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This could go in a lot of places, but I'm putting it here because the idea is worth thinking about in its full generality: how your intuitions about things, and expectations about how reality works, are a function of what you've experienced. If you've experienced things under a certain overwhelming regime that tilted the world, your instincts will be worthless when that regime is over.
Actually, let’s run through my experience as a prototype. I want you to imagine that you graduated into the post GFC world, say in 2011, and learnt how to work in your first job in the 2010s. Perhaps a manager takes you under their wing and tells you “this is how we do things.” More likely you watched how people and teams around you execute, and internalise the operating cadence of your industry. As the decade progresses, you change jobs; you continue to absorb ‘this is the way we do things’ even as you rise in your career. And while each company is slightly different, there is a fundamental stance — a set of underlying assumptions that everyone shares that nobody questions. These are things like “you can become rich if you are an early employee in a startup” or “the solution to growth problems is hiring more people” or “we pay lip service to tracking operating costs but actually I have no idea what things cost; let’s pay for another SaaS because software is always cheaper than people!”
This is the way we do things. Works for ZIRP. Works for young adulthood. Works for the web of your social network. Works for the industry you've come up in. Works for bitcoin, and what bitcoin is, or what you think it is. Works for everything.
Easier to know this than to see where you're blind, though. But a lot of alpha in trying.
this territory is moderated
We don’t really have an alternative to acting as though our model is correct, even if we’re fairly certain that it isn’t.
I think Hume said something about how he still has to eat breakfast and put on his pants in the morning, despite being an avowed skeptic.
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I would imagine that this is how most people live? Maybe even everyone? Maybe even LLMs?
That being said, I think some people are gifted with the ability to be more flexible in their thinkig and thus adapt better to sudden regime changes where the old ways no longer work.
This flexibility could be moral flexibility (willingness to bend the rules or hurt others), or mental flexibility (quickly learning the new rules and how to optimize over it)
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