[FRIAM] Nautilus: Investing Is More Luck Than Talent

[Marcus Daniels]

Robert writes:

< It would be a Hebbian-oriented mental process by way of "habituating" the kind of thoughts that lead to altruism or the desired state. >

I give that names like worrying, self-reflection, doubt, analysis, and reading.   I believe it is practiced in a widespread way by the type 1 thinkers that Pamela mentioned.

< And, so my question is how this can work at the level of a society, beyond the individual level. An example, perhaps but not sure, is the societal transformation of profit-oriented, capitalist or stockholder-owned enterprises into employeed-owned cooperatives. >

Ok.  I’m skeptical about the concept of employees.   Employees aren’t the deciders pretty much by definition.   To simply have a bunch of people that do enough to get an income isn’t typically enough to make an enterprise successful.   Hard problems require improvisation, not just managers that divide up work.  Actually I’m skeptical about the concept of enterprises too.   Enterprises imply insiders and outsiders and thus haves and have-nots.   The only solution I can see is to divorce goals from organizations.   Goals need to be their own first class objects that aren’t proxies for other things like money.  For example, I write to FRIAM because it has an inherent value to me, not because it is proxy for something else like professional networking or whatever.   I work on a free editor feature because I want it.   As soon as organizations get involved there is trouble.  In reality, we need organizations like political parties and non-profits like the ACLU to cope with bigger organizations like the elected federal government.  And we need the federal government to counter other governments that have even more objectionable properties.

< Genetic engineering isn't going to get us there either, IMHO. We don't know where to locate the genes or how to comfigure the so called Hox circuits to get better brains or minds.  Again, better for whom? >

Through experiments, individuals with more or less short term memory can be identified.    There have been cases in the popular press (e.g. 60 minutes) about people that have profound auto-biographical long term memory.   There are IQ tests.  There are individuals in academia in industry that demonstrate incredible productivity (objective measures like citations or patents).   Pick some phenotype of interest, and then the inverse problem is what are the minimal polymorphisms in the genomes of individuals that have this phenotype that are distinct from individuals that don’t have this phenotype.   The combinatorics of such a search are very hard (4^(3e9)), but Ising machines like adiabatic quantum computers could help address that.    It would require a huge collection of full genome samples to make the inferences robust.   The idea is to work backward from brains that have the desired property to the nucleotide mutations that statistically are associated with it (and not).  If there are pareto-optimality tradeoffs, that should come out in the statistics too.   For example, being a gymnast or a Sumo wrestler call for different specializations.

Marcus
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