Slack

  • Slack is the absence of binding constraints on behavior
  • Slack is optionality - the ability to change your behavior or strategy at short notice
  • Out To Get You and the Attack on Slack
    • The world is filled with demands on your time, money and attention
    • If you accede to too many small demands, you’ll run out of slack
    • Large demands often have a way of expanding unexpectedly to take up all of your slack
    • Sometimes this is okay - there’s a time and a place for maximum effort
    • But most times are ordinary and call for ordinary effort
  • “You can afford it”
    • People like to tell you that you can afford things
    • But everything you commit to take a bit out of your reserves
    • If you say yes to everything, you quickly run out of reserves
    • Instead of asking whether you can afford it, ask if it’s worth it
  • The Slackless Life of Maya Millenial
    • Things are really bad when the presence of slack in your life is viewed as a defection
    • There are places in the world that see slack as insufficient dedication and loyalty
    • If you’re not putting your all into your career, your cause or your image, you’re seen as a “failure”
  • Make sure you have slack under normal circumstances
  • Respect others’ need for slack

Confessions of a Slacker

  • Slack is the distance from binding constraints

  • Slack can be expressed as

    slack equation

  • Slack disappears as any resource approaches zero, regardless of how much of everything else you have
  • Maintaining slack requires balancing all important resources, devoting particular attention to resources that you’re lacking the most
  • Concentrate on getting resources you need, not the resources that are easiest to obtain
  • However, the scarcest resources are often the ones that are hardest to obtain, and thus many people have aversive thoughts about them
  • Ignored constraints, don’t go away, though. They’re still binding you.
  • When no single resource is especially scarce, you can figure out exchange rates between resources to help shore up resources that get drawn down more quickly
    • The classic example is the time/money trade-off between hiring someone to do a job and doing the job yourself
  • Remember to account for intangible resources when tracking slack
  • The main advantage of slack is that it gives you optionality - the ability to change your plans, turn down deals and explore new paths
  • Be careful of highly competitive environments - they incinerate slack

The Rules About Responding To Call-Outs Aren’t Working

  • Privileged people often ignore marginalized people
  • Social justice spaces attempt to address this by instituting formal rules about how privileged people should respond to marginalized people
    • Listen to marginalized people
    • When called out by a marginalized person, don’t argue
    • Believe the marginalized person, apologize, and don’t engage in the called out behavior again
    • When you see others doing the same behavior, call them out
  • It’s not possible to follow these rules literally
    • Marginalized people are not a monolith
    • Marignalized people have the same range of opinions as privileged people
    • When you’re called out for two opposite things, it’s impossible to follow both directives
  • Since the rules are impossible to follow, what actually happens is:
    • One opinion is lifted up as the “the opinion of marginalized people”
    • “Listening to marginalized” is reduced to agreeing with the opinion
    • Any disagreement with the opinion is reduced to “talking over marginalized people”
    • This results in fights over who is the “true voice of marginalized people”
  • These rules leave marginalized people open to sabotage
    • Language of call-outs sabotages effective leaders for having insufficient ideological purity
    • Rules about shutting up and listening to marginalized make it difficult to correct lies and distortions
  • Rules are exploited by abusive people
    • Rules about listening to marginalized people prevent victim from asserting their rights
    • Abuser can send victim into depressive spiral by claiming that all the things that bring the victim joy are symbols of oppressive behavior
    • Abuser may separate victim from friends and allies by spreading rumors of oppresive behavior
  • Rules lack intersectionality
    • No one experiences all forms of oppression
    • People that are oppressed in different ways call each other out
  • Rules prevent group dedicated to addressing one form of oppression from collaborating with groups dedicated to addressing different forms oppression
  • We need to learn how to address conflicts in a substantive way

A Lament on Simler, et. al

  • Critique of the leaning tower of morality
  • Conflates evolutionary self-interest with the common usage of the term
  • Obscures the fact that “selfish” genes can produce altruistic organisms, if the altruistic behavior leads to greater spreading of the particular genes
  • The evolutionary origin of altruistic behavior confuses us; we think it’s “fake” because it’s the result of a self-interested process
  • But that’s confusing outcome and process - it’s possible for a selfish process to have an altruistic outcome
  • When we talk about genetic selfishness, we’re talking about the process that results in our behaviors, not the behaviors themselves
  • There is a complete moral break between ourselves and the process that created us
  • Human morality cannot and should not attempt to encompass the process of evolution
  • A neurotic desire for approval
    • The world outside of our minds is fundamentally amoral
    • Why do we care that there is no universally “true” altruism?
    • Don’t need to justify things to evolution - evolution is not God, nor should it be treated as one
  • Notions of selfishness and unselfishness are human constructs
  • We assign moral values to mechanisms by which genes spread themselves and then get confused when evolution seems to work differently from our moral intuitions

