All systems, theories, and models are bounded by a finite area of utility. Outside of that area their ability to describe reality break down.
Blind Sides
Existential threats to a system that are not salient or understood by the designers of the system.
Literal Abundance
A good or resource that depends upon naturally abundant components, or which can be derived amply through sustainable production and stewardship approaches. [Source]
Zero Sum Fallacy
Most people have an implicit assumption that for them to win, others must lose. Solutions that offer win / wins are often are believed to be impossible and thus not worth attempting.
Time-Neutral Habit Insertion
The practice of integrating a new habit into your life while at the same time eliminating an old one that requires the same amount of time to perform.
False Progress
The feeling that you did a lot, but actually made no meaningful progress towards your goals.
Completion Bias
The seeking of pleasure that the completion of a task creates. Tends to cause Death by 1000 tasks.
Execution Velocity
The moving average rate at which a team makes progress towards goals.
Skateboarder Paradox
Turning your hobby or passion into an income stream modifies the set of behaviors required to pursue that passion, often for the worse. [Article]
Credit Deflection
Act of allowing the credit for a positive outcome reflect on a team not a leader.
Cycle Frequency
Humans and systems improve at what is repeated. To accelerate optimization increase volume of real world cycles.
Baseline Decay
Systems all are subject to entropy, and thus left unattended systems adhere to some natural decay rate over time unless maintained.
Selling Pickaxes
The value capture strategy of selling infrastructure and tools to speculators.
Butterflying
Value capture technique of capturing value on both demand and supply sides of your place in a value chain. Must be done in a way that creates value for both sides to avoid middlemaning.
Add an ‘S’
The value capture strategy of building a company on the lessons that early movers spent money to learn. [Article]
Reality Distortion Stack
The layers of reality distorters that influence the clarity with which we model reality.
Principle of Cumulative Advantage
Once an agent gains a small advantage over other agents, that advantage will compound over time into an increasingly larger advantage.
Hanlon’s Razor
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Schrodinger Task
A Schrodinger Task is something you’re avoiding. It’s an email you wont open, a paper you won’t start. It’s impossible to know how hard that task will be without starting. Break it into smaller tasks to start.
Adherence
A measurement of how consistently the experiencing self behaves in alignment with the principles held by the narrator self.
Incentive Saliency
Decisions are always influenced by incentives, but decision makers aren’t always aware of all the driving incentives. Incentive Saliency is the degree to which an incentive is known and understood by a decision maker.
Unpriced Externality
A cost or benefit incurred by a party who did not choose to incur it. Examples include the benefit an oil company enjoys by not paying for the price of their impact climate change.
Thumb Sucking
Warren Buffet’s term for wasting time in a state of indecision, akrasia, or analysis paralysis. Violates SPR Principle. Solve through activation.
Wartime CEO
The term for a CEO who is leading a company through a highly volatile transient state.
Rationality Filter
The filter you use to assess the validity of stories, ideas, and models you come across.
Activation
The art of mobilizing the Experiencing Self to act coherently with wishes of Narrative Self.
The Self
The self is a combination of the Narrator and Experiencing selves. Humans are di-viduals and behaviors are a result of composite, often decoherent goals of these two selves.
Maximization
The desire of the Experiencing Self to extract the greatest amount of satisfaction from a given resource.
Experiencing Self
The person you are when interacting with the world. The Experiencing Self receives data from the Narrator Self and environment and performs actions.
Narrator Self
The person you feel that you are. The one that tells stories, sets goals, and makes plans.
Akrasia
When the Experiencing Self acts against the best judgement of the Narrator Self. This results in Thumb Sucking and procrastination. A type of Decoherence.
Decoherence
A state of unalignment between a real system and an intended system. A common example being behavior is not in alignment with reported goals.
Homeostatic System
A system in which system behavior is defined by variables that are unchanging with time.
Transient System
A system that is not in a homeostatic, stable state.
Minimum Complexity
The lowest number of elements of a system required for the system to exhibit given properties.
Lossy Models
All models are approximations of the reality they simulate. If the model was perfect it would be the reality. There will always be data loss and thus a model’s usefulness has limits.
Causality Web
A network of effects resultant from an initial action.
Element
You’re area of knowledge and ability. This is the place where you are better than everyone else. It’s where you should spend all your time.
Principle
A useful bias about an aspect of reality used to guide behavior.
Future
‘The Future’ is the set of possible downstream end points for present situations.
The Jungle
The Jungle is the fast-paced, claustrophobic environment where your myth’s turn into real things. It’s your office, that hard conversation, the Tennis court. This is the place you walk into each day to do what you do. Don’t let it change your values.
Willpower
Willpower is a short term strategy for overcoming Akrasia. It is the ability to get one’s self to do the hard things that you know you must do, when they must be done. Over reliance of willpower violates the Sustainability Principle.
Residual Nostalgia
The feeling that something should continue to exist because it always has existed, despite changes in the underlying reasons for the thing’s existence that make it obsolete.
Minimum forward action [MFA]
The easiest action that can be performed by the Experiencing Self to move closer to a goal of the Narrator Self. Ex: wiggling toes to get out of bed. An Activation strategy.
Yak Shearing
A form of Akrasia in which causal linkages between tasks appear to be stronger than they really are. A result of Narrative Fallacy.
Deployment channel inflation
This is a phenomenon in which a creator artificially inflates the minimum viable complexity of an optimal deployment channel for a given concept. For example, some startup ideas should really be tweets.
Optimal Deployment Channel
The creative medium that is best suited to allow a given idea to enter the world. This is the context of the content. This could be a blog post, company, book, tweet, painting, or conversation. The deployment channel for a given concept is highly dependent on the concept itself and the goals of the concepts creator.
Maintenance Phase
The phase of a systems life cycle in which the system has become largely self-sustaining. External resource inputs are designed to create system longevity. This phase is preceded by the value creation phase, where external resource inputs are instead aimed at formalizing the core value equation of a system.
Value Creation Phase
The phase of a system within which the system’s core functionality or value equation is construed and built. In this phase, the system architect(s) focus on ideation, experiments, and improving based on feedback. This phase precedes maintenance phase.
DRI
Directly responsible individual. This is the single person who is in charge and who is accountable to deliver a given task.
Pool of knowledge
A shared set of ideas and thoughts communicated openly amongst a group of people.