Luca’s ideas

Learning is about reducing stimuli’s entropy

Regarding learning, the brain works like a system of pumps, each “pumping” meaning from a previous representation. For example, a first brain region gets information from the eyes and extract lines, a second region takes the lines and recognizes letters, a third region takes the letters and recognizes words, and so on.
A pump works in the measure it is able to extract meaningful patterns: patterns which represent what is going on, therefore stable over time, therefore low entropy.

This idea is part of my book “The Control Heuristic, 2nd Edition“.

Critical mass as a requisite for Cultural Change in organizations

A new habit won’t be adopted sustainably in an organization unless a local density of at least 80% has been achieved in any given team.

(E.g., at least 80% of the members of a given team practice the habit with consistence.)

This idea is part of my book “Best Practices for Operational Excellence“

Expected Emotional Outcome

The most important criteria that will determine whether we will take action on a plan of ours is: do we intuitively believe it will have a positive Expected Emotional Outcome?

This means that we are unlikely to act on plans with negative EEO as intuitively predicted regardless on the external outcome we analytically expect.

Positive EEO is based both on “how much taking this action will distance ourselves from existential risks” and on “how much pleasure did this action bring us in the past (i.e., how addicted we are to it or to its cues).
Negative EEO is based on the opposite: how much it will bring us closer to existential risks and how much discomfort did it cause to us.

This idea is part of my book “The Control Heuristic, 2nd edition“

Prioritization by specificity

When faced with information coming from different channels (e.g., oral language & body language), people prioritize the channel which they are able to subjectively interpret in the less noisy way.

This explains why people with Autism Spectrum Disorders are more likely to disregard body language.

This idea is part of my book “The World Through A Magnifying Glass“

Metapractice: practice your practice

The maximum level of proficiency people can achieve at any given skill is limited by the time spent practicing and the amount of feedback gathered in each practice session.

Therefore, it is critical that you not only practice your skill but also practice your practice, tweaking it so that you can learn the most out of it.

This idea is part of my book “100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late“

Antifragilization

Things which are antifragile benefit from volatility (Taleb, Antifragile).

However, how likely something is to exhibit an antifragile response is not a static property. When exposed to relatively moderate stressors, antifragile things become more likely to exhibit antifragility – a process I call antifragilization. Similarly, when not exposed to any stressor of at least moderate entity, the antifragile becomes weaker and less likely to exhibit an antifragile response – a process I call fragilization.

This idea is part of my book “The Power of Adaptation“

Autism Spectrum Disorders as a high-pass filter

A good approximation for Autism Spectrum Disorders is a high-pass filter: a filter that only lets details pass through and blocks other kinds of information such as context.

This idea explains why people with ASD tend to be relatively proficient in fields where context is irrelevant (e.g., mathematics, computer science) and relatively impaired in fields where context is necessary (e.g., social interactions, dancing and sports).

This idea is part of my book “The World Through A Magnifying Glass“.

Centralization is only efficient to the central observer

Centralization is only efficient to the center: be it the political center (the politicians), the geographical center (the capital), the financial center (the banks & related institutions), the societal center (the “front-row class”) or the professional center (the “front-row professions”).

This idea is part of my essay “The bottom-up manifesto“.

Personal change happens through addiction to the actions producing the desired outcome, rather than to the results themselves

Everyone is upset when they cannot lose weight. Only fit people are upset when they cannot go to the gym.

Personal change only happens when we become addicted to the actions that bring us the results we want.

Only desiring the results only brings us frustration.

This idea is part of my book “The Control Heuristic, 2nd Edition“.

Most of morality maps over not introducing non-ergodicity

Most of morality maps over not introducing non-ergodicity, which is to say, over not creating or reducing the distance from existential risks, for the self or for the members of the community.

This idea is part of my book “The Control Heuristic, 2nd Edition“.

Functional poolers

Functional poolers are an architecture that allows for ML systems to extract meaning from incoming streams of data without external supervision, not even in the training phase.

This idea is part patent-pending “Techniques for the emergence of meaning in ML“.

Internal karma

Our behavior has repercussion on our future, not only through the external ripples of our actions coalescing in waves that hit (the traditional concept of karma), but most importantly by changing our mind and thus our future behavior.

Take decisions not (only) for their external result, but for the future behavior and reactions of yours they promote.

This idea is part of my book “100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late“

Ergodicity as a non-binary property

Yes, we can say that some activities are ergodic and others are non-ergodic. But it’s also possible to say that one activity is more ergodic than the other one.

That’s because people do not care about what happens when t→∞; instead, they care about the medium term. And in the medium term, it’s possible to compare how ergodic the outcomes of an activity look.

This is important because it represents more closely the risk management evaluations people make when presented with competing options.

This idea is part of my book “Ergodicity: Definitions, Examples, And Implications, As Simple As Possible“.

Is the autism spectrum two-tailed?

I suspect that the autism-spectrum is two tailed. In the center, neurotypicals. On one tail, people with autism symptoms. On the other tail, people with tendencies opposed to those of autistic ones (i.e., a preference for context over detail and an impairment at detailed fields).

This idea is part of my book “The World Through a Magnifying Glass”

The Distributed Brain

Our brain is made of multiple computing units, each individually evaluating a fragment of our perception. This leads to “broken phone” effects in which a unit’s wrong inference is assumed as correct by other units (leading to illusions) and in which incomplete but coherent information is considered as complete (leading to confabulations).

This idea is part of my book “The Control Heuristic”

Mimetic societies

Mimetic societies survive if and only if skin in the game is enforced. If it is, those with ineffective or sociopathic behaviors are forced out of the population, and only pro-survival behavior are available to imitate.

Instad, in the absence of skin in the game, charlatans are revered and imitated, leading to decadence and incompetence.

This idea is part of my book “The Control Heuristic”

Antifragile Organizations

Antifragile is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to identify what benefits from variation, usage, problems, and feedback.

I’ve merged my expertise in management together with my knowledge of antifragility in a course called “Antifragile Organizations”. Designed for managers and entrepreneurs, it is practical and problem-oriented.

Virus infrastructure

One would think that a country that got hit hard during a pandemic’s first wave would be hit lightly during further waves, as it built immunity. Instead, we often observe the opposite phenomenon: places that are hit hard in the first wave tend to be hit hard in subsequent ones. That’s because of virus infrastructure: the geographic, demographic, cultural, and social factors that make a virus spread more easily in a given area.