Tuesday, 16 April 2024
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Hello. All is well. In the last couple of days, I've been binge-watching videos. Mainly National Geographic and one channel on YouTube. I tend to avoid YouTube, but I came across a video by Rian Doris, and I was instantly hooked. I find him charismatic. His content is about optimizing one's performance, flow state central to this. It's a compact curation of highly useful, practical information. A lot of it resonated with me from my personal experience.

One video I found funny, a video about starting work within one minute of waking up. That's basically how I got anything done without taking stimulants. In a routine, I prefer waking up at 4 AM. If I know what I'm supposed to be doing, I will get straight out of bed, and start my work. It was critical for me to get the most out of the next hour or two until 6 AM. After that, I'd have a hard time focusing.

I'm not familiar with the details, so I'll keep it abstract, talking of the brain's reward system and stimulants. Forget the notion of what's normal. Just think of what you're trying to accomplish. The goal of taking stimulants should not to be to feel better, feeling better is relative and can be misleading. Generally, it's better to aim for better regulation, not better feelings. Those two things are not the same. Regulation is a word I like to use as representing the sum of everything you do in a given context to survive. The word survive is complex in meaning here, it includes the basics of sustaining life, but encompasses all the functions of a human, all the way to our ability to make concepts. It's hard to get clear definition of what survival means, as it's relative too, but I think we can spot some general trends throughout history. Anyhow, I see stimulants as simply modifying your reward function. The goal should be to find the sweet spot for what you're trying to accomplish. Too low reward, and you won't seek effort that compounds your effort, and too high, you'll seek wasteful effort. We also have to consider the collective we're in as well because I think this can obscure issues. 

There's another video by Rian Doris, where he talks about the difference between an explorer and an exploiter, and the ideal between, the captain. The explorer finds new sources to exploit, but doesn't capitalize on them, while the exploiter has the opposite problem. The captain is the one who can make good calls for when it's time to explore or exploit.

This makes sense in a competitive context, but I think it has issues for a context based on social cooperation. In such context, I'd call the exploiter the creator and the explorer the exploiter. Because if you're in an environment where there's lots of creators, you can take advantage of that as an explorer, becoming an exploiter, but not fundamentally adding new value to the overall system.

This is why money can be a misleading indicator of value creation. It doesn't take into account for whether it's based on creation or exploitation, those two not being absolute categories but relative.

Value creation is a relative long-term, slower process for creating new value. Low productivity, high resilience source of creation.

Value exploitation is a relative short-term, faster process for taking existing value. High productivity, low resilience source of creation.

Value exploitation is not inherently a bad strategy for society if it's kept in check, but because of bounded rationality, it's prone to go unchecked, causing maximization of a subsystem at the expense of the overall system.

While it can be clear to see how a forest can be destroyed by overexploitation, the more complex system, especially social systems, can be taken for granted, not realizing over exploitation of a social system can make it break apart.

What's even more dangerous with social systems is that it's harder to measure value. We can in fact be destroying value while seeming as we are creating value.

The more muddy value proposition, the more I think we should be skeptical. Should marketing have more friction? I think we should avoid commercializing social reality and stick to physical reality.

I walked into a newly built supermarket yesterday, and I could only think of how did we go so wrong. Even in food, the branding is prioritized over what's actually in it. Instead of teaching people to focus on regulation, we teach people to be happy, seeking food that slowly saps the life out of them. We're forgetting we're humans that must survive to thrive.

I think we must be careful with humans. I think we overestimate how stable this level of nature is. We should build on top of it but not at the expense of it.

I always find it odd we talk about companies as living entities. Why do we allow people to hide behind companies? We're creating too powerful beings that can't be put in check. In the end, companies will break apart as humanity breaks apart.

The rights we enjoy are simply strategies to avoid things breaking apart too quickly. Subsystems, if unchecked, will entrench as much as possible. Some are just a bit more clever, playing the long con, but not clever enough to understand we must keep lower levels thriving, not stagnate.

I hope some societies stay unaffected by social consumerism, but it seems we're all going down that route the more globalized we become. The cancer will spread as much as it can, the less friction, the faster it can spread.

This writing certainly escalated. I don't really hold much in what I wrote here, just some thoughts.