Avalok's Journal

Where are you and where are you going?
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shaz
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by shaz »

Plus you just got rid of all that stuff. You might need to relax and enjoy not having a grandfather clock for a while. Moving is tiring and stressful so you do have to weigh that against the benefits of getting out of a house that isn't the right fit. (I hope I don't get kicked out of the forum for that very un-ERE remark.)

guitarplayer
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by guitarplayer »

shaz wrote:
Sun Nov 27, 2022 9:59 pm
Moving is tiring and stressful so you do have to weigh that against the benefits of getting out of a house that isn't the right fit.
Same might go for the reverse, i.e. when getting a place it is worthwhile to think about how much effort it is going to be to exit the arrangement. This would be an argument for a nomadic lifestyle!

shaz
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by shaz »

@guitarplayer you are correct about that. I wish I had thought through my exit strategy better before I bought a house.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

@shaz I will happily put up with the exhaustion and tiredness if I am convinced it is the right choice. My partner is not so steadfast, which can be good, as sometimes I genuinely do need to take it easier. Currently writing this looking at the spot where that blasted clock stood, with a cross-stitched quote from the end of Ishmael in its place. Much better.

Had the day off work today. What a difference the quiet makes: mind feels empty, time feels much slower.

I reviewed the calculations I made regarding selling the house this morning, and looked at the impact it would have to our projected accumulation vs. staying put. Suffice it to say is it not clear-cut. I want to get someone in to value the place before I look any more at it, because a lot depends on the equity we would receive. I'm trying to avoid being swayed by the intuition that it feels like the right thing to do.

Spent chunks of the day reading Antifragile, and had loads of tangential thoughts come from that. I've made rough notes for myself, but I'd like to formulate them better before writing into my journal. I've also been having a think about what I want to do with my time currently. Since work became intense over the summer, I (without really realising it) have stopped filling my non-work hours as effectively. With the allotment becoming routine now, it feels as though there is space for me to take on something else. I've a few ideas now, and I'll be considering them in the coming days/weeks.

MBBboy
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by MBBboy »

I think being blind is part of it - and that's mostly due to not knowing about the existence of the topic, which if of course the point of reading the book! And then even when you understand it there's the challenge of applying it. I can go buy a backup generator to be more robust. How the heck do you become antifragile to losing power at your home?

I think another big part of it is that time is a necessary component to becoming anti-fragile, and there isn't really a shortcut for that. In your relationship example above you need to foster and maintain a set of relationships likely for years before the types of events described can occur.

I would recommend going back and reading Black Swan still. I still got a lot out of it - Fooled by Randomness is the one that suffers that the backwards reading approach.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

It's funny and scary how many prejudices must affect my interactions day-to-day. I've been working this week with another dev who I have always sensed found software design and architecture to be a load of BS, which it certainly can be, but having worked on well-architected systems, and spaghetti hells; I'll take the former any day. It is also this part of the job that I find engaging and creative, and is the part I can see myself being comfortable doing for a longer period of time. The actual programming is generally at this point a means to the end of realising designs.

I was expecting our discussions to not go well; I could foresee a clash between my eagerness and his scepticism. In short, I was expecting any of my suggestions to be blown off, dismissed as unnecessary/complicated/extra work etc, but have found him to be far more cooperative. He has been willing to give stuff a shot that he has been dismissive of in the past. I'm relieved, not because I feel as though I got my way (I haven't), but because it has shown to me that I can work with this guy more so than I thought previously.

It makes me wonder how much of his previous denigration is because no one has ever explained well to him why you would want to write code with proper design patterns. And by well, I mean that no one has ever sat down and gone through what they attempt to solve. At face value it just looks like fancy coding, but that is not the point. To me it was intuitive, but that doesn't make it universally so.
MBBboy wrote:
Wed Dec 07, 2022 9:39 am
I can go buy a backup generator to be more robust. How the heck do you become antifragile to losing power at your home?
Currently I am at a loss, but I'm going to keep turning this one over. In the software world, you can use autoscaling to spin up new servers as demand requires, but not so in the material realm.
MBBboy wrote:
Wed Dec 07, 2022 9:39 am
I think another big part of it is that time is a necessary component to becoming anti-fragile, and there isn't really a shortcut for that. In your relationship example above you need to foster and maintain a set of relationships likely for years before the types of events described can occur.
This is really where a persistent attitude comes in. You cannot kill randomness, but you can keep going; this is his last message in Fooled by Randomness IIRC.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by AxelHeyst »

