“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”

The lines we draw between ourselves grow in number every day. Each of us is becoming more idiosyncratic. We might not actually be more unique, but it’s becoming easier to define people on a number of dimensions. Humans are becoming more modular. This is confusing, both in theory and in practice.

Increasing human modularity comes in two forms: descriptive and actual. For the first, consider psychological frameworks like Myers-Briggs, OCEAN, The Big 5, Enneagram, or even astrology. These all provide a language for people to describe their differences. Psychologists used to group managers into Type A and Type B personalities – just one binary dimension. Now, we talk about professional behavior in terms of the 32 different Myers-Briggs phenotypes. The constituent elements of our personalities have broken down into smaller parts. This facilitates conversation (and/or therapy). We’re continually increasing descriptive human modularity.

Actual human modularity is also increasing. In a similar vein, self-help books like Atomic Habits give people some practical tools to change their behaviors in a modular fashion. Effective habit builders are the psychological equivalent of Mr. Potato Head. They can proactively swap out parts of their identity to better match a new environment. Like if an ambitious employee decided to start frequenting the same gym that the CEO uses.

The result is accelerated and unpredictable change. As things become more modular, it’s easier for smaller actors to exercise their willpower. Little actions compound over time – the more often you act, the faster the compounding rate.

This trend isn’t limited to the scale of humans, let alone the field of psychology. As is pointed out in Fear of Oozification, anything that technology touches becomes more fluid and faster-moving over time. It’s like we’ve unlocked the ability to build castles out of pebbles, rather than of giant rocks. Now, since anyone can move pebbles around, anyone can build a castle. The dynamics of Pebbleworld are faster, more complex, and less legible than they were in Boulderworld.

So, how do you succeed in Pebbleworld?

Foster an Action Bias

This means valuing speed over precision. Things today happen fast, so it’s suboptimal to wait until you have all the information. Hypothetically, one could calculate the costs and benefits of every action. One could imagine all contingencies.1 In Pebbleworld, however, if you are sure you’re making the right decision, you’ve waited too long.

Pandemics are a classic example. By the time you know a virus will go global, it’s too late to stop it. The appropriate, modern response is to be overly cautious and take action with incomplete information.

Deep Analysis + Long-Term Planning < Shallow Analysis + Learning by Doing

Shorten Your OODA Loops

On a related note, you should generally strive to shorten the distance between actions and feedback. Since the rules of Pebbleworld continually shift, it can be a bad idea to stubbornly follow one strategy for too long. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. In the last section, I recommended favoring A; taking action quickly.

But when shorting OODA Loops, it’s important to maintain all stages. The trick is to cut down on the time you spend in each stage relatively equally. Generally, people spend too much time Orienting themselves and Deciding what to do. They spend too little time Acting and Observing the outcomes of their actions.

There is obviously a limit to this approach. If I shortened my OODA Loop for my cycling goals to a day, there’s no chance I’d hit them. Many domains, like sports, gardening, investing, and health require a great deal of consistency. The trick is to track your progress, be honest with yourself, and be pragmatic about both your goals and methods.

Take Advantage of New Borders

As mentioned above, there seem to be an infinite number of ways to demarcate ourselves from others. There are, in other words, new borders of belief and identity drawn every day. We’ve begun to organize ourselves less like branching file folders and more like metadata. Which makes sense – people don’t like being put into boxes. But we do kind of like having badges that state or show the groups that we’re proud to belong to. Each person has a growing set of descriptive tags associated with them.

This trend will probably continue. On the surface, it does present some issues with finding common ground at scale. But the benefit is that it’s much easier to find commonalities in small groups. Increasing descriptive modularity provides an attack surface to the coalition builder. It’s an opportune time to be aware of psychological frameworks. But, more importantly, to be aware of trending personal interests (e.g. pickleball, crochet, craft beer - not political opinions).

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1

I tried to come up with a protocol to speed up this process of defensive imagination, called the DUSK Loop.