A fundamental, inescapable battle that shapes a lot of the world around us: the warring curves.
- A fundamental, inescapable battle that shapes a lot of the world around us: the warring curves.
- The warring curves are the logarithmic and the exponential.
- There are many scenarios where you get exponential cost for logarithmic returns.
- At the beginning they work great.
- But they are fundamentally capped at some frustratingly low ceiling.
- You can always get more return for more effort, but past a certain point it's effectively meaningless, all effort no return.[abk]
- This is a vicious spiral.
- Close-ended, top-down contexts have this shape.
- This curve shows up because to capture more real-world value, you need a ton of rules and structure.
- Think of the portion of real world value captured by the system as the volume, and the set of rules and structure necessary to capture that value as the surface area.
- The real world is fundamentally, inescapably wrinkly and fractal; it does not behave according to simple linear rules that make sense to humans.
- As you get into smaller details, they have more surface area for a smaller amount of net new volume.
- This is where the shape of the curve comes from.
- The volume grows logarithmically and the surface area grows exponentially.
- This scenario cannot be tackled by simply putting more effort into it; the curves race away from each other.
- This problem only shows up if you try to capture the real world with top down rules.
- At the very early stages, you get a high amount of value for a small amount of effort, and everything seems to be going great.
- But unbeknownst to you, you are locked into a path of tragedy and heartache.
- As you get further, you get closer and closer to the inflection point where the curves cross.
- When the curves cross, you start getting extreme cost for very little benefit.
- As you get closer to the inflection point, you can tell something is wrong, but you think you're just losing your touch, and you push harder.
- Once you get past the inflection point you are lost. You are locked into this approach that used to work but now cannot work.
- Starting from scratch seems impossible, and so you toil there, stuck in a dead end, increasingly exhausted and angry, until you give up.
- You can get to 80% of the value with 20% of the effort, but you'll need infinite effort to get anywhere meaningfully beyond 80%.
- This phenomena shows up in many situations.
- This showed up for Alexa and Google Assistant: grammar based trees of behavior that got increasingly expensive to author for real world scenarios.
- This shows up any time you try to capture a real world phenomena in a formal ontology.[abl]
- This shows up in a government trying to set precise laws.
- This is also part of why you get the tyranny of the rocket equation for organizations.
- That is, where adding an incremental employee is the best way to get more value, but each incremental employee adds less and less value until it becomes infinitesimal.[abm]
- It's also why organizations and organisms[abn] get to a certain size and can't get bigger whereas emergent things like an ecosystem or economy or city can grow to an arbitrary scale.
- The top down control works best at small scales but it flips for larger scales where it's not possible to coordinate
- But all hope is not lost. There are other scenarios where you get exponential return for logarithmic effort.[abo]
- These combine the two warring curves in their maximal expression.
- This is the virtuous cycle.
- Open-ended, emergent contexts have this shape.
- This shape is wildly different from its cousin.
- It starts off with more effort than the alternative.
- But past the inflection point you get nearly infinite value created for a small amount of effort.
- It uses an emergent phenomena to capture an emergent phenomena.
- You just need to plant the seed and water it; it will grow into a majestic oak tree on its own.
- These kinds of situations are rare and hard to engineer, but they can be searched for and grown.
- Think truffle hunting or gardening.
- To solve modernity's problems, we need to focus more of our attention on this kind of virtuous cycle.[abp]
- The warring curves problem is impossible to fix with coherent effort.
- It can only be tackled with swarm energy that is emergent and imprecise.