I liked this post for introducing upside decay, which seems like an important concept I didn’t have before. At the same time, upside decay feels like a very general concept, so it felt a little odd to tie it so strongly to virtue in particular.
The mechanism of “being admirable makes weak ties more inclined to help you out” does sound plausible. But I’m not sure why that would be connected to upside decay in particular. Using the example of scientific discovery, it feels like a major country could have assets such as high investment into education and R&D that helped it have lots of rare discoveries, even if its foreign policy didn’t do it any favors and lost it weak ties.
I also feel like the introductory example frames upside decay as something like “the value that you lose that you otherwise would have had”, which feels like a bit of an odd framing since there’s no “default value that you would have in general”, just the sum of many different factors. Imagine that this was something like a game where each “resource point” translated to a 0.1 percentage point increase in the probability of a positive event per some unit of time. Maybe someone has “3 points” worth of weak ties but “5 points worth” of R&D investment and “14 points” of other assets, for a net of a 2.2% chance of a positive event—outperforming the 1.8% chance of someone with 10 points of weak ties but only 3 of R&D and 5 of other assets. (All numbers pulled out of a hat.)
Yeah I think it’s an empirical question what fraction of upside is explained by weak ties.
Paul Graham wrote this essay which identifies weak ties as one of the 2 main factors behind the success of startup hubs. He also says that “one of the most distinctive things about startup hubs is the degree to which people help one another out, with no expectation of getting anything in return”.
I think upside decay is most applicable to venturesome things. So for example, a plastic chair factory is not very venturesome because the technology and processes are well established. The factory manager can be a real jerk and people will still buy his chairs. On the other hand, things like creating a startup, making smaller semiconductors, or new energy technologies are much more affected by upside decay.
Using the example of scientific discovery, it feels like a major country could have assets such as high investment into education and R&D that helped it have lots of rare discoveries, even if its foreign policy didn’t do it any favors and lost it weak ties.
I think this country would be good at incremental discoveries, improvements, some types of development, and commercialization. But it wouldn’t be good at generating rare discoveries. Using your example of a board game, weak ties can be translated into “Victory Points” at different ratios depending on the type of activity you’re looking at.
I liked this post for introducing upside decay, which seems like an important concept I didn’t have before. At the same time, upside decay feels like a very general concept, so it felt a little odd to tie it so strongly to virtue in particular.
The mechanism of “being admirable makes weak ties more inclined to help you out” does sound plausible. But I’m not sure why that would be connected to upside decay in particular. Using the example of scientific discovery, it feels like a major country could have assets such as high investment into education and R&D that helped it have lots of rare discoveries, even if its foreign policy didn’t do it any favors and lost it weak ties.
I also feel like the introductory example frames upside decay as something like “the value that you lose that you otherwise would have had”, which feels like a bit of an odd framing since there’s no “default value that you would have in general”, just the sum of many different factors. Imagine that this was something like a game where each “resource point” translated to a 0.1 percentage point increase in the probability of a positive event per some unit of time. Maybe someone has “3 points” worth of weak ties but “5 points worth” of R&D investment and “14 points” of other assets, for a net of a 2.2% chance of a positive event—outperforming the 1.8% chance of someone with 10 points of weak ties but only 3 of R&D and 5 of other assets. (All numbers pulled out of a hat.)
Yeah I think it’s an empirical question what fraction of upside is explained by weak ties.
Paul Graham wrote this essay which identifies weak ties as one of the 2 main factors behind the success of startup hubs. He also says that “one of the most distinctive things about startup hubs is the degree to which people help one another out, with no expectation of getting anything in return”.
I think upside decay is most applicable to venturesome things. So for example, a plastic chair factory is not very venturesome because the technology and processes are well established. The factory manager can be a real jerk and people will still buy his chairs. On the other hand, things like creating a startup, making smaller semiconductors, or new energy technologies are much more affected by upside decay.
I think this country would be good at incremental discoveries, improvements, some types of development, and commercialization. But it wouldn’t be good at generating rare discoveries. Using your example of a board game, weak ties can be translated into “Victory Points” at different ratios depending on the type of activity you’re looking at.