Status quo

Inertia has two distinct parts. The first is that objects in motion will continue their motion toward the same unless there is a force that changes the motion. The second one is that objects that are at rest will remain at rest unless they are acted upon a force. The Status quo is about the second part. It is all around us as the first part. People, their bodies, and organizations all want to protect their status quo. Even the people who should be the most rational, scientists, suffer from it. Changing the status quo is hard, but not impossible.

Status quo, bodies, and minds

Your body and mind both tend to preserve the status quo. Your body wants to keep its temperature within a certain range and wants to keep fluids in balance. Status quo helps your body to function in optimal ways and to prepare for any threats that might get in your way. When the temperature rises, your body starts to sweat more to keep its temperature within the range. This happens to many other functions and other temperature changes or changes inside your body. Your body is full of balancing feedback loops that focus on keeping its status quo. Otherwise, your body would collapse and the death would occur fast.

Your beliefs and identity have status quo. Your thoughts also depend on it. Your mind keeps producing the same answers to questions day after day. It rarely produces any new thoughts even when they are important or necessary. It is even rarer that your mind destroys your old thoughts about the situations you normally confront.

Science and status quo

You might believe that scientists are the most rational people. You might think that they are willing to get rid of their old assumptions and change their views after you have given them evidence that they were wrong. This rarely happens in real life. For example, it took centuries or even millennia to approve the fact that earth is not the center of the universe. Science is changed by the crazy ones who are willing to endure to prove themselves right when people with old theories abuse them. Scientists are humans and they have egos and psychological biases.

Once scientists have made their conclusions about their research, they will toss out most evidence against their theories. They cannot objectively see their results after they have made their conclusions. They are willing to preserve their status quo at almost any cost. You will not easily find a scientist who is willing to destroy his theories even though the evidence shows them wrong. What you will find are scientists who disapprove of all people who can convince others that they were wrong. These people are the last ones who will change their minds. Their egos cannot handle contrarian evidence. This does not mean that science is bullshit. On the contrary, it means that the process is working. This resistance is part of the due process.

How to beat it

The longer the status quo has worked, the harder it is to break it. And the harder it is, the more effort and wisdom you need to overcome it. Willpower will not get you far. You can use it and beat the status quo for a short time, but eventually, you will succumb back to your previous situation. You have to use your path of least resistance and increase it bit by bit to overcome the status quo in your current environment. You have to start the change with minimal steps. If you increase steps too fast, you will fail. Then, you have to start again, but it will be a bit harder. The effort you have to put to reach the next step will increase. When you use incremental steps long, you can reach the critical mass needed to change and get in a position where the change will happen.

Even though the path least of resistance is key to change the status quo, there are few other ways you can make the change easier. In other words, you can make the resistance smaller. Use your psychological tendencies to weaken the resistance. You can cheat yourself with them to put more effort to overcome the status quo. If you can change your environment to overcome the status quo, do it. You can increase the availability of the triggers that will move you in the right direction. This is easier when the environment has changed. Sometimes the only way you can make the change is to change your environment. This is important especially with addictions.

Until next time!

-TT

PS. Do you consider yourself a helpful person? If you found anything useful in this text, please teach it to your friends.

Covid-19 and evolutionary point-of-view

You can think about the Covid-19 pandemic from the evolutionary point of view. You have only one life. There is path dependence. If you die to this virus, everything else is irrelevant. This applies to all diseases and potentially other lethal events. The only smart thing to do is to minimize your odds of having to suffer from them. People who undermine the possible impact of the virus are, plain and simple, stupid. There are opportunity costs for minimizing the odds, but the opportunity costs of dying are infinite. You have to find the balance of avoiding the virus and the other life.

Instead of the survival of the fittest, this pandemic is about the survival of the most adaptable. People who thrived before the pandemic can have great problems in adapting to new conditions if they maximized their output compared to their resources before the pandemic. People who have slack in their lives are in pole position to survive Many lives are disrupted in one way or another. Some people suffer the wrath of the virus and most do not experience big effects. It is safe to say that some people are more adaptable for fighting this virus than others. Even young and healthy individuals have died to it. Nobody knows why it happened to them. From an evolutionary point of view, Covid-19 makes genes of the human race more adaptable to the current situation in total.

What about the necessary changes in this situation? Can you adapt your rhythms of life to the current situation with the virus? Can you change your schedule in a way that you can minimize the odds of possible contagion of the virus? Can you change your daily rhythms to make the change? Can you use trial and error if you have to go out to exercise or work out at home? Can you go out when others stay at home or do you follow a tight schedule? Can you work or do your chores like buying groceries from home? Can you find a place to live far away from others and grow your own food or cook it yourself? If you have not done these things before, can you reprogram your brains to do them?

