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Luca Dellanna Profile picture
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16 Feb, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Let me understand. It took hundreds of thousands of years to understand that cows can contribute to greenhouse gases, but a few years of small-scale development of lab-grown meat are enough to say it doesn’t have negative side-effects?
More context
Also: the side-effects of something (not just the product, but the infrastructure needed to produce it, it’s byproducts etc) are different whether it’s “lab-studied” and “industrialized. Small scale and large scale can’t be equated.
To clarify the first tweet. Testing is not just about measuring whether a new technology is harmful in known ways (eg whether it produces greenhouse gases).

It’s about measuring whether the tech AND its industrialization are harmful in known AND unknown ways.
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More from @DellAnnaLuca

Luca Dellanna Profile picture
15 Feb
TWO REASONS PEOPLE REFUSE “COIN FLIPS” BETS
and the importance of considering what’s “out of scope”

Thread, 1/N
2/ A classic “surprising phenomenon” is that people offered a bet such as “I flip a coin; if heads, you win $1000, if tails, you lose $950” tend to refuse playing.

The surprise comes from the fact that, in theory, the bet has positive expected outcome: $25.

(1000*50%-950*50%)
3/ However, there are two explanations for which it’s rational to refuse such a bet.
Read 11 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
12 Feb
THE HIDDEN SIDE OF NON-ERGODICITY

Most examples of non-ergodicity are activities in which the outcome of a person completing them many times is lower than the outcome of many people completing it once. For example, Russian Roulette.

But there are cases in which its higher.

1/9
2/ First, if you don’t know about ergodicity, I suggest reading this thread:
3/ One classic example of non-ergodicity is Russian Roulette. The expected outcome of 600 people playing it once is 100 dead and 500 winners, whereas the outcome of a single person playing it 100 times is 1 dead and no winner.
Read 11 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
8 Feb
PRODUCTIVITY HOMEOSTASIS

How come that as we get better tools to be more productive (software, …), in some jobs, productivity didn’t increase too much?

More tasks that don’t add value, of course. But why do we choose to engage with them, rather than being productive?

1/N
2/ To explain this phenomenon, called productivity homeostasis (which roughly translates to “stays the same”), we must first look at a similar phenomenon: risk homeostasis.
3/ The Fence Paradox (see image below) is an example of risk homeostasis: the idea that, when an activity becomes safer, people often react by increasing their risk taking.

Why?

Read 13 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
4 Feb
A peek inside my adaptive systems course starting on the 23rd of February.

In this thread, a list of what participants will learn.

1/N
MODULE #1: HARNESSING ANTIFRAGILITY

The organic is both antifragile (we lift weights → our muscles grow) and fragile (we lift too much → we injure ourselves).

What determines antifragility?
What's the relationship between it and fragility?
What to do about it? 2/N
3/ Antifragility can make us stronger (exercise → stronger muscles) or weaker (no exercise → muscles atrophy).

It can make us adapt (famine → we adapt by storing more nutrients) or maladapt (lack of famine → we take risks & store less nutrients, making us more fragile).
Read 19 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
2 Feb
ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS ARE EVERYWHERE

Societies are adaptive systems. What a policy does is less important than how people adapt to it.

Our body is an adaptive system. We lift weights not to move them, but for how our muscles adapt to it (they grow).

(thread, 1/N)
Teams are adaptive systems. In the short-term, a manager's decision matters for what it does. In the long-term, it matters for how the team adapts to it. What behaviors does it make more likely?

2/N
Markets are adaptive systems. Many strategies only work until the market adapts to them.

Marketing, sales, and strategy are about adaptive systems. In the long-term, what matters is how customers, competitors, and suppliers adapt to a new product.

3/N
Read 6 tweets
Luca Dellanna Profile picture
1 Feb
WITTGENSTEIN’S RULER, P2

A Nobel prize can tell us two things: how good is the recipient or how bad is the committee.

“Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.” – @nntaleb
2/ I used to express Wittgenstein’s ruler as follows: the more the free parameters, the less you know what is being measured.

For example, last spring COVID mortality could have been informing us about how aggressive is the virus or how good is a country’s testing
3/ In addition, and this is the point of this new thread, it just dawned to me that Wittgenstein’s ruler is not just about the precision of the ruler but also about its choice.
Read 7 tweets

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