It’s cool how TOC and CF are complimentary with concepts like bottlenecks and breakpoints as well as focus and yesno/rejection of gradations.
I think I like pretty much every CF article. Is it useful feedback to say I like any individual article but nothing specific about it? It seems to me like just asking questions is more useful, then you get feedback on what’s confusing.
I say we should instead be proud if our opinions are resilient enough that they usually don’t need to be updated. We should be looking to reach stable conclusions that have substantial margins of error on most if not all factors. If there are a lot of factors where we don’t have adequate margin of error, then we’re in a bad situation – we need to gain margin of error (e.g. by improving the factor, getting more accurate data, or understanding things better) or else reach a conclusion like “this system is pretty unstable”. Inadequate margin of error can be due to our understanding or due to the underlying reality itself that we’re trying to understand.
That’s interesting.
I think currently the trend is towards valuing pragmatism and changing your opinion easily (although politicians get criticized for flip-flopping, but I think people recognize it’s because of political expediency instead of honestly changing your mind). I think in the past having convictions and principles was more respected.
I think neither view (at least as a general attitude among common people. some philosophers most likely have had good nuanced views) is as nuanced as what Elliot says here. Here we get an explanation of why some opinions should be stable, it’s not just blind allegiance to some ideas. Being open to revision is compatible with this view of ideas being stable.
Bottlenecks are factors that are near breakpoints, and non-bottlenecks are not near breakpoints (they are more than an appropriate margin of error away from any breakpoint).
Could they not be far away in the wrong direction?
It could mean that factors far away from breakpoints are too much work to focus on now. It’s overreaching. It’s better to work on something else that you can make quicker cross a breakpoint.
But I don’t really understand why a bottleneck can’t be so bad it’s far away from a breakpoint.
Maybe it could be that when a factor is that bad some small amount improvement will turn into something qualitatively better. That doesn’t have to move the bottleneck yet. You could still reach new breakpoints on the same factor while it’s still the bottleneck. So you have a final goal but some milestones on the way. Could that always be the case? I can’t see that.
Balatro (video game) example like those in the article
There are scoring requirements for each round in Balatro (video game). If you can currently score more than the current requirement then scoring even more won’t help. Often you would like to trade in excess scoring for value generation instead.
Value generation could either be getting more money or deck fixing. It’s possible to reach the ideal deck. Deck fixing can stop being the limiting factor before the ideal deck is reached. There is variance in drawing the cards you need but you increase your chances by increasing your hands and discards relative to deck size and by increasing the ratio of good cards to bad cards. You can get that chance to 100%, but lots of different probabilities are involved in Balatro so less 100% is usually good enough. Not having 100% can end the game, but such is the game.
You can be bottlenecked by a specific element in scoring. For example you can have lots of mult but too little chips. Lots of strategies focus almost entirely on mult, but some chips over the starting level is pretty much required. This means that a (generally) average chips joker can be better than a (generally) great mult joker.
Sometimes you have enough of a specific factor currently but more of that factor will be useful later. You’re anticipating that the limiting factor will change. You may even give up some capacity that works on the current limiting factor in order to set yourself up for the future limiting factor. Also in Balatro you can’t always count the on the same resource showing up again so you have to take it now (usually a joker). Your forced to take it early because getting it at all is not a high chance.
I think I could do more examples like this to practice. I was thinking about doing Let’s Revolution too, but I should play it more and I could just use limiting factors terminology in the Let’s Revolution topic.