Even though survival is the most important thing, you have to think about the financials. This situation brings higher-order effects. Some of these effects cause financial distress. Can you adapt your finances to the new situation or new world? This pandemic will have profound effects on the world, nations, companies, and individuals. Some financial rules will probably change. There will be no return to the past. Some nations, companies, and individuals will thrive financially while others will suffer. Many old successful business models will crash and new models will be born. Some industries will change permanently. Best-adapted companies will pay small money for the destroyed businesses that were in ok shape before the pandemic. They can become more successful. Companies and individuals who have cash and small fixed costs concerning their total costs and income can buy things cheaply.

It is a great time to make changes

Covid-19 pandemic is not all about doom and gloom. It is also a great time to make changes. When your life has changed, it is easier to make other changes too. For example, you can use your time more efficiently because some time wasters have disappeared. You do not have to use so many hours to get to work and back. You can also avoid colleagues who waste your time. You can arrange your work in a way that is not dependent on others. It can be easier to develop ways to become more productive in your work without explaining it to others. Or listening to them tell you it is a bad idea to do things differently because it is not the way we do things here.

This is also a great time to get rid of bad habits or other behavior or develop new ones. Bad habits can disappear if the trigger and the prize do not exist anymore. You are then forced to make changes and reprogram your brain. The paths of least resistance to growth with new behavior can be easier to develop. It can also be harder to reach out to old paths of least resistance because the physical and mental efforts can become too hard. You can also develop a better attitude to a crisis when you notice that you can survive this one and thrive after it. Do not be afraid of the future, because it can be better than you think and the odds to make changes are higher today than before the pandemic.

Until next time!

-TT

PS. Do you consider yourself a helpful person? If you found anything useful in this text, please teach it to your friends

Critical mass of social contagion and Covid-19

You can understand the Covid-19 pandemic and its impacts better with the latticework of mental models. You can also become better prepared for future pandemics with the latticework. Even though the virus is a biological phenomenon, it spreads through social contagions when the critical mass is achieved. If you understand social contagions better, you can see what needs to be done and how to cope with the pandemic better.

Covid-19 as a social contagion

Covid-19 spreads through the population with close human contacts. Like all social contagions, it has three parts. First, there are a significant few. They are people who spread the disease faster than the rest of the population. Second, social contagion needs to be sticky to spread. Third, it needs the right environment to spread. When all these three parts are in place, the virus soon becomes unstoppable, after the critical mass is achieved, unless you do something. When the critical mass is achieved, the growth accelerates exponentially, until it starts to decelerate. The contagion collapses eventually.

Let us start with the significant few who spread the virus faster than the rest of us. What is common with these people is that they have a better possibility to spread the virus. They meet lots of people and they have close contacts or they have close contacts with these people. They can be real estate agents, work in junk food restaurants or work in call centers, etc. They live in dense urban areas or use public transportation to commute to work. They are also people who have to work for a living, are workaholics, or do not care about minor illnesses like flu. The best way to stop or slow the pandemic is to focus on finding the significant few who spread the virus faster. Then you have to limit their odds of spreading the virus which means that you have to stop them to meet anyone.

In the second part, the stickiness factor is simple. One reason why COVID-19 is so sticky is that many people who spread it do not know they have it. They can spread it without knowing it and it is a problem. This fact is important because they have not tested people who do not have any symptoms. The other reason why it is sticky is explained by the fact that it does not kill people easily or fast. It is not like Sars which killed many more people compared to the number of infections and disappeared fast. The third factor which made it sticky is the length of high odds of spreading. Covid-19 can spread about two weeks from the first symptoms. One problem is that we do not know if it can spread even before the first symptoms arrive. I am not a professional. I have no exact data about the disease.

The environment is simple. Covid-19 spreads through social contacts. Urban areas with dense populations are ideal places to spread. It is hard to avoid social contacts when you live in a place like them. You cannot avoid all people in dense areas. It also spreads in events and places in which many people gather together closely. These events and places include sports events, weddings, public transportation, etc. These events and places have to be shut down when you want to avoid spreading the virus. All you need is a one-person with the virus and it spreads like a wildfire in a dry season.

The faster you can address all these factors and manipulate them, the less the virus spreads. If I am right about the latter, the first wave of the disease decelerates its spread faster in the countries which have focused on the factors than public offices have predicted. Time will tell us whether that is the case. When the contagions are dangerous like the pandemic, it is better to overreact than undermine its effect. If you want to stop spreading your actions have to be fast and decisive. Therefore, the actions that the public feels are not necessary, are smart things to do when it comes to social contagions with highly negative effects. And because this pandemic is a power-law event, you cannot predict it or its impact on societies.

