Two Types of Homeostasis

+ On Writing in Public

Contents:

1. Preamble

2. On Writing in Public

3. Two Types of Homeostasis

Transcription below

Preamble

Hello :) Today (6 Nov), I am sitting on a United flight to Boston, but the United WiFi is not working! D: All my half-finished posts live in Substack drafts, & most of them require cross-referencing / fact-checking, & my blank paper sheets got checked when my carry-on bag did—so I’m writing this on the back of an ML paper. ‘Recursive Reasoning with Tiny Networks’: thank you, 90/30 Club. Paying taxes as a working adult so the state pension’s there when you retire: this is how setting up 90/30 Club has felt, enjoying from the sidelines as an attendee recently. Build the infrastructure that will nourish & sustain you. They inject signal into my salience landscape; I love it.

I’m going to write two things on this page: first, some meta commentary on writing in public, then ‘Two Types of Homeostasis’, since posts on ‘Living Better’ are all I can write without the web (perhaps some canny Manifold trader took the internet down).

On Writing in Public

An underrated fact about alignment is it’s a ‘transitive verb’—takes a subject and an object—aligning what to what? as in ‘Stated vs. Revealed Preferences in LMs’—to close the SvR gap, you can align S to R or R to S.

Similarly, we get [the above] feedback loop when we write in public. Outflows & inflows. I have a soft spot for each edge on this graph. Writing in public pulls the three nodes into tighter alignment.

Two Types of Homeostasis

I think many people think they’re doing well in life when they get good exam scores, get into good colleges, graduate from those colleges, and so on. I think this basically holds for people from the most challenging backgrounds but does not hold otherwise.

Here is doing nothing at all:

Here is following the default trajectory for people of your reference class:

These are the two types of homeostasis.

I do not know why someone with Oxbridge-educated parents would be happy to get into Oxbridge. You are simply doing what has been done before.

Here was my reaction:

Though not part of that group, it was priced in.

The fun part is that you can change your reference class—and with it, default baseline expected trajectory. You’re on a new trajectory once a scholarship invests in you. Can you outperform again? Generate the excess returns (not just financial) needed for sustainability of the program? Outperform your reference class?

Homeostasis might look like this if enough people invest in you:

(pictured: dollar, hourglass, brain—representing inputs of money, time, mentorship)

There’s a question of what we owe our investors, and I think we owe them outperformance.

You outperform by finding your calling and pursuing it with fervency and artisanship—when incentives are aligned.