Stay Awake For Signals

I've heard that future problems are overweighted against our present agency, in terms of how we allocate our attention and energy.

If I understood correctly, worrying about future problems is a surefire way to unnecessary suffering to the present me who has the capacity to actively engage with what's unfolding now.

But then, life or reality in itself is dynamic, hence the idea that there are no permanent solutions in dynamic systems.

I think this also makes it a bit hard from my understanding to 1) achieve any form of grounded stability and rest on that without accepting impermanence and 2) predicting the future in its various forms that we try to do it, because the future keeps deviating from our models.

We cannot freeze reality long enough to build something stable and permanent. And yet, we continue investing enormous energy into prediction, as if a sufficiently detailed map could control the territory.

In genuinely dynamic systems, preparation based on prediction becomes obsolete the moment conditions change in a direction we didn't anticipate.

Premium Skill

At this point in time, I'm leaning more into believing I'm better off learning to adapt to whatever the future brings than developing my lens to predict it more accurately.

If the future is fundamentally uncertain and conditions constantly shift, then the premium skill is responsiveness towards emergent reality.

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Adaptability is the capacity to sense what's changing, learn from it, and then adjust your approach in real time.

Recently, I've also heard of this concept of "diversification of strategies" and my mind has been thinking about it a lot.

A trader with ten ways to deal with market changes will live through a shift that breaks the trader with one perfect idea. The person with many skills finds a chance in big changes that stop the person who only knows one thing.

Diversification in this sense is just a positioning mechanism to have leverage across multiple possible futures.

If we live in a dynamic reality, we'll have to move along with whatever the dynamic is within a particular timeframe and continuously adjust our approaches as conditions shift.

Alternatively, one can just wait for the dynamic to change to a version that they're good at surfing, in order to thrive for sometime before survival mode kicks in.

All of this may seem abstract, but there's a way to bring it into sharp focus via using markets as an example.

Paying For Perfect Guesses

Markets in this context can be defined as a complex system where people show what they care about by trading things.

If you remove finance from the equation, markets are a place for finding new things, then help trade facts and signals.

Strip away the wealth accumulation, the status games, the speculation, etc. and what remains is pure mechanism, a market price is just the group signal of everyone taking part.

Each one makes a choice based on what they know and/or what they think.That signal is much smarter than any single person's guess because it includes facts that no one person has.

Arguably, markets are one of the most dynamic systems that we humans have created, because they need facts to flow fast and quick results that reward being able to bend more than being able to guess.

Markets punish the trader who strongly holds onto a guess, no matter how good the thinking behind that guess was. And the result is quick and harsh. You are wrong? You lose money.

See what markets don't do? They don't pay for perfect guesses.

And perhaps most importantly, they reveal something about how agency actually works in dynamic systems.

Your power is not in holding tight to outcomes or guessing the future. Both are just make-believe in the long run.

Much easier is to put yourself in a good spot, stay awake for signals, keep up many skills, and change your plan as the world shows itself to you.

Thanks for reading!! Share your thoughts below on the comments.

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