The Cactus and the Weasel

  • The phrase “strong views, weakly held” describes hedgehogs better than foxes
  • Foxes are better described with the phrase “weak views, strongly held”
  • If this is surprising to you, you’re probably more familiar with the degenerate forms of foxes and hedgehogs
    • Cactus - degenerate hedgehog - strong views, strongly held
    • Weasel - degenerate fox - weak views, weakly held
  • True foxes and hedgehogs are both complex individuals capable of meaningfully updating in different ways
  • Unlike foxes and hedgehogs, weasels and cacti are incapable of updating
  • Views and hold
    • The basic distinction between foxes and hedgehogs is that while foxes have superficial knowledge of many things, hedgehogs have deep knowledge of a few things
    • To get a hedgehog to change their mind, you need to offer a single big idea that can overpower the big idea they already hold
    • This isn’t hard as it sounds, because a hedgehog’s big idea is often anchored by a small number of fundamental axioms
    • Undermining those axioms can cause the hedgehog to rapidly update their entire worldview
    • To get a fox to change their mind globally, you need to undermine an idea in many problem domains
    • Foxes are better at local updates, whereas hedgehogs tend to update globally
  • The strength of views
    • Beliefs aren’t held as disconnected sets of atomic propositions
    • Beliefs are organized into related clusters - views
    • If a large number of views can be connected into a global model, we can call that connected cluster of views a world view
    • Both foxes and hedgehogs have views, but only hedgehogs only have world-views
    • A strong view is one that encompasses a large set of beliefs and is interpreted as literally as possible
    • A weak view is one that encompasses a few critical beliefs and is interpreted in a manner that makes it easy to defend in a debate
    • The advantage of a strong view is that it’s much easier to generate concrete predictions from strong views
    • In order to successfully undermine a strong view, one must pass an ideological Turing Test
  • Changing Your Mind
    • We can easily change our minds when dealing with isolated, peripheral beliefs
    • When people talk about changing minds being difficult, they’re talking about changing views or world-views
    • In order to change a strong view, you need to
      • Learn new habits
      • Learn new patterns of thinking
      • Need to learn new habits first, otherwise the new patterns of thinking won’t make any sense
    • Paradoxically, this means that it’s easier to change a hedgehog’s mind than a fox’s
      • Foxes don’t tie their habits as strongly to their views, so changing habits don’t have same sort of global update effect that they have on hedgehogs
  • Strong Views, Weakly Held
    • Successful hedgehogs cultivate the ability to change world-views rapidly
    • Recognize when a core axiom of their world-view has been undermined
    • Assume that all other beliefs associated with that world-view are now false
    • Build a new world-view on top of new habits, and treat old views as false until proven otherwise
  • Weak Views, Strongly Held
    • Foxes don’t have strong views, in that they don’t use a single cluster of beliefs to explain large parts of the world
    • However foxes hold their views strongly - a single refutation isn’t enough to trigger a global update
    • This is because views are supported by a number of independent justifications from a variety of fields, and refuting one of the justifications for a belief doesn’t undermine the rest
    • Just as the challenge for a hedgehog is to rebuild their world-view rapidly, the challenge for the fox is to reorganize their beliefs quickly
    • The difference between foxes and hedgehogs is what they do with domain-independent principles
      • Hedgehogs build totalizing world-views
      • Foxes treat domain-independent principles as ad-hoc tools to use in novel situations
  • Heuristic and doctrinaire religion
    • The real difference between foxes and hedgehogs is how they operate outside their “home” domain
    • Foxes start quickly, as they’re able to bring in analogies and metaphors from outside the new domain to get a head start
    • Hedgehogs are slower to get started in a new domain, as they have to build up a coherent model of the entire problem first
    • However, once that coherent model is built, hedgehogs can act and coordinate much more quickly than foxes, since they can execute at the speed of subconscious habit, rather than conscious thought
    • Given that hedgehogs have deep domain knowledge of their home domain, and can outcompete foxes in new domains once new world-views get built, what is the advantage in being a fox?
  • The Tetlock Edge
    • The one sustainable edge that foxes seem to have is prediction
    • Tetlock’s data shows that foxes tend to be (marginally) less bad at predicting the future than hedgehogs
    • Where does this advantage come from?
      • Foxes eschew abstration, and prefer analogy, metaphor and narrative
      • By refusing to get locked into a particular set of consistent abstractions, foxes can integrate disparate and contradictory pieces of data, which hedgehogs often abandon
  • The Fox/Hedgehog Duality
    • The fact that foxes don’t throw away data that doesn’t fit the model means that foxes slowly gain an edge as they accumulate more and more data
    • However, in order to realize this long term advantage, they have to survive against hedgehogs who are better at executing in the short term
    • Nobody can be both a fox and a hedgehog - you only have a limited amount of time and computational capacity
    • Tradeoff between ability to integrate new data and ability to execute on already collected data
  • Dissolute Foxes and Hidebound Hedgehogs
    • Cactus: strong views, strongly held
      • Hedgehog that never updates becomes a cactus
      • Elevation of fundamental beliefs to unfalsifiable sacredness
    • Weasel: weak views, weakly held
      • Meta-cognition without cognition
      • Engages with ideas in purely relative terms
      • Loses the ability to evaluate the objective truth of an idea
  • Foxes and hedgehogs deal differently with insincere arguments
    • Foxes can ignore insincere arguments entirely, since they’re not that tied to having a globally consistent world-view
    • Hedgehogs have to detect insincere arguments in order to prevent those arguments from contaminating their world-view
      • When encountering someone with an ostensibly opposed world-view, hedgehogs probe that world-view for internal consistency
      • If the world-view is not internally consistent, then hedgehogs detect it as insincere and refuse to update on it