game-theory
Ego-San on the Sting of Defeat
Facing cognitive dissonance due to the failure of a goal requires choosing between delusion, metamorphosis, or quitting.
To give up your dream for the pursuit of it forms cognitive dissonance on multiple layers.
- The initial goal, G, was not achieved, so the mind has to contend with absolute failure. The system (other people, the planet, whatever) has rejected you from attaining the goal you set, despite your best efforts.
- Any future time spent on the dream becomes a sunk cost fallacy (I got this good, so I can't stop now, right?). As a fallacy, it only continues to get worse. Confirmation bias (which can be avoided with a simple strategy that is discussed below[1]) also prevents you from seeing other routes, locking your routine into the literal definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”[2]
- The self you've cultivated and the strategy you have chosen have failed to materialize, and you realize you can't become the person you needed to be to attain your ultimate goal due to a combination of values/self-belief/etc.
In order to break the cognitive dissonance that is born from this paradox, the goal-failer faces a crossroads:
- Option one is to delude themselves into thinking that they never wanted the goal to begin with (sour grapes). This is a poor long term strategy due to the investment spent in fulfilling the goal with limited resources (financial, time, etc). Delusion is chosen carefully as a word here. It is delusion because you know the truth. You know you have failed to do what you set out to do. As a defense mechanism, you pivot to protect the visage of self you've put effort into.
- Option two is to transform into the person that can attain your dream. Much like how Barou realized there was no satisfaction to his goal of becoming the world's best striker by playing the way he always has, he was forced to evolve into a new person through the despair. The impossible combination of his ego, his skill, and the reality of the other players on the pitch broke him at his base and a new person was formed. This metamorphosis is a new person, with a new hypothesis and a new set of values, with the same goal. The Bayseian updating part of the mind takes in the new data and reformats the core assumption.[3]
- This new person as a willful organism has their goal in the front of their mind and can only be stopped by the laws of the universe (physics, genetics, etc.). In the long term, this strategy also succeeds at removing cognitive dissonance, but importantly, does not involve delusion. The goal-failer accepts their failure into their hearts and realizes to become the success they envision, the only route forward is to sacrifice the version of themselves that prevent attainment of their goal.
- Quit. Self explanatory.
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it's really fucked up that Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the US
— Jared 🗿🌱 🇰🇵 (@b1g_damage) November 7, 2022
Intuitively, I'd think that all the top 5 most populous cities would be the ones that come up most in conversation. The actual top 5:
- NYC
- LA
- Chicago
- Houston
- Phoenix
Cities I hear people mention a lot:
- NYC (1 in population)
- LA (2 in population)
- SF (17 in population)
- Miami (44 in population)
- Boston (24 in population)
- Seattle (18 in population)
Deltas
Fastest Growing (big cities[1]):
- Fort Worth, TX
- San Antonio, TX
- Phoenix
- Oklahoma City
- Las Vegas
Fastest Shrinking (big cities):
- SF + Bay Area
- NYC
- Boulder, CO
- Boston
- San Jose
Interesting that people are leaving the North to move South. I think that may be due to the fact that baby boomers are retiring and want more amenable tax brackets + sunny weather. Also, when a certain percent of friends or family move to an area, it becomes more costly to not follow them.
smaller pop = greater delta so I'm skipping those ↩︎
Area under the curve doesn't look super good for Xanax
The rebound effect of drugs is an insane, under appreciated side effect due to future discounting. Being in pain now warrants a cure, but it may be the proverbial "kicking the can down the road" with mental sedatives. This is also caused by the locality of pain tolerance, and the immediacy of it all.
This doesn't even begin to address the folly of the Tragedy of the Commons caused by big Pharma.
Some drugs cause individual withdrawals, others cause societal ones.
Pride leads to arrogance and then away from humility and connection with their fellow man. You don’t have to be Christian to see the wisdom in this. You need only to care about your career to understand that pride—even in real accomplishments—is a distraction and a deluder. (Location 1017)
When catching up with people you haven't seen in a while, the desire is high to immediately jump into conveying the most braggadocios news about yourself since you have last seen the person.[1]
Amongst type-A American millennials, the re-sync is the prime opportunity to enter a non verbal tourney with your peer, to puff your chest out and compare size through success or failure.
Are you still living at home with your parents?
Did you get that promotion?
How's your girlfriend doing?
I'm sorry to hear about…
When did you move to …? What's your rent?
A human version of the chimpanzee dominance display.
In fact, when I've tried to avoid discussing myself for experiment or out of a desire to avoid the spotlight, it seems to come off as rude. ↩︎
You take it personally because you agree with whatever was said. As soon as you agree, the poison goes through you, and you are trapped in the dream of hell. What causes you to be trapped is what we call personal importance. Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about “me.” During the period of our education, or our domestication, we learn to take everything personally. We think we are responsible for everything. Me, me, me, always me! Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world. (Location 428)
This is especially true among the twenty somethings who are old enough to take bets for status and dominance but too young to have the experience to see how those bets play out 202212270339
The Principal Agent Problem:
Only 1.5 percent of the purchase price goes directly into your agent’s pocket. So on the sale of your $300,000 house, her personal take of the $18,000 commission is $4,500. . . . Not bad, you say. But what if the house was actually worth more than $300,000? What if, with a little more effort and patience and a few more newspaper ads, she could have sold it for $310,000? After the commission, that puts an additional $9,400 in your pocket. But the agent’s additional share—her personal 1.5 percent of the extra $10,000—is a mere $150. . . . It turns out that a real-estate agent keeps her own home on the market an average of ten days longer and sells it for an extra 3-plus percent, or $10,000 on a $300,000 house. When she sells her own house, an agent holds out for the best offer; when she sells yours, she encourages you to take the first decent offer that comes along. Like a stockbroker churning commissions, she wants to make deals and make them fast. Why not? Her share of a better offer—$150—is too puny an incentive to encourage her to do otherwise. (Location 872)
I had an experience like this in NYC where it felt like my broker was trying to offload me into an apartment as quickly as possible to get their cut and move on to different clients.
In general, I try to avoid working with people who have conflicting incentives to my own.[1]
one of the reasons I avoid VCs -- their incentive is effectively opposite of a founders ↩︎