MBBboy wrote:
Wed Dec 07, 2022 9:39 am
I can go buy a backup generator to be more robust. How the heck do you become antifragile to losing power at your home?
1. Lose power in your home
2. Go oh no this is bad all my food spoiled and I nearly froze to death but luckily I just scraped by
3. Power comes back on
4. Get on the internet and order some books/read some forums about food preservation, DIY offgrid solar battery systems, and a few other things.
5. Learn some food preservation skills so that if the power goes out again, you know how to dehydrate the veggies and jerk the meat, or whatever.
6. Build a small solar battery system so if the power is out you can have some lights and charge your phones and stuff, so you have comms as long as the cell towers are still up. Also get some candles.
7. Get some more blankets and refrigiwear suits (or whatever), so if the power goes out when it's cold you won't freeze.
8. etc

In other words:
>A crisis happened
>You learned from the crisis
>You got new skills and advanced your tech stack
>The next time that same crisis happens, it'll be a nothing-burger for your household.

AKA you got stronger due to the crisis. Antifragile.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

@AH those actions are antifragile (as in, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger), but the end system is at best robust to the original issue (power outage). Perhaps that is just the best we can do, so long as we are willing to create increasingly robust systems each time a shock hits us, the overall effect is antifragility. So my power outage contigency system can only ever be robust, but my antifragile behaviour of increasing its robustness each time it fails (longer power outage, too cold for blankets too suffice etc.) creates a system that is antifragile in time.

AxelHeyst
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by AxelHeyst »

avalok wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 1:27 pm
So my power outage contigency system can only ever be robust, but my antifragile behaviour of increasing its robustness each time it fails (longer power outage, too cold for blankets too suffice etc.) creates a system that is antifragile in time.
I think this is right. Antifragility is a word that describes a graph of resiliency that goes up and to the right, as opposed to horizontal or down and to the right (fragility)? Antifragility is the ability to increase your system robustness in response to crisis through time. So antifragility implies learning behavior, I think. You need either a central nervous system, or a system composed of enough elements that a learning-style effect is emergent (I'm thinking like a forest that becomes healthier in the wake of a fire). Any snapshot of any system can give no information about the antifragility of that system, only the instantaneous robustness of it. (Maybe? Unless you're able to observe structures of the system that imply learning-style capabilities?)

For human-directed antifragile 'systems', it's not good enough to just have a brain. You need the right software, which you might think of as an attitude towards crises. Someone might have the attitude in the wake of a power outage that the government is doing a lousy job and spends all their time ranting about it on facebook. They may be correct, but they're now pouring personal energy into a black hole. They've gotten functionally weaker. Their attitude causes their life-system to be fragile.

Someone else might have a fatalistic attitude, and whenever the power goes out they shrug, they do jumping jacks all night to keep from freezing to death, and when they power comes back on they throw out their old rotten food and buy new food. (Or, kick on the generator they have, and run it till it runs out of gas, and then they do jumping jacks. But after the crises ends, they don't buy more gas cans or blankets). They're resilient to some degree, but they haven't gotten any better.

The attitude described above, one that takes crises as learning opportunities to actually improve the base level of operational fitness for every crisis/attack on the system, is an antifragile perspective.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Anti-fragility is not the same thing as resilience. For instance, one of the examples Taleb offers is that kinship is robust, friendship is fragile, and sexual attraction is anti-fragile. You can make a system or relationship, such as friendship, which is relatively fragile more robust by investing more or working harder at your friendships. You can make it more resilient by adding more friends or making sure all your friends aren’t only work buddies or location dependent. To make your friendship circle anti-fragile, you have to alter some of your relationships to be such that they actually thrive when an element of risk is in play, such as is the case with relationships that thrive on sexual attraction.

In general, simplest way to thrive in spite of catastrophe is to set yourself up to be black market dealer in emergency supplies. Obviously, not necessarily the most moral way to thrive, but meets definition of anti-fragile.

mathiverse
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by mathiverse »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Thu Dec 08, 2022 2:36 pm
In general, simplest way to thrive in spite of catastrophe is to set yourself up to be black market dealer in emergency supplies. Obviously, not necessarily the most moral way to thrive, but meets definition of anti-fragile.
To riff off of this and suggest a more palatable possibility... Be the neighbor that has power and supplies in a power outage that they can share with other neighbors. During an outage check on neighbors and invite them to use extra fridge space, sleeping space, cooking space, heating, blankets, etc. That way the outage strengthens your relationships and your neighborhood's relationships.

daylen
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by daylen »

Life is a like layered sandwich of fragile and anti-fragile toppings. Anti-fragile toppings are smeared into fragility at the level above and below. Or at least this is compatible with the original framing of "gaining from disorder".

In relation to the drug dealer example, fragility comes in through the painting of a target on your back for future anti-social humans looking to take your property. Internally, this also has a cost towards establishing pro-social behaviors (outside of business).

