Note: This was originally published at https://brianlui.dog/2020/10/06/upside-decay/. This concept is important because many people are self-interested, and this provides a convincing self-interested reason for being virtuous. Being virtuous is good, but it's also practical! Upside decay means that an organization doesn’t get any lucky breaks. If we think of average...
This is also posted at brianlui.dog. Cornelius has a problem in his life. Cornelius: Emma, I know you’re really good with people. I feel silly saying this, but maybe you could help me with a problem I have? Emma: That’s a very nice thing for you to say, Cornelius! What’s...
Thanks for your thoughtful response! I chose China as an example because it concisely illustrates the contrast - China dominates all the segments that don't need upside, but struggles for those that do. It also explains the narrow definition of virtue I use. It assumes a moderate knowledge of current affairs which is definitely something that's boring for a lot of people, but I'm personally more familiar with China and less familiar with other possible examples like cryptocurrencies or AGI.
I think upside decay is most applicable to venturesome things. So for example, a plastic chair factory is not very venturesome because the technology and processes are well established. The factory manager can be a real jerk and people will still buy his chairs. On the other hand, things like creating a startup, making smaller semiconductors, or new energy technologies are much more affected by upside decay.
Using the example of scientific discovery, it feels like a major country could have assets such as high investment into education and R&D that helped it have lots of rare discoveries, even if its foreign policy didn't do it any favors and lost it weak ties.
I think this country would be good at incremental discoveries, improvements, some types of development, and commercialization. But it wouldn't be good at generating rare discoveries. Using your example of a board game, weak ties can be translated into "Victory Points" at different ratios depending on the type of activity you're looking at.
Note: This was originally published at https://brianlui.dog/2020/10/06/upside-decay/. This concept is important because many people are self-interested, and this provides a convincing self-interested reason for being virtuous. Being virtuous is good, but it's also practical!
Upside decay means that an organization doesn’t get any lucky breaks.
If we think of average luck as a normal distribution of outcomes, this is what it looks like:
The reduction in area under the curve (the orange part) represents the loss of positive outcomes. The total loss is small, but it’s concentrated in the tail of the curve where the extreme successes happen. This is upside decay and it’s catastrophic.
Here’s a per capita GDP chart... (read 1334 more words →)
The latter one. It follows the same pattern as this diagram.
Yes, the failure modes are mentioned in the last part of the post: trying to decouple identical things, and trying to decouple unrelated things.
How do we identify situations where we are using some concept which may be usefully decoupled? Or, alternatively: which of our concepts in fact constitute couplings of two (or more?!) orthogonal[2] concepts—and how do we tell?
Great catch. This is something I didn't mention in the article because I typical-minded. Here's a description, which I will add back to the article later probably:
1. Whenever you come across something that seems like it is logical, but violates your intuitions, then there's a high chance that this technique can help. This is an easy situation to use dimensional decoupling and it comes naturally, because we are already in 'interrogative' mode.
2. When you're stuck... (read 375 more words →)
You're right, bucket errors are the result of entwining things. Dimensional decoupling is a way of reducing bucket errors. In my personal experience, once I used dimensional decoupling regularly, it became second nature and automatic. I think it's important to have low-friction ways of reducing bucket errors.
And yes, the most valuable decouplings are ones where they aren't identical but we think they are. But until we try to decouple them, we don't know whether they are or not!
Which diagrams disagree?
The pattern is an application of dimensional decoupling - the dimensions are the in the headers of the diagrams.
Top left: sad and not happy.
Top right: sad and happy.
Bottom left: not happy and not sad.
Bottom right: happy and not sad.
This is also posted at brianlui.dog.
Cornelius has a problem in his life.
Cornelius: Emma, I know you’re really good with people. I feel silly saying this, but maybe you could help me with a problem I have?
Emma: That’s a very nice thing for you to say, Cornelius! What’s the matter?
Cornelius: I keep getting taken advantage of! A lot of my friends seem like they’re really nice, but they just take and take from me and never give anything in return. I noticed that your friends aren’t like that at all. What am I doing wrong?
Emma: I’ve met a few of your friends and I have to agree. A lot of them seem like... (read 1309 more words →)
Great comment; you're right that in addition to avoiding upside decay, we can also try to increase the positive tail!
Also good spot that virtue as defined here is relative (e.g. during the Cold War the USA would be considered "virtuous" by dint of being less mean than the USSR).