Everyone. Welcome to Nontrivial. I'm your host, Sean mcclure. We all depend on our environment to survive. We need food, water, friends, family, co workers, we participate in the economy, pay for entertainment, post on social media. But all these things bear the seeds of our destruction. We need things to grow. But past the point, these same things can destroy us. The real challenge in life is finding the right dosage for the things we depend on.
Analytical approaches tend to fail when it comes to finding the right dosage. So I offer an alternative based on complexity and signals. Let's get started. We are not self sufficient beings, right? We totally depend on our environment, right? So as individuals, we go through life, we have to obviously ingest food and water. In order to survive, we have to interact with our environment, we have to interact with people, we have to collaborate.
Uh we have to, you know, mix and match ideas and and converse and this is very much the story of survival of humanity. So at the individual level, we have to uh you know, we have these deep, deep dependencies on our environment. I've talked about some of those kind of hidden dependencies before some of them are not hidden. Some of them are at the organizational level. Organizations depend on the cooperation and competition with other organizations, right?
So they very much depend on being immersed into the market and partaking in that market. Um and being involved uh you know, from a revenue and profit standpoint from, you know, again, cooperating and competing and getting ideas and using those ideas and hiring employees uh as they come and go and all this kind of stuff. So there's this, this, this kind of flux of input and output within uh when an organization sits within the market and, and competes effectively.
And then at the nation level, right, nations have to trade with other nations. Uh they might have to protect their borders and therefore be uh you know, you know, defend their borders, maybe they have to go to war with other nations, uh maybe they're trying to kind of take over other parts of the world or whatever it is. Uh the individual, the organization and the nation all depend so kind of at all scales if you will on uh inputs from the environment, right?
We have to take things in and we have to use those resources effectively if we're going to survive, right? And there's many, many different ways to think about this, you know, we can think about it physically, think about it, information all the different kind of facets and manifestations of the way this plays out. But it's very much true that, you know, people, individuals or organizations or nations, you know, we all at all levels have this dependency with our environment.
We have to take inputs, right? We have to take in resources in order to survive. So part of that um is this is not necessarily a good or a bad thing. What I mean by that is uh, if you take in, uh, let's say, as an individual, uh, you have to obviously take in food and water. So you can decide, you know, make decisions around that as to what type of food you're going to take in and how much of it. Right. So, if we start, well, I just start with something basic like water, right? Water is good.
So, is it, uh, you know, kind of a black and white? It's definitely a good thing. Well, no, you can drown, right? You can have too much water even drinking, you know, uh, you could drink too much water and essentially drown or, I don't know, overwork the kidneys or something like that. You could do it in a potentially dangerous way. Uh, the food that we eat, right? We need food to survive. But you could eat too much food, could overwork the body.
You could stress the body, you could lead to, uh, you know, bad health, whether that's through weight gain or maybe you're taking in too much sugar, maybe you're taking in too much salt or MS G or whatever it is, you know, carbs, you, food is a good thing, right? To a certain point and then past a certain point it becomes a bad thing and we can go up to the organizational level. Right.
We want, let's say, eccentric individuals because they might be particularly creative, but they can also be toxic if they're too eccentric. Right. If their eccentricities uh start to interfere with an irregular flow of business with a regular flow and use of ideas and that's going to be problematic.
And uh and nations, there's all kinds of great examples of this, how nations need to use, uh you know, a number of things uh economically, you know, uh with uh the citizens uh within the country, whatever it is in order to uh progress in order to grow as a nation, uh maybe to take over certain areas to increase the quality of life of their citizens, but too much of that can lead to a bad thing. So in all these cases, um it's not necessarily just a good or a bad thing, right?
When we are in our environment and we're taking in resources, we have that dependency, we need to do it, but it only works up to a point and then it can be kind of catastrophic, right? There's always the the seeds of destruction within the things that we take in, in life and, and again, this could be physically or emotionally, right. This could be, you know, for an individual, this could be, you're in a relationship and there's certain compromises that you have to make.
But if you make too much compromises and you give too much of yourself or you expect the other person to change beyond their, their, their true self, then that's going to be problematic. And so whatever scale you're looking at, there's always the seeds of the destruction, always the seeds of destruction within anything that we take in, we have to take in, we have that dependency, but there's always those seeds of destruction, right?
Um A pretty cool book by Ray Dalio uh principles for dealing with the changing world order. Why nations succeed and fail. Uh He talks about this at kind of the nation level um where he's looking at uh you know, basically this kind of repeating cycle that happens between nations.
He looks at, you know, essentially the um the main empires that have existed, basically starting with the Dutch and then going into the UK currently the US and then probably China next, although it's hard to say for sure.
And he's looking at these repeatable patterns that occur when they, when they're on the rise and then when they're at the top and then when they're on the decline and you see, you know, economic factors, right, political factors, you see things like wealth gaps, you see the role of capitalism and democracy, uh, obviously military strength, technology, you know, the use of information, intellectual property and all this kind of stuff and none of these things are necessarily good or bad.
