Some thoughts on the skin in the game of our thoughts/ideas/mental models and @tegmark's Life 1.0/2.0/3.0.
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1/ A system learns best via negativa- filtering out the less optimal parts and therefore allocating more resources to the more optimal parts. The bad pilots are at the bottom of the ocean. The worst capital allocators in a market ran out of money.
2/ But @nntaleb, in Antifragile, argues against the idea that individuals grow in low-survival circumstances like concentration camps, arguing instead that the camp acts as a filter (the no-absorbing-barrier) on the camp system as a whole, not on the individual system level.
3/ Only the strongest survive giving the impression that the camp strengthened those survivors.
4/ But I want to ask how we can impose a similar filter, or as he calls it, no-absorbing-barrier ON the individual system. Specifically, the system that is the various thoughts in our own mind.
5/ Our mind like every system, it learns best, via negativa. Or as Charlie Munger, often points out, it is easier to try not to be stupid, than it is to seek brilliance. So in what way do our stupid thoughts/ideas/mental models exit the system that is our mind?
6/ In other words how do we increase the skin in the game of our thoughts? Some immediate strategies come to mind.
7/ One is putting action behind your thoughts in order to subject them to real-world consequences. Another is to actively seek out negative feedback. However, I would argue that both of these strategies futile not accompanied by self-reflection.
8/ Actions are great because they inevitably lead to mistakes, and if, and only if, this series of events is accompanied by self-reflection, will bad mental models exit the mind and an individual will get "smarter".
9/ Negative feedback is forced self-reflection. The feedback is never objective, it merely forces one to entertain the notion that elements of his worldview have errors (or it leads to erroneous action).
10/ I point this out to highlight the fact that self-reflection is the no-absorbing-barrier for our thoughts, our only mechanism of creating skin in the game for our thoughts on the individual level.
11/ A friend of mine was talking to me about @tegmark's book Life 3.0 on AI. Of course, I had to ask what Tegmark defined as Life 1.0 and Life 2.0. The answer is that Life 1.0 relies solely on Genetic Adaption while Life 2.0 is "programmable".
12/ In other words, Life 2.0 (humans) have the ability to learn instantaneously outside the confines of genetic adaptation, thus learning is not simply the product of generations of death.
13/ Using Taleb's example of the concentration camp, Life 2.0 can learn from the concentration camp on the individual system level (weakest mental model's death), not just the camp system level (the weakest individual's death).
14/ If Tegmark is right, I would claim that human's highest advantage over other species is our ability to self-reflect. Self-reflection is a way of transcending inter-generational evolutionary learning.
15/ The Munger's among us are the most Life 2.0-like of our Life 2.0 species.
Utilize self-reflection to subject your thoughts/ideas/mental models to skin in the game, therefore allocating more resources (time) to the more accurate/useful mental models.
Utilize self-reflection to subject your thoughts/ideas/mental models to skin in the game, therefore allocating more resources (time) to the more accurate/useful mental models.