The next text is about Covid-19 and evolution.

Until then,

-TT

PS. Do you consider yourself as a helpful person? If you found anything useful in this text, teach it to your friends.

Power law distributions

The last text was about Mediocristan and Extremistan. Let's forget the former and focus on the latter. Extremistan is a world in which the enormous outcomes are the results of small causes. 80/20 rule is the best known power-law distribution. It states that 80 percent of the outcomes come from 20 percent of the causes. This is just one power-law distribution and there are uncountable amounts of them. Do not focus on the 80/20 rule when you think about power-law distributions. Covid19-epidemic is an extreme example of a power-law distribution. Even though it is not sure, it likely started when one person ate some part of an animal he should not have. Millions of people will suffer from the virus.

The good, the bad and the irrelevant

It is not important to only understand that a minority of causes or inputs produce the majority of effects and outputs. Understanding that the majority of causes or inputs produce a minority of causes and outputs is equally important. Let's say that your causes and effects have 80/20 distribution. Then 80 percent of your causes and inputs are irrelevant. Their effects and outputs are close to zero. It is safe to say that 20 percent of your causes and inputs have large positive and negative effects and outputs. If your life is good, then your 20 percent has larger positive than negative effects. If your life is bad, the negative effects of that 20 percent are larger.

You do not have to be a rocket scientist to understand you have to enlarge the effects of positive causes and inputs in your life and diminish the negative ones. You can change to get rid of some of the irrelevant 80 percent of the causes and inputs. Change them into positives. It is unlikely you can get rid of all the negative causes and inputs. You can find ways to diminish some of the effects and outputs. You can transform some of them into irrelevant ones.

Long-term predictions are not smart in Extremistan

You can make predictions in Extremistan and be right for a short time, but the overall results of predictions are usually negative. As I mentioned in the last text, you need 100 billion fold data points in the 80/20 world compared to the normal distribution world. When the power-law distribution is 50/1, you cannot have enough data points or computing power to make any useful predictions. Financial markets and economies are parts of Extremistan. Therefore, an economist, financial pundit, or someone else who believes they can make exact predictions are idiots. Their total effect on the economy is negative. The funny thing is that they believe their predictive models are based on solid math. In short, do not believe anyone who believes they can make any useful long-term predictions in any social interactions. The world today is not predictable.

When predicting is not possible, you have to prepare for everything. How to do it is a whole another ball game. One way to deal with it is to reduce tight interactions. Do not use all your resources to achieve something like putting all of your time or other resources like money into one endeavor. Be less leveraged than you can. Have smaller debts than you can take. Be more independent. Rely less on other people and their resources. Have many income streams. Then you rely less on a single one.

Start making small experiments. Make small and numerous adjustments to your inputs. See what happens. There are lots of examples of what you can do. Make small changes in your marketing materials when you can do them in a cost-efficient way. Change a few words or colors, etc. Make small adjustments to your daily habits like your eating. See what happens if you diminish the availability of bad nutrition and increase the availability of a good one. Put some of your sweets (if you have them at home or work) into somewhere you cannot see them without increased effort in finding them.

Do you consider yourself a helpful person? If you found anything useful in this text, teach it to your friends.

Until next time,

-TT

Mediocristan and Extremistan

There are two statistical worlds in which we live. Nassim Taleb has described them with names Mediocristan and Extremistan. The first world is a normal distribution world and the second world has extreme distributions. In mediocristan, two persons that have a combined length of 4.00 meters are close to each other. For example, they have 2.01meters and 1.99 meters in length. In extremistan, there are two persons whose combined wealth is 10 million. It is most likely that one of them has wealth close to that of 10 million and the other has wealth about 100,000. As you can see, these worlds are totally different from each other. In other words, one figure does not change statistics much in Mediocristan, but one figure can change everything in Extremistan.

Mediocristan

Mediocristan is the world where the majority of the people think we live in. This applies even to the majority of the most educated persons. Success equals effort and skills in this world. Mediocristan applies to most biological effects on humans. Genes work in ways that produce mostly results that can be found the normal distribution. The results that genes produce have high predictability. You can define probabilities to them and they do not change much. Here are some percentages how much some biological or psychological attributes of humans are explained by the genes they inherit:

• Height 70%, Weight 80%
• Reading disability 60%, Verbal ability 60%
• Face remembrance 60%, Spacial ability 70%
• General intelligence 50 %, Personality 40%

As you likely know, your biological parents´ genes affect your biological and psychological traits. If they have some extreme traits, likely, these traits are not so extreme in you. In a world with normal distributions, return to averages happen fast. If you have a height of 2.10 meters, your son´s height will likely be closer to average.