You see the same thing, right. Uh, in all the things that you do as a nation in order to climb up, you're going to have the seeds of destruction in those same things, which I think is really interesting. right? And that's, that's really the essence of this kind of pattern of seeds of destruction is that it's the same things that what is good for you is also bad for you, right? What is good for you is also bad for you, right? You've got, you know, steps that nations will take with their currency.
For example, where you got to kind of, you know, Ray Dalio talks about essentially the three types of money you can have, you kind of have that hard currency or that hard money like gold or silver. And then you've got the paper currency which is still backed by something like gold. And then you've got fiat currency which basically completely disconnects itself uh from, from the gold or from the silver, right?
It's completely disconnected at that point, you can start printing money so you can stimulate the economy. Uh you can get to the point where your nation, you know, essentially establishes the world Reserve currency, which gives you a lot of uh benefits in terms of uh being able to borrow from other countries because people want to work within that currency. And so they'll lend to you in that currency that allows them to save and, and participate in an economy in that currency.
And so it's a nice example of what you're doing with the currency as you detach yourself from the physicality, like gold can be a good thing. It can drive a lot of revenue If you will into the nation, it can bring a lot of money, it can raise the quality of life of your citizens. You can do a lot of things that you wouldn't have been able to do before. Um But that exact same move also creates these massive obligations.
You end up with a large amount of debt, you know, just think of the United States owing a lot of debt to China, you know, and are they or are they not going to pay that back? Maybe they will, maybe they won't. What most nations do is Ray Dalio says is instead of, you know, kind of dealing with those debt obligations, they just end up printing more money. And in the short term, that can be a good thing. Maybe it stimulates the economy, maybe it continues to keep the Empire on top.
But that creates that kind of hollow out, Hollows out the the nation because it devalues the currency and it uh uh causes things like inflation and all that stuff. So, uh and, and there's all kinds of other examples in the, in the changing world order by Ray Dalio, which is pretty cool, just, you know, military, what you have to do from a military standpoint, what you have to do with new technologies, what you have to do with information.
Uh But over time, those same things that you're doing to grow, end up causing these wealth gaps, these value gaps, these, these kind of political gaps. And uh you know, uh as Ray is explaining in his book, you'll be at the very top and these things will start to be going on. They're kind of these hallmarks that the decline is about to happen.
And then all of a sudden you really, you, you get kind of extreme polarization politically, you get um populists that start to, to, to rise up in uh in the, in the political scene. Uh you know, that no one seems to agree on what, you know, where to point the moral compass or what morality is and the institutions kind of start to break down.
People are not trusting institutions and all those kinds of things you hear about when uh well, but you might, if you look at the United States right now, you could say it has a lot of the hallmarks of decline, of course, that's debatable. But uh it, it, if you look, especially comparing United States and China, you can kind of see um United States has, has, has a lot of those markers that Ray Dalio talks about in terms of a nation declining. Right. It, it rose up.
It's got this great story of rising to power and then it's, it's been at the top and now it's got the hallmarks of, of decline, but it's the same things that made it rise, that made it decline. And that's true. If you look at the Dutch and if you look at the UK, if you look at the United States and you look at China right now, they're definitely on the rise.
Maybe, you know, within the next 10, 2030 40 years, maybe they will be at the top, maybe they'll have a couple 100 years of being the leading empire. But there's a good chance that they will also decline because again, this is a repeatable structure as Ray Dalio talks about in his book, Principles for dealing with the changing World Order. So go check out that book. But it, you know, this, this podcast is not about any particular book.
What it's about is just the fact that the same things that save you are the same things that kill you, right? The same things that you bring into your life. Again, going back to what I said at the beginning, we have this dependency to interact with our environment.
We must take in resources, we must take in inputs, we see this at the individual level, we see this at the organizational level, we see this as, as as nations grow and prosper, they need to work with the environment, work with other nations, work with other people, bring in, bring in, bring in.
But those exact same things that you're doing also bear the seeds of the destruction because they can end up creating whether it's big debt obligations, whether it's toxic individuals within an organization, whatever it is. And uh and so what all this essentially leads to, what I think is a conversation about dosage right in life. What we're really trying to do is decide what dosage dosage to strike for the things that we need in order to grow, right?
And so this again going to all scales at the individual level, you think about diet, right? You, you, you, you need some protein, you need some carbs, you need some salt. OK? But how much you know, we want to be able to partake in life, we want to be able to be social. So we want to go to, you know, restaurants but restaurants is never really, the food is never as healthy as something you're doing on your own. So how much of that should we have?
We want to be entertained, we want to spend money on entertainment. But how much is good? How much is too much, how much television is too much, right? Think about social media, probably a perfect example. Social media opens up doors um it could do it from a, from an employment perspective. It allows you to promote what you do. But how much is too much, how much do you start to distort your view of reality by being a part of social media?
So again, it's not that social, you don't know, we shouldn't be dualistic about things, right? It's not that social media is all bad, is that social media up to a point can be really, really good. It might help your career, it might even help your own uh you know, physical health because you're getting exposed to people, maybe your spiritual health, whoever you're following whatever conversations you're having, you