This is one of the most profound pieces I've read because it cuts through so many areas of life. Reading this has opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. For example, I've noticed that programmers (of which I am one up to a point), are always bickering about which is the better language or what is the best way to do X, or best tool to do Y. Of course the answer is that they all have their advantages and disadvantages, but they argue these points with religious fervor. So much so that newbie programmers don't even know where to start. I started coding back when all you needed was a good book or tutorial, notepad++ and a terminal. Nowadays newbies have to go through some initiation steps like configuring vim (some code editor where you use nothing keys to navigate). I'd say that we are in phase 3 of that.
Retail trading is also going through the cycle. I would say phase 2: growth, where there are more and more retail traders nowadays, ever since COVID. For example, there was a WSJ article recently about how black people are embracing the stock market. I think the status being sought after is the ability to predict the market rather than mere financial status. A lot of people want to have the status of being right. To be known as the Oracle. There are soo many financial blogs lately which I think goes to show. It will be interesting to see what the involution and postcycle of this looks like.
I think it has some relationship with the law of diminishing return: Where an additional unit of input decreases output. But i can't quite outline the relationship but both ideas both point out the same thing:
Agreed. Well the bigger a company/movement gets, the less is can move forward/upward from just the contributions of the few key people. It needs more energy than that, it needs exponentially increasing energy. And it can't access exponentially increasing energy because not everyone who joins has that kind of energy.
Nor are there exponentially more good ideas to keep things moving - in fact there are often fewer.
Diminishing returns in every possible way. (In most cases.)
Most of the groundbreaking progress happens right at the beginning, and everything after is just growth for the sake of growth.
Your post reminds me of a recent event this week where the head of our Military was in the hospital having surgery and no one knew. Our government is so big that everyone gets lost in the vastness of the money, people, meetings…the President didn’t know our top Military leader was in the hospital. The other thing I’ve been following is how $550billion of Covid relief money has been lost, unaccounted for…watching the hearings is hard - the people in charge can’t answer who, what, where, when…to your point about Bigger is Better or not - definitely in this case Not. Building something with purpose is life giving. Meeting Scorecard hurdles is not. You’re right, there’s lots of instances where not measuring is more fun. Just doing.
This is one of the most profound pieces I've read because it cuts through so many areas of life. Reading this has opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. For example, I've noticed that programmers (of which I am one up to a point), are always bickering about which is the better language or what is the best way to do X, or best tool to do Y. Of course the answer is that they all have their advantages and disadvantages, but they argue these points with religious fervor. So much so that newbie programmers don't even know where to start. I started coding back when all you needed was a good book or tutorial, notepad++ and a terminal. Nowadays newbies have to go through some initiation steps like configuring vim (some code editor where you use nothing keys to navigate). I'd say that we are in phase 3 of that.
Retail trading is also going through the cycle. I would say phase 2: growth, where there are more and more retail traders nowadays, ever since COVID. For example, there was a WSJ article recently about how black people are embracing the stock market. I think the status being sought after is the ability to predict the market rather than mere financial status. A lot of people want to have the status of being right. To be known as the Oracle. There are soo many financial blogs lately which I think goes to show. It will be interesting to see what the involution and postcycle of this looks like.
I think it has some relationship with the law of diminishing return: Where an additional unit of input decreases output. But i can't quite outline the relationship but both ideas both point out the same thing:
There's only so big a firm can get
BTW
You know, A human is not a gorilla
Agreed. Well the bigger a company/movement gets, the less is can move forward/upward from just the contributions of the few key people. It needs more energy than that, it needs exponentially increasing energy. And it can't access exponentially increasing energy because not everyone who joins has that kind of energy.
Nor are there exponentially more good ideas to keep things moving - in fact there are often fewer.
Diminishing returns in every possible way. (In most cases.)
Most of the groundbreaking progress happens right at the beginning, and everything after is just growth for the sake of growth.
And yes I know a human is not a gorilla.
Your post reminds me of a recent event this week where the head of our Military was in the hospital having surgery and no one knew. Our government is so big that everyone gets lost in the vastness of the money, people, meetings…the President didn’t know our top Military leader was in the hospital. The other thing I’ve been following is how $550billion of Covid relief money has been lost, unaccounted for…watching the hearings is hard - the people in charge can’t answer who, what, where, when…to your point about Bigger is Better or not - definitely in this case Not. Building something with purpose is life giving. Meeting Scorecard hurdles is not. You’re right, there’s lots of instances where not measuring is more fun. Just doing.