Extremistan

Extremistan is the place where a minority of the people think we live in. Extremistan applies to most social effects on humans. Success is non-linear with effort in this world. Social contagions produce results that produce extreme distributions. Most of them are from Extremistan. Some social attributes that are from Extremistan are book sales per author, wealth, and sizes of companies. There is no predictability in Extremistan. It is almost impossible to predict extreme statistical distributions like changes in stock prices. Even figuring out the mean of a simple 80/20 Pareto distribution requires a sample size of a hundred billionfold compared to normal distribution according to Taleb. Changes in stock prices have much larger extreme distribution. Therefore, they cannot be predicted in any modern computer or human brain. This means is that it is much easier to prove that someone is wrong than what the reality is. Today´s world suffers from the domination of high-effect, low-probability events. Most scientific breakthroughs happen when they are not expected, instead of deadlines put to researchers.

Events and effects that combine both worlds

Some events happen in both worlds. For example, some economic effects from predictable catastrophes like earthquakes have extreme distributions. An earthquake that has twice the power than the other can cause tenfold economic effects on people. The earthquake in the same magnitude as 100 years before can also cause manyfold effects today than it did then. These kinds of socio-economic effects grow in magnitude when more people live in big cities, and we use more of nature´s resources.

The modern world grows larger and larger winner-take-all effects. Even a little bit more skillful athletes can earn ten times more money than athletes a few percentage points below their skill levels. The same effects can apply to authors, musicians, and other artists. But this does not always apply. Even a little bit luckier author with the same skills can make a hundredfold more money than others.

Nothing to add,

-TT

Next text delayded due to sickness

Sorry for not publishing anything, but I have been sick for almost two weeks. I hope next post will be ready next week.

-TT

Three levels of causation

What makes you smarter than other animals? You can understand that the stimuli you receive do not represent only facts or data. The latter is the modern word for the former. You can also understand that the stimuli you receive are connected by cause-effect relationships. Your understanding of data consists of these relationships and you can act based on them. You can also imagine new events by using these relationships. No other animal can do it. The ladder of causation consists of three levels of cognitive ability.

The first level, seeing or observing

Your brain is a great pattern detection machine. It can observe and receive stimuli around it. It does that with greater efficiency than you can think. Your brain makes all kinds of associations based on the stimuli you have received in different situations in your life. It can also make good predictions based on those associations which are based on your experiences without specific reasons. The problem is that data is mostly stupid. It does not tell about cause-effect relationships. It does not tell which is the cause and which is the effect. You have to interpret and understand the data. Your brain can make good predictions to questions like ”What if I see x doing y” or ”How are stimuli related to each other?” If artificial intelligence is at this first level, it cannot function in new situations. Every new situation has to program to it by a human being. This level is all about the observed world.

The second level, doing or intervening

When in the first level you can observe things that have already happened, in the second level you can change them on purpose. You cannot understand cause-effect relationships just by observing them without interventions or smart experiments or copy somebody else´s actions. You cannot answer the question: ”What happens to the sales of iPhones if you drop the price by 40%?” if you have no observations beforehand.

Scientific experiments made in controlled conditions are second-level tools. For example, an online retailer can direct different customers to slightly different sales pages that sell the same products. Then, it can see the data about the conversion rate of both of them. Good questions at this level: ”What if you change red to blue color?” or ”What if you ban a person from doing something?” This second level of causation also makes it possible for you to create great causal models based on your observational data. This can be done even without experimentation if the cause-effect relationships are reliable enough. This level is all about an observable new world.

The third level, imagining or retrospection

Imagination can create answers to questions without data at all. For example, you can think about what had happened if you had not done anything. You can more easily understand the reasons behind certain outcomes. For example, you can think about what could have happened if you were unlucky and separate luck from skill. You can compare your observed data to an imaginary world or an imaginary outcome. You can also invent something that is currently not from this world without making any experiments. This level is all about the world that does not exist, yet. Technological developments do not happen without this level. Reaching out beyond the existing reality is not possible.

A simple example of all levels

A simple experiment is to lower the price of something for 50 percent. The first level of causation means that you cannot know what happens unless you have done it before. No statistical methods can be used to discover what happens unless you have experienced the same price reduction before. It is not the same thing to lower the price from 3$ to 1.50$ than from the previous experience: 2$ to 1$. The second level of causation demands experimentation of letting some customers have the price reduction and not giving the same price reduction to others. The second level of causation does not answer the question: What if we had reduced the price to 2$ from 3$? It is the third level question. This requires imagination.

This is all for this time,

-TT