85 chunks · 59 episodes
...ll bits of signal that stand out from the background noise Humans are a form of ground truth, pinning down what's valuable / useful. If you have humans in the loop and the signal can pop out of the general noise, you get a very powerful, self...
...he useful variance is what stands out. That's a consistent edge imparted by the ground truth of the universe. That strong consistency of a subset is what makes it pops at the level of the population. Usefulness gives a consistent edge, and th...
...nces that are useful in the world. A weak but consistent alignment based on the ground truth of useful utterances in the real world, which allows that inherent structure to pop out at scale. People say things in the real world to make things ...
...bly. The game is the emergent kayfabe taking on a life of its own; terraforming ground truth to its own internal logic. No one wants to play the game. If you don't play the game, then you are knocked out of the game. The game produces nothing...
...s to feedback means less likely to be viable when you finally interact with the ground truth of the real world. But also every bit of investment you do before viability might lock in non-viable constraints. When you invest incrementally in a ...
...r example the farmer doing the animal husbandry. In natural selection, it's the ground truth of natural selection. Natural selection is fully emergent; it must be so. Things that are more likely to survive or replicate are more likely to be m...
The only hope of surviving the ground truth is to have continual exposure to it.
...more and more from an echo chamber and thus brittle. Removing yourself from the ground truth makes it so that when you interact with the ground truth again you won't be strong enough to survive it any more. It is only via continual interactio...
...those interactions come to dominate, to take all of the attention away from the ground truth, from the outside world. The attention that must be paid to navigate the inner world is the maintenance cost of the organization. The activities the ...
...ws in any organization of sufficient size. The kayfabe has delaminated from the ground truth. If you privately point out the ground truth, a leader will pull you aside and say something like: "We know the official plan is not perfect. It has ...
...authority cannot be coerced. If it's formal authority then it can skew from the ground truth reality. But the prime emergent directive is to act like your manager is correct, even if you don't believe it. If you don't, your boss can fire you ...
...s most immediately important for survival of the idea in that context), and the ground truth is increasingly forgotten. Every successful organization's selection pressures inadvertently are pulled inward, into the internal social structure. I...
What removes ambiguity is strategic clarity that aligns with ground truth. Program management style spreadsheets are a crutch, they make it feel like you have less ambiguity than you do. The illusion of clarity and control....
...ing reality are kayfabe and might shatter. But narratives that do represent the ground truth in a rigorous way (that is, as people investigate them closer, they become more convinced in the broad strokes of the narrative) are resilient and us...
...anizations as they grow become increasingly about optics (politics) not output (ground truth). When you do an action, you have the direct output that comes out of it, as well as the optics of other people inside being able to see you do it. T...
...ide the team look very traditional and heroic. The internals of a team is about ground truth, disconfirming evidence. The external of a team is about posturing, kayfabe, perception. Who can you let inside? How can you make that as large as po...
...u're in at the moment. Some orgs have more or less acute kayfabe (distance from ground truth), and different orgs will have their own particular flavor of kayfabe. But every org has it, at least a little bit. Kayfabe, within that org, is in s...
... at seeking and absorbing disconfirming evidence at the level of strategy (e.g. ground truth market dynamics and your place in then).
... tends to become an echo chamber and then increasingly become more kayfabe than ground truth. But still, the experts are implicitly voting that the jargon is worth having, so it might be load-bearing.
...e individual components often die. Individuals experiment and are culled by the ground truth of reality. That creates the space for new individuals that are viable to grow. This is a kind of self-pruning diversity. This characteristic is what...