10x Core Concepts: 4. Garden versus Machine
Society is more like a garden and less like a machine.
If you are lost on a desert and dying of thirst the first glass of water will save your life. But the fifth glass of water gives you less pleasure, and the tenth glass of water might make you sick.
[Previous article: 10x Core Concepts: 3. Fragility — Robustness — Antifragility]
Machine “doesn’t care” if you pour into it one liter, ten liters or 100 liters of fuel at once. But garden flowers do care if you pour too little or too much water at once. Or if you don’t water them regularly. You cannot water a garden by pouring their monthly water need at once and then leave for a month. You cannot make the trees to grow faster. Nine pregnant women don’t reduce the time for a baby to be born into just one month.
Society needs more people who “know a good measure” like gardeners, and less people who over-rely on mechanical and linear thinking. The quantity is not the only thing that matters. Focus on finding a good measure and good balance.
The idea of complex garden versus linear machine comes from the book by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer called The Gardens of Democracy.
Biology, humans and human societies are complex systems
As we said in the beginning a garden is very different from a machine. If you pour 6 or 60 liters of fuel into a machine it doesn’t matter. But if you pour 6 or 60 liters of water in your garden it might have very different effects. Too little water and your plants might die. Too much water and your plants might die as well. The balance, good measure and right timing is crucial. This is how complex systems behave.
If you have only one type of plants in your garden you might be more fragile than if you have 10 types of plants in your garden. A disease might attack one type but leave others intact. This is the main point of the previous article about antifragility.
The same applies to the number of transferable skills, personal traits and the number of your connections or customers. A good measure is important. You grow too quickly and you might fail because you underestimate the importance of the development and quality management. You grow too slow and you might fall behind the competition.
Many things in life and in the society are more like a garden, and less like a machine. If you are too extreme or too specialized in one area, you might not see the bigger picture or might miss a chance to positively influence the world. It is like pouring too much water on your plants at once.
If you bother people with your ideas or products too much they might switch off and disregard what you are saying. Moderation and good timing are the key.
Learning and unlearning
We discussed previously how to balance growth and development — the quantity and quality or depth. And we saw an example of cauliflower that looks like composed of ever smaller cauliflower — this self-similar objects are called fractals. In the same way we need “to water our plants constantly” — don’t get stuck in one narrow skill or subject of study, but regularly relearn and unlearn many transferable skills — these are the skills that can be used in many areas and practical life. As I write these pages I feel that my typing skills — how to touch-type without looking at the keyboard are deteriorating. I might need to invest a couple of painful hours to learn again, to correct my mistakes and to get, metaphorically, from a current sub-peak on a learning terrain (an adaptive landscape idea from biology) — or local optimum where I feel comfortable writing — into a higher peak — a more optimal, quicker way of touch-typing with a fewer mistakes.
The idea of relearning is very strong and it is called spaced repetition — our learnt knowledge has a half-life of one sleep. So if you learn something the next day you remember only half of what you knew, and the next day only half of that half. So of course if you have a good short-term memory you can cram before the exams and pass them — but you will forget most of what you learnt quickly. So we discussed the need for a growth mindset — that means focusing on the process and not the result — being motivated to learn new things not because of grades and external pressures — but because we have passion to learn new things — because they help us to become better people, and better citizens and more productive at meaningful things we plan to do in our lives.
Besides the need spaced repetition — relearning the topic or skill after a few days — we also need to feel a bit of a pain and stress when we learn. We discussed this while describing antifragility — lifting weights is a bit painful — but if we are careful not to damage our muscles and overdo the exercise — the pain and stressors make our muscles grow and become stronger. The same counts for “brain muscles” — we need to exercise them regularly and effectively by a technique that is called active recall. It means that instead of rereading the topic over and over — just don’t look at the text and try to recall it from your memory. If you fail to do it — practice again and again. This is more painful and costs us more energy — but ultimately it is more effective.
Living on the edge
Imagine you happen to be lost in the desert and wandering around under a violent sun with your lips being dry and the wind blows the sand to your eyes and hurts them. The sweat hurt them too. You are completely thirsty and you feel that you started to hallucinate — you seem to see a blurry contours of an oasis.
