Monday, 18 March 2024 ------------------------ Hello there. I think I'll begin each writing with a brief report on my feelings. Overall, last week was positive. But yesterday as I was falling asleep, I caught myself in negative thoughts, relatively mild though, and regarded something external to me I'd encountered. Luckily, I was able to reduce them by conscious effort with two things. The first thing was to remind myself that I was unusually tired, as I hadn't fully recovered from the day before. I'd went for a walk in heavy rain and wind without proper clothing. On the way back home, I was soaked to the skin, having to keep my eyes shut from the barrage. Despite this, I wasn't bothered much. But even though I felt calm in this condition, gradually I began to experience a mild dizziness and a changing heart rhythm, instilling some worry in me too, or should I say a bit of sense perhaps? Had my newfound fearlessness turned me arrogant, to perform a reckless show of bravado by mocking death? I think I underestimated how quickly you cool down while wet in wind. I can only be thankful that I wasn't too far from home. It was selfish and misguided, and I will be more mindful to not let my curiosity put me in unnecessary danger. I was not only endangering myself, but potentially taking the effort of emergency services from someone else caught in misfortune. Back to reducing my negative thoughts, as I said, the first thing was remembering I was tired. The second thing was shifting my perspective. Reasoning my affect to my tiredness was not enough to stop my mind from rationalizing and applying the affect to other reasons. The tricky thing is those reasons may be valid in regards to keeping in mind but I was applying too much affect to them. Changing perspective helps my brain better see that. If your perspective is centered around your experience, we easily attach too much importance to things, and doing so isn't helpful to us. However, changing perspective wont help if you don't have good references for shifting perspective. For me, comparison to how it could be worse or how others have it worse do not work for me. I'm not sure how to properly explain what works for me, it's relatively new for me, at least on an experiential level. I think it tackles fear of missing out and being attached to your story, but I'm not sure it's effective to just read something about that without having some experience of losing those things. It can easily become the same thing as telling someone to just be happy and smile. I have now read the second chapter. In this chapter, we learn by examples of single-stock systems and double-stock systems. I think it's best for me if I just write how I'd like to make sense of it. By not strictly following the flow of the book and all its contents, I feel more free to just be curious about it. I'd rather begin with a basic understanding than trying to cover everything and be confused. How do we know if a flow to a stock is a balancing one or a reinforcing one? If the stock can replicate/reproduce by itself, its inflow would be considered to have a reinforcing feedback loop. In a single-stock system, like physical capital for production of goods. But first, in this case, we do not consider the constrained external environment, but look at the unconstrained internal environment only. The inflow is investment, the stock is physical capital, and outflow is depreciation. Investment is governed by a reinforcing feedback loop because increasing the stock-level increases output allowing for exponential growth depending on the reinvestment rate, while depreciation is governed by a balance feedback loop as its a linear rate of outflow relative to the stock level. They call this a reinforcing-loop-plus-balancing loop system. But something like the temperature in your room is not reinforcing. It doesn't get hotter in your room because of the temperature itself but by your heating appliance doing more work. In a single-stock system with balancing feedback loops, like a car dealership, we can see how delays in the system can make it difficult to keep the stock level at a desired target. I think you can sort delays into two boxes. The first is physical delays in the processes, in this case, the time it takes for cars to be delivered to the dealership after making an order. The second is perception and response delay. I'm not sure what name to give them as a whole but it's delays that we can control to better balance inflow and outflow to the target stock level. For our example, sales in the dealership is uncertain. Perception delay is the time period we use to estimate future sales. Do we average sales by 5 days or 10 days? Response delay is the fraction of the estimated discrepancy we adjust for, meaning we spread out orders. I don't fully understand this but I think I have an idea. I'd say we can make a comparison to the prediction loop for our brain. The perception delay is the amount of input it needs before it compares with its prediction, and then response delay is how many iterations of incorrect predictions before it adjusts its prediction by tuning probability, e.g when you incorrectly see a gun instead of phone, how long before brain corrects your simulation. What's interesting with this dealership example, is that we see how the stock level oscillates as the flows try to stabilize, and how reducing perception and response delay can actually cause it too oscillate even more, even though you might intuitively think that reducing those delays would improve stability. The book has graphs that helps to show this. I'd probably have to do the math myself to really understand it but regardless it still gives us the understanding why it's important to know how changes to the mechanisms that manipulate the flows will result stock level stability to spot issues. This oscillation is a common cycle in many systems, the economy with its periods of expansion and contraction is one that springs to mind. As previously mentioned, you don't find isolated single-stock systems in the real world. They exist within an environment with constraints, for example, physical capital has stabilizing constraints (materials, energy, space, labor, markets) so its exponential growth has limits. We can add a resource to our system model of physical capital to create a two-stock system. Which type of resource it is, will change the dynamics. The two main groups are non-renewable or renewable resources. Non-renewable resources are stock limited (oil, helium). Whereas the stock of renewable resources is infinite or can regenerate but the flow is limited. For now I sort renewables in three levels of flow limitation. First level is near unlimited flow like sun, oxygen, water. Perhaps separating sun from the others. Second level is replicating like fish and livestock. Third is non-replicating like timber and crops. What I found interesting with non-renewable resources is the dynamic between extraction rate, capital stock, and resource stock. How due to the exponential growth in capital stock, therefore the extraction rate, the resource stock depletes exponentially, and at a point as the resource is depleted, extraction rate falls and becomes unaffordable to extract the remaining due to the high capital stock. It's equally interesting to see the dynamics in the nonrenewable resources. For replicating, like fish, the more efficient our extraction become, the more affordable it is to extract at low stock levels, which due to its reinforcing nature, reduces extraction long-term, or fully depletes it. The higher stock level, the more distorted or delayed feedback can become in terms of where the equilibrium of inflow and outflow is. If you have vast amount of timber to extract, the possible outflow will decrease until it reaches the inflow.