Do you update or calibrate your beliefs?

One of the forms of excessive self-regard is that you overrate your beliefs about the world, people, and ideologies, etc. Beliefs are good when they are right. You could not get anything done without them. Reality proves that most of your beliefs are right. Therefore, doing choices based on your beliefs make your life better. Unfortunately, you have to update or calibrate your beliefs in the modern world or you will lose the grasp of reality. To a certain extent, this happens to all of us. It has happened to me, at least.

Belief formation is a simple process

You form your beliefs with a simple process. First, you hear or see something. Second, you choose to believe it. Of course, sometimes you choose to ignore it. Let's keep things simple and focus on things you have approved in your mind. Most of your beliefs have common sources. When you are young, some kind of authority figures is the first sources of your beliefs. Your parents, other family members, and teachers tell you what to believe. Sometimes your friends are your sources. No matter who the sources are, your ability to question them is poor. When you get older, the number of your sources grows. At some point, the number of sources starts to diminish.

Beliefs and reinforcing feedback loops

The longer you live, the higher the odds that you do not calibrate or update your beliefs. Your beliefs are hard to change because you process new data in a way that strengthens your existing beliefs. The validity of your beliefs is hard to question because your brain seeks the data that confirms your beliefs and ignore the data that question them. This process is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that keeps strengthening until you disrupt it. The same reinforcing loop is at play when parents transfer their beliefs to their kids. This loop can continue centuries.

One of the misunderstandings about one´s beliefs is that the smarter you are, the better you are in changing your existing beliefs. The fact is a complete opposite. Even though smart people are better at processing data, they are also better at corrupting the data. They are better at finding people, research, and facts that support their point-of-view. They also have stronger beliefs because they can better explain themselves why their beliefs are the right. Therefore, they discard the evidence that contradicts their beliefs even when it is right. If the data is in the form of numbers, the better you are in twisting them to support your beliefs. The majority of the less smart people have higher odds of changing their beliefs. Intuitively, this makes no sense to you at all. The smarter you are, the more useful it is to you to find other people who disconfirm your beliefs.

How to calibrate and update your beliefs

Most scientific facts have been proven wrong. In the course of history, things that have been certain in people´s minds, like the earth being a center of the universe, have changed to other facts. You have to be prepared to update your facts and beliefs when new facts contradict them. It is not a sin to change your beliefs. The biggest sin is to cling on your false beliefs after you have learned new data about them. Unfortunately, the complete opposite has higher odds of happening. When you get disconfirming data about your beliefs, your brain often clings on your beliefs even harder.

Sometimes facts do not change completely. Then, you have to calibrate and/or update your beliefs. If you want to do that, you have to first acknowledge the fact that most of your beliefs are not certain. Nothing in life is 100% sure or 100% wrong. Therefore, you have to define odds with everything. You have to think about how confident you are about anything. For example, you can be 99,999% confident that gravity exists or you can be only 75% confident that you are qualified enough to do your job. You can also use a range of possibilities and put odds to the range. For example, you are 80% sure that your income will be between 50,000$ and 75,000$ in five years.

One way to see if your beliefs or facts need updates and calibration is to check their long-term track records. For example, if you believe in socialism, find out how well it has worked in the history of mankind. After you have done your due process, ask yourself whether you have found proof that it has worked before somewhere. If you have ways to measure the effects of your beliefs and facts on you, do it for a long time. Then think again if you have to update them or not. For example, if you have had a diet for a year, one way to see if it has worked is to measure your weight and/or the length of your waistline at least twice a year. Adjust your beliefs about your diet if you have to. You can also find out expert opinion about your beliefs or ask their critics to give you feedback about them.

This is all for now,

-TT

Two system archetypes and feedback loops

To understand this text, you should first read about feedback loops if you are not familiar with them.

Systems have the same principles and share common characteristics. Systems that have enough common characteristics can be described as archetypes. Systems that belong to the same archetype have a similar structure, goal, or purpose and their behavior is similar over time. Similar feedback loop behavior is the main common denominator in system archetypes. Reinforcing feedback loops produce archetypes more often than balanced ones. Reinforcing loops usually produce behavior that is too much for the balancing loops. It is a rare occasion when balancings loops produce archetypes.

Limits to success archetype

Sometimes success is too hard to handle. Most people are not prepared to handle it. Limits to success archetype usually have a self-reinforcing feedback loop and a balancing loop that keeps reinforcing loop stable. When the balancing feedback loop cannot handle the acceleration in the self-reinforcing loop, problems will start to occur. After a while, the reinforcing loop cannot produce growth and your balancing loop becomes the dominant one. Then your success starts to deteriorate.

For example, when you become suddenly famous and successful and you are not prepared to have a balancing feedback loop that is strong enough to handle your success. The demands for your success will increase. Your growth can be in danger because later some limiting factor that was not a problem before like time appears. This growth becomes less sustainable because maintaining the growing demands more of your time. Suddenly, growth disappears because the balancing loop begins to dominate the system and your time and other resources are tied to the wrong places.

