touch was data augmentation, and increasing the total amount of data and training by a lot, which was done in 2012 after which the big break finally came.

Location

When someone tells me about a new development, one of the first things I ask is: who is doing this? Which company or university? This is often ignored in a news report of the new finding. The news segment may say "Italian researchers demonstrate such-and-such". Knowing that they are Italian is not enough: it is just as well to remember the university and/ or city. Why do I insist on this? 

One reason is it is more useful for networking. If you do read a good article from the University of Milan for example, and later meet someone in your field who studied in Milan, chances are quite good that they have met the authors of the article! This helps you ask more informed questions. It also shows that you have bothered to remember something related to them. In the best case they want to pay back in kind by asking about your research. 

However, I think the most important reason for remembering things by location, has to do with the concept of a mind palace. The idea of a mind palace is that you imagine this place with lots of different objects and textures and levels and whatnot, and you use the image of this place to connect different memories to each object. To me, using a mind palace seems so bogus. It seems totally arbitrary. Better then to connect things to an image that is not arbitrary at all: the map of the world! The world map is something that should be remembered anyway, so it costs very little extra. It also works well on different resolutions: one will know about more things in one's home country, but one also has a better idea of the geography of one's home country. 

Using the historical timeline as a third dimension to this world map-mind palace does also work very well. I don't see how it is possible to organize memories without having a good visualization of the historical timeline.  

Skeptical and Charitable

It is important to be skeptical. Being skeptical means that you do not accept things on hearsay. You do not accept a statement that contradicts your present beliefs without a demonstration that proves it. To a skeptical person, a proof is necessary. A person who is not sufficiently skeptical will accumulate false beliefs. Carrying a lot of false beliefs leads to contradictions in beliefs. Being used to contradictions makes you less sensitive to them. This makes it harder to notice important contradictions. Not being able to notice important contradictions makes it even harder to be skeptical. So it is a vicious cycle. A bad model of the world makes updating your model of the world harder, so be careful about what you put in yours.

Being charitable means that you are willing to accept a statement that contradicts your current beliefs, if given a demonstration. To a charitable person, a proof is sufficient. A person who is not sufficiently charitable will ignore data that contradicts their beliefs, despite there being good reason to accept the data. Such a person can miss good opportunities. So being charitable is also important.

Notice the two logical statements above:

• If skeptical, then proof is necessary.
• If charitable, then proof is sufficient.

So to a person who is both skeptical and charitable, beliefs are based the proofs that they have seen.

What if every time we were faced with an opportunity to choose to be skeptical, a red screen would flash saying "maybe you shouldn't believe this"? And what if every time we were faced with an opportunity to be charitable, a green screen would flash saying "maybe you should believe this"? In practice, one of the signs may fail to light up. If both signs fail to light up and we just ignore the data, what happens then? What is the default? Skeptical. Skeptical is the default. A person who ignores all data is trivially a skeptic.

Does that mean that if being skeptic is the default, should we make an effort to be more charitable, even if that means accepting some false beliefs? I think not. Having bad beliefs is worse than having no beliefs, because of the vicious cycle effect. Imagine being in a plane that is about to land in Stockholm, Arlanda. The captain says that they have lost the map they have of Arlanda, so instead they will use a map they have of Copenhagen, Kastrup. You would rather they just looked out the window then!

So much for the tradeoff between skepticism and charitability. Let's focus on increasing the total sum of them! How can we do this with limited resources of mental energy? An obvious thing that people don't do enough is "just google it". Especially things that have been believed for a long time, that one picked up on hearsay. Such cached beliefs can make one look very stupid, since it is so easy to look them up these days. Ok, suppose we are on google. Which source do we believe? Answer: the most upstream one. In matters of science, always go to the original article. In matters of politics and such, who to trust about who-said-what? Answer: don't bother with who-said-what.

Is the original article the most upstream source in science? No, the most upstream source is nature herself. Nature is the final arbiter, and I don't mean the journal. Asking nature is quite expensive in general. In programming and mathematics, we are more lucky. We can go through the proof step by step by ourselves, and check that everything is right. In programming, one can implement the algorithm, and check that the output is correct. Just checking the output from examples is worth less than a full proof. However, with a paper proof, there is the problem of self doubt: did I miss something? Currently, I have a higher confidence in the computer carrying out logical operations, than in myself.