In relation to the mini-power plant example, there is an upfront and maintenance cost as well as an internally amplified attachment to a particular place that could experience raids, droughts, floods, etc.

Which toppings to choose?!

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

@daylen I get the sense that you're touching on the fact that every decision has side effects, every choice has tradeoffs: by designing for antifragility in one area, you expose yourself to fragility elsewhere? If so, one could do reverse fishbones specifically around the accrued antifragility/fragility exposures arising from a given action.

daylen
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by daylen »

Yeah, another way of seeing it is that life = negentropic systems of descent. Descent into a valley of local optima is never the final story since the fragility of parts allows valley crossing between wholes (thus anti-fragility at various levels of composition). Protein anti-fragility -> cell fragility -> individual anti-fragility -> individual in group fragility -> species anti-fragility -> species in clade fragility -> clade anti-fragility (with some important steps left out in-between and on either end)

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

Hmmmm. So I guess it follows that you want to make your priority level(s) antifragile, accepting fragilities at the composites. To return to the power outage example: @AH's antifragile response was completely appropriate because it accepted the fragility of its parts (particular tools, food stores, appropriate clothing) to construct antifragility at the system level. You could repeat this at ever higher orders. For example, accepting some fragility of the power outage system in place of antifragility of a more adaptable strategy that allows one to easily move on, should things turn south at their current abode (i.e. long term power outage -> move away).

candide
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by candide »

avalok wrote:
Sun Dec 11, 2022 9:31 am
So I guess it follows that you want to make your priority level(s) antifragile, accepting fragilities at the composites.
Taleb used the example of all the small Italian principalities/city states before unification. Anyone component/alliance might have been fragile, but the system was stable.

But more to Taleb's wheelhouse: banks. When you allow the components to be too big/important to fail, then it is the system itself that takes on the fragility. And thus Taleb has argued to break up banks.

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

Right, I am going to do a longer post "monthly" post now because we are away for Christmas, and I cannot guarantee getting time on the forum much between now and then.

WL 5->6
I have spent considerable time since the end of November thinking about what I want to spend my time doing, outside of work. This was mainly provoked by the WL5->6 thread, in particular some statements made by Jacob:
jacob wrote:
Tue Nov 29, 2022 2:27 pm
Effectively, it means giving up watching TV/youtube.
jacob wrote:
Mon Dec 05, 2022 8:06 am
I'm hoping that especially the WL5-6 and WL6-7 efforts will get some insight from this and realize that the reason one gets stuck is in thinking that the way forward is "more practice" if one is already practicing (a WL6-7 problem)---nope, it's time to start drawing reverse fishbone diagrams and WOGs. Alternatively believing the answer is "more theory" (like better spreadsheets or a good book) if one is already theorizing (a WL5-6 problem)---nope, it's time to pick up some practical skills.
And Taleb gave me pause to think even more:
A donkey equally famished and thirsty caught at an equal distance between food and water would unavoidably die of hunger or thirst. But he can be saved thanks to a random nudge one way or the other.
Artisans ... have some volatility in their income but they are rather robust to a minor professional Black Swan. Their risks are visible.
If you "have optionality", you don't have much need for what is commonly called intelligence, knowledge, insight, skills ... you don't have to be right that often.
These compounded to make me realise I should spread my wings wider; do more and different things. Given breaking the WL5-6 barrier is predicated on praxis, it is important I start to do as soon as appropriate, rather than concerning myself with a grand strategy.

Now I don't think my enemy here is TV/YouTube(*); it is a lack of direction in what skills (modules) I'm developing. This is historically abnormal for me, but this year has involved little skill development and more consolidation: allotment felt much more habitual, routine exercise, stable savings rate etc, journaling habit etc. Unfortunately it took until the WL5->6 thread for me to realise I am not utilising my time effectively; I'm complacent.

Ashamedly, it took me a while to think of things I wanted to develop. There are plenty of interests I'd want to pursue, but far fewer that I want to commit to which have a small footprint (read: portable) and cost very little money. The narrowed list I came up with is as follows:
- Investments studying
- Writing (particularly about software architecture, which I find interesting even outside of work)
- More structured kettlebell training
- Opportunistic bike maintenance (e.g. I could do with replacing the bar tape on mine)
- Cooking (in particular emphasising making staples in house, such as yoghurt)
- Guitar

Now the last one is inexpensive only because my Dad happens to have an acoustic from when I was younger and we both tried learning; set up costs would be nil. The other benefit of guitar is it is fine motor, which I am particularly weak with (apart from QWERTY keyboards), so it would bring a considerable difference of skill to develop. It also possesses a good catchment of the renaissance education domains from the book (namely, Intellectual, Emotional, Social, Technical). As such, I have borrowed the acoustic and intend to start learning (again) with the initial goal to be able to play a few songs my partner and I enjoy.

