Professionally, I focus on creating social benefit startups. In my Saturday morning emails I share what I’m learning and thinking. Topics range from better living and parenting to business and philosophy.
Non-Ergodicity. In the category of not sure if it is profound or common sense or something Nassim Taleb said already, here comes the Ergodicity book. It defines the concept “population outcome” as the outcome of many people performing an action once, and “lifetime outcome” as the outcome of one person performing an action many times. If they differ, the system that produces them is non-ergodic. A few things to mention from the book are:
Averages don’t tell the whole story. You are an individual and many “games” or systems have a risk of ruin or “game over”. The winner in many games is the one who could avoid ruin and still perform. The winner is not strictly the best performer, as high performance involves risk of ruin. “In other words, to get extreme outcomes, you must reduce average outcomes. Do you really want to be the one with the highest score? It will come at a cost. Not just effort and opportunity costs but also risk – risk that will increase the best outcome but decrease the average outcome.”
So-called “Risk aversion” is rational if there is a chance of ruin. That’s why humans evolved to avoid situations with positive expected values but a high chance of ending up worse off.
“If we aren’t willing to trade places with them completely – their life, their body, their thoughts – then there is nothing to be envious about.”
He promotes the Kelly Criteria but I still can’t quite explain it.
As I was reading the book, I thought about Spencer Greenberg’s success function.
The Enneagram. I’ve found the enneagram to be useful in understanding myself and my patterns. Its non-scientific roots do give me pause. At first I wondered if it was as BS as astrology. Now if I think of it as a descriptive grouping of personality traits without a full explanation to it. That helps me see how it could be true to an extent even if we don’t know why. I’m told I’m a 3-type which is painful to hear yet many parts sound familiar. In particular the drive to Do rather than Be resonates with me. The book I’m reading calls out 3-types for listening to the audiobook version of David Allen’s Getting Things Done book while multitasking doing something else. I feel so seen 🤣 I’ve never actually done that but I would.
More Cancer Screening. Cancer is a leading cause of death and outcomes are better when you detect it early. I recently got a colonoscopy so cancer screening is on my mind. Newer modalities are available including scans and liquid biopsies. Full body preemptive MRI scans are getting mainstream attention. I learned a lot about it from the The Drive podcast interview with the cofounder of Prenuvo. Ezra is an alternative and there may be others. Liquid biopsies to detect cancerous cell-free DNA in your blood sound really interesting. For example, check out Grail. Have you tried any of these? Doctors don’t recommend these across the board for three main reasons: they are expensive, they may not have enough evidence about ultimate outcomes and can result in false positives. But I think it can make sense on an individual level. How do you estimate prospectively the psychological cost of false positives for you and your loved ones? How do we apply the thinking from the Ergodicity to decide which screening to get?
Until next time,
Miles
P.S. At Purpose Built, we published a blog post on our Lead Faucet and how we book customer calls for our founders.