As you come closer and closer you are ever more joyful — this is not a mirage — this is real! And it has a well with flowing water. You take your palm and get some water and start to drink it hastily — the first minute of drinking feels like heaven. But then the pleasure decreases. And after five minutes you even feel a bit too full and start getting sick.
This is the same principle we saw with flowers in the garden — the first cup might feel amazing, the second less so and the fifth might give you a stomachache. Economists call this decreasing marginal utility. Decreasing means that with every other cup you feel less and less pleasure. Marginal means additional — the next cup, or the additional cup is marginal cup. Imagine you have a small pool of water and you pour another cup into it and the pool gets bigger — its margins expand. Utility is what economists and philosophers call usefulness — something that gives us pleasure or helps us to achieve our goals and the things that we care about.
So the additional cup we drink has a decreasing marginal utility. And after maybe a 5th cup one can start to get sick — it means that now the utility is negative — it starts to hurt us instead of giving us pleasure.
Let’s get back to our garden example. Maybe you forgot to water plants in some area for a few days and they were neglected and seem to be a bit weak, even dying. You need to take care of them as a priority — but not overdo it with water — as the shock of too much water can kill them. I once did it with my cactus that colleague gave me. It was a small green cactus siting on my desk. I neglected it for long and forgot to water it. Once I realized it and rushed to pour water on it. But I poured too much water. I only realized it after a while — when the cactus broke into two!
So this is an important realization — prioritize those plans that are neglected! But don’t go into extremes and overdo it with watering — they are not machines — they cannot process the additional water with ever faster speed!
We can speculate that something similar happens to poor people when they win a lottery and get the big pile of money all at once — they don’t know what to do with it and take care of it properly — and it might turn to be a curse. Then we read stories how someone who won a million is broke and bankrupt after two years again. But this doesn’t happen as often when people get those people get their winning money over a long time — in monthly installments.
We could also say that prioritize not just the plants and flowers that are important but also those that are more important — that give you higher utility. Maybe those that fetch a higher price on the market or those that have higher chance of withstanding the dry periods. Also remember the idea of antifragility — having a variety, a quantity of many different plants, skills, contacts and projects.
Also grow plants that match your current ability. I wrote above, that I failed at taking care of cactus properly — maybe I am not yet (remember growth mindset and the power of Not Yet) qualified to take care of some very delicate flowers that require much more experience. So I need to progress in steps and learn actively how to take on more and more challenges. This means, focus on things that seem to be solvable and you can prove somehow that they are solvable by doing experiments. Again keeping a growth mindset — you can do it if you try — try again, fail again, fail better! Or as they say, fake it until you make it!
But it is important to go first after the things that are more solvable first! This is what we call go after the margins — and living on the edge! Taking new challenges — going through sometimes painful exercise to grow your mental muscles — but don’t overdo it, don’t start with too difficult things and don’t do everything at once — without repetition. Also don’t do something that feels comfortable — like rereading — instead do something that is more painful — like learning through active recall of what you read.
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Notes on the Garden versus Machine
Nassim Taleb has also a similar metaphor of the difference between cat and a washing machine. But the metaphor of garden by authors Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer — and their description of the difference between “machinebrain and gardenbrain” mindset I find more appropriate.
I wrote a separate article called Living on the edge that explains the concept of marginal utility and connects it to the effective altruism that I will explain as the 8th concept. But we can use the metaphor of a small pool of water and four directions instead of North, East, South and West. So imagine these directions or four criteria are Importance, Tractability (another word for solvability), Neglectedness and Personal Fit. The idea is to balance all four and let our plants (our projects) grow in all four of these dimensions. So how to select the plants to grow — or the projects to engage in? Consider all of these four criteria — what problems are most important, solvable, neglected and they represent the biggest fit? Rate them from e.g. 1 to 10, when one is small like a dust speck and the ten is big as a meteorite. Or if these are too big — think of a mouse and an elephant. In the article about effective altruism I came up with every animal in-between a mouse and an elephant.
Think about the difference between 3 and 4 as in orders of magnitude, like the Richer scale does for measuring the earthquakes. So 3 is e.g. like 100 and 4 is like 1000.
