So Elua encourages variation and replication with weak selection, and Moloch encourages selection and variation with weak replication.
Nice. New thought for me. Thank you.
I sort of rotate the basis vectors a bit. I sometimes think of evolution as a dance between creativity (variation) and death (natural selection). In that spirit, I’m hearing you say that Elua encourages thriving via creativity, whereas Moloch encourages survival via death.
…Moloch is locally dominant when resources are scarce, and vice versa for Elua. […] (This is my best steelman of whatever the hell an “abundance mindset” is supposed to be)
I came to a similar steelman. Again with slightly shifted basis vectors though — basically the same ones as I mentioned up above I think. It comes out in terms of explore/exploit in my view. If you’re in a resource-poor situation, it’s high risk to explore, and you want to use whatever strategies you have on hand (with some exceptions, like if death is basically certain, at which point your strategies have already failed and you just want to increase variation a whole lot in a final survival bid). But if resources are abundant, then your long term survival is best served by basically preparing for forms of death that haven’t yet arrived. So expanding capacities via exploration. These seem to be two different modes (tight management of scarce resources vs. creative play to increase capacity in a high-resource domain).
If you’re actually in a high resource context but you can’t perceive it because your perceptions are contracted around a kind of emergency survival strategy, it’s helpful to “adopt an abundance mindset” so you can notice your context and correctly switch strategies.
If there’s some degree of self-fulfilling prophecy to the resources available (e.g. being confident you’ll get funds causes people to believe in your cause more and give you more funds), it’s also maybe helpful to assume you’re in an abundant context.
But if you are in fact in a scarce context and it’s not self-fulfilling, you very much want to budget and use what you know works.
Basically agreed, with the extra point that sometimes you can play your way “out” of a high resource context too by exploiting too hard (i.e. killing the goose that lays the golden eggs to get an extra meal). So attuning to what part of reality you are actually in is important.
Nice. New thought for me. Thank you.
I sort of rotate the basis vectors a bit. I sometimes think of evolution as a dance between creativity (variation) and death (natural selection). In that spirit, I’m hearing you say that Elua encourages thriving via creativity, whereas Moloch encourages survival via death.
I came to a similar steelman. Again with slightly shifted basis vectors though — basically the same ones as I mentioned up above I think. It comes out in terms of explore/exploit in my view. If you’re in a resource-poor situation, it’s high risk to explore, and you want to use whatever strategies you have on hand (with some exceptions, like if death is basically certain, at which point your strategies have already failed and you just want to increase variation a whole lot in a final survival bid). But if resources are abundant, then your long term survival is best served by basically preparing for forms of death that haven’t yet arrived. So expanding capacities via exploration. These seem to be two different modes (tight management of scarce resources vs. creative play to increase capacity in a high-resource domain).
If you’re actually in a high resource context but you can’t perceive it because your perceptions are contracted around a kind of emergency survival strategy, it’s helpful to “adopt an abundance mindset” so you can notice your context and correctly switch strategies.
If there’s some degree of self-fulfilling prophecy to the resources available (e.g. being confident you’ll get funds causes people to believe in your cause more and give you more funds), it’s also maybe helpful to assume you’re in an abundant context.
But if you are in fact in a scarce context and it’s not self-fulfilling, you very much want to budget and use what you know works.
Basically agreed, with the extra point that sometimes you can play your way “out” of a high resource context too by exploiting too hard (i.e. killing the goose that lays the golden eggs to get an extra meal). So attuning to what part of reality you are actually in is important.