You have to make changes to solve the problem, but you have to figure out the main cause of it. Did your priorities change? Did the problem of saying no to less important things become a real problem for you? What you have to do is to find the right limits for these activities that weren´t your problem before? When you have found them and you cannot limit the time used for them yourself, you might need to hire somebody else to manage your time and say no to less important things so that you can focus your efforts on the most important things.

Escalation archetype

Competition is usually a good thing. But it can go too far and produce some unwanted consequences and escalate into a full-blown war between two or more competing entities. Usually, the escalation archetype is consisted of limited stock, competitors, and balancing loops. Escalation is more or less a zero-sum game. If two competitors have limited shares of goods, one of them cannot have more than 100%. This means that these two can have a combined share of 100% of the goods. Usually, competitors fight from a slowly growing amount of goods. And this fight usually is pretty stable because of those balancing loops. When some variables in balancing loops change as things escalate, self-reinforcing loops inside the balancing loops are shaped. These loops create problems.

Before escalation, the shares of goods are almost or completely stable between the competitors. All their efforts go to maintain this balance in the shares of goods. Escalation begins when one competitor changes its behavior and another sees that behavior as a threat to their position. What happens is that the competitor who was interested in maintaining balance has to react to the first mover´s behavior. For example, this can result in a price war escalation. The first mover reduces the price of their goods and the other competitor has to follow. This can change into a self-reinforcing pricing war with several rounds of price reductions. It usually ends when both competitors are not able to reduce their prices or one/all competitors are destroyed.

Competition is good for society and actors in it. Even escalation can be a good thing. Positive goals are good. Many escalating competitions can produce good results for societies. For example, competition in developing new medicines can produce better ways to cure diseases. If this competition escalates, it helps others. It can even help companies if they develop faster processes to develop medicines. The best way to reduce the problems of this archetype is to avoid it. Collaboration is often the best way to manage things. It should be your first choice.

There are many other system archetypes and most of them usually are about feedback loops and their mismanagement. Changes in the variables in feedback loops can produce unintended effects and these can change system behavior in a completely different direction. Sometimes it is about changing goals or dominant interconnections that produce addictions.

There are many good books about systems and you can find more information about different archetypes from them.

Source:

Learn to Think in Systems, Albert Rutherford

Until next time,

TT

Systems Thinking

This text is about introducing you to systems thinking. It continues from what you have learned about systems, feedback loops, and interconnections. Please check the previous links if you are not familiar with these themes before reading this text. This text gives you the rude basics of systems thinking.

You live in a complex world with lots of interactions between systems and their elements. It is hard to understand the world without systems thinking. It can be described as a typical mindset. It is used to get a big picture of your systems and how their elements produce different cause-effect relationships. Systems thinking does not work in a way that you focus on one element and forget its effects on others. This latter way of seeing things produces severe misunderstandings about the world. And systems thinking reduces the number of misunderstandings.

The world is full of systems within systems

Your skin is a system within your body which is a system too. You cannot understand your skin without understanding the interconnections between your body and your skin. When you do something to your skin, your brain reacts to your action. If you burn your finger on a stove, your brain sends a signal to remove your finger from the stove. For this to happen, your skin is a receptor of the heat which sends the signal to your brain that it has detected something that is too warm for keeping your finger on it. Without these interconnections, the skin in your finger would burn for a long time on a stove.

Systems thinking helps you to figure out the longer-term effects of the effects of your actions. It does not focus only on here and now the effects of your actions. When you do something without thinking about the longer-term effects, you can have many unintended consequences which you could prepare for, if you had used systems thinking. With systems thinking, you can have higher odds of understanding the future than without it. It also helps you to remove your focus from the causes you cannot change to causes you to have the power to change. This saves you lots of time and effort without having many negative effects. Systems thinking helps also you to make sense of the structure of your systems. It deepens your understanding of them. You can see how different elements in your system interact. When one element changes, others react to this change. Then the whole system behavior will change, at least a bit.

A process with many questions

To understand how your system works, you have to ask many questions. You have to figure out which effects are related to which causes. You cannot understand and/or improve your system without understanding what happens and why. You can also solve problems related to your system with this process. Many of the questions you ask are not related to any special system. They are the same questions, no matter what system is concerned. Problem-solving and system improvement process has three steps:

First, when you start figuring out the effects of one element, you create wider views about the element and the timeframe you focus on. You ask questions about the interactions of many elements and what the future of the system will look like. Questions, like ”How will system elements interact in the future?”, ”If I change one element, how will the other elements behave in the future?”,

Second, you start figuring out how does the system behavior arises and changes. You ask questions like, ”What are the key circumstances and how fast do they change?”, ”In what directions do the key interconnections move?”, ”Do the feedback loops in a system balance or reinforce the interactions of the system?”

The third and final step is all about improving the system. These questions focus on the simple truth that systems are almost always improvable. You can ask questions like: ”Is this system as simple as possible, but not simpler?”, ”Do I need all these elements to get what I want from the system?” or ”Can these elements be improved somehow? The question about the last step is: Does the system improvement produce better results than the time and effort you will put on it? If not, you have to focus on other things.

-TT