Also a side note — a mouse is much less effective than an elephant but much more antifragile than an elephant! A mouse needs to sleep long hours, an elephant sleeps four hours and can consume tons, but its legs are very fragile. If an elephants leg gets broken, it will die. There are also not that many elephants left on the planet. But the same cannot at all be said about mice.
I read Antifragile by Taleb and he gives a lot of often funny examples about the difference between humans and machines — and how an average temperature doesn’t give us much information if we don’t know the variation — if we stay in “an average 25 degree Celsius temperature” for four hours, but the first 2 hours it was 100 degrees and the next two hours it was minus 50 degrees Celsius we will be for sure dead.
But I would need a lots of technical complexity science literature to get deeper to the topic. Recently a philosopher Reza Negarestani wrote what seems to be a good overview on complexity science literature that he uses in his project of Toy Philosophy — to build a toy universe from bottom up using models like Lego bricks in a mindset of an engineer rather than a philosopher. I have to note that I am nowhere near the sophistication and understanding of majority of these models that Reza Nagarestani uses — but my goal is to simplify 100+ models and select ten most useful models for high school kids to learn how to learn quicker and get more and more models like a snowball rolling down and getting bigger. So my challenge is to introduce readers from a bird-eye point of view to 10x Core Concepts, while at the same time not being too simplistic, but use practical and easy examples.
Reconciling Gardens with Machines
Of course if we over speed and don’t shift gears we can break a car. Machines are also sensitive. But they seem to be built for a single purpose. Hardware seems to be quite different from wetware (our brains). But then there are ideas like Society of Mind by Minsky and Papert that focus on many different agents that seem to occupy our minds. Like hundreds of little machines that do their work and coordinate each other.
Cognitive science and also physics increasingly use the paradigm of computation in their fields along with many concepts from computer science. Then they arrive at the metaphor of computational brain or computational universe.
It is important to say that also earlier and ancient discoveries of e.g. hydraulics lead to similar metaphors used to explain processes in our bodies.
Nevertheless, books like The New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram show how very complex behaviors can arise from very simple rules and cellular automata.
Also fractals seem to be present everywhere in nature, including human biology.
Seymour Papert who co-authored the book Society of Mind with Marvin Minsky is also a pioneer of constructivism in education — of learning by doing and discovering big ideas of how the world works. Papert wrote a book called Mindstorms where he explains his constructivists ideas and e.g. the importance of debugging — of learning through mistakes and being able to correct them. The Lego company called their Lego robots set, Lego Mindstorms in tribute to Seymour Papert.
My cursory understanding of what Reza Negarestani is doing now with his Toy Philosophy for philosophy is something similar to what Papert tried to do in education — building it brick by brick. Now Negarestani uses legos instead of logos — mental models to construct toy universes.
My cursory understanding of books like Society of Mind is that they show how conscience comes into being by a work of hundreds of separate agents that are themselves without conscience — like some machines doing their jobs — and in the process they create conscience through emergence.
Eliezer Yudkowsky in his tome Rationality from AI to Zombies warned against overusing the concept of emergence as a vehicle to describe a process or a phenomenon, we don’t currently understand.
But we can look at emergence as a certain tipping point — once a certain threshold is reached, there is a change in quality, patterns emerge suddenly and they seem to make sense to us.
Think of Conway’s Game of Life — a cellular automaton and “a zero player game” that shows interesting patterns between order and chaos and is similar to Stephen’s Wolfram Rule 110. Both are Turing complete and A Game of Life foreshadowed the later computer exploration of fractals. In both cases very interesting patterns emerge from very simple set of rules.
In this Notes section I wanted to outline the sources of my thinking and also gaps in my understanding and things that need further exploration.
Gardens are a metaphor from agricultural revolution and machines are a metaphor from industrial revolution. In the post-industrial era we need to prioritize again the metaphor of gardens — to understand and simplify complexity and understand that taking good measure and good timing are important when dealing with biology, humans and our society. Again fractals, or self-similar objects are a good candidate for such simplification. Also the concept of antifragility shows us that, as Taleb says: Living creatures crave volatility (change) but can break if volatility and stress is too high.