I plan to tackle the others alongside, but I want to spend some more time (over the Christmas break) considering a sensible set of goals to aim for. For example, I've tried sticking to a routine with investments studying, but it ends up falling by the wayside and I think this is because I have not set particular goals for myself here. With others, such as cooking and bike maintenance, I intend to better incorporate those into my day-to-day. For example, aiming to cook more meals where I devise the recipe myself, perhaps from what is on-hand.

For writing, obviously my increased journaling will help, and I am already writing pieces about software architecture offline, but I want to set up a small blog to share these pieces, if only to encourage myself to write little and often.

Reverse Fishbones
As part of the WL5->6 MMG, the vote was to create new WoGs. I took the time to redo as many reverse fishbones as I could think to do, which I will share here when I get time to scan them onto my laptop.

Reading
Still reading Antifragile, still loving it; it will be my own read of the year at this rate. I plan to reread it immediately after finishing. I have reserved Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism off the back of Lemur's journal.

Garden and Allotment
The ground has been frozen and covered in snow for the past week, but I still managed to harvest a two frozen leeks for a soup in the week. There really isn't much going on now, but there is still plenty of food for us to pick; I just need to remember to do so!

I am going to try a second planting of garlic this week, once the snow has thawed, because I am still not seeing any shoots from my original planting in the autumn... it'd be a shame to lose a self-saved set of varieties.

Finances
Capital: £105,172.02
Average Savings Rate: 57.7%
Average Savings Rate TTM: 65.0%

(*)We do not own a TV; I cannot sit still to watch a TV programme. I do use YouTube, but mainly for music, or to listen to talks while washing up.
Last edited by avalok on Tue Jan 03, 2023 4:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.

ertyu
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by ertyu »

Idk if I should ask here or on the wl5-6 thread, but I was going through some similar thinking, thinking up modules for the wog, and one of the things i noticed is that for me, investing feeds cash into other modules but beyond that, i can't seem to think of what other goals it's heterotelic with. besides cash, what does it contribute to for you?

avalok
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by avalok »

The short answer is that I don't really know yet, but that I'm not too concerned about this. The way you phrased your questions suggests a difference of approach, so let me try to explain why I cannot give a satisfactory answer.

My WoG is built bottom-up, so instead of thinking of modules for the WoG, I think of modules, which will then form a WoG, whether I draw it or not. This of course may lead to heterotelic behaviour but, as I have said on the WL5->6 thread and here, I'm not concerned about synergy at this point; I care more about collecting modules, and maybe having them talk to one another a little. The emphasis is on having modules, not on the web.

Regarding investing, that module contributes for me:
Image
These goals are seen in isolation to other modules. It doesn't matter whether another module makes use of/contributes to the same goals at this point. What matters is whether this module is, given its goals, at least productive for me: does it help fulfil goals I want to fulfil? Perhaps a counter-example will help: television.
Image
This module is, even in isolation, obviously counter-productive. The effects are not where I want to go, and I don't need a WoG to know that. For investment studying I can see some positive goals that come out of it, and there are limited downsides to trying, so it is a candidate. That is enough for now.

The point of this approach is that it emphasises trial and error. The focus is on doing something and then learning what the goals are, because often the effects are not known upfront (most of my investing goals are quite woolly). It would likely take me a few months of commitment to studying investments before I can draw an accurate reverse fishbone. There are things knowable in advance, for which this exercise is useful in discounting the obviously heterotelic, but a lot you only find out by cutting yourself on it.

If this sounds anti-web-of-goals, it is not. It's an approach I am taking to start to fathom a process too complex for me currently; the web of goals strategy itself. At some point I expect to understand the modules of my life well enough to see their effects as elements in a strategy.

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grundomatic
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Re: Avalok's Journal

Post by grundomatic »

@ertyu

Total noob at systems thinking here, so this is "discussion" and not "answer". I could have this all wrong. For an investing (and not just investment learning) module in a WOG, it's a place for money to go (rather than to shopping), a place for time to go (rather than TV), and money as an output provides resilience in case some other money producing modules fails or is put on hold.

It also seems like there are a couple feedback loops in an investing module. As you increase your understanding, the input of time and mental energy should decrease, freeing those up to be used elsewhere in the system. Also you can loop the output of money right back into the module for a self-reinforcement effect.

I see that asset allocation is listed as the zeroth order goal for the learning module, so depending on what that means there could be different outputs for an investing module. It could mean knowledge is the input and sleep well at night is the output, or values is the input and desired social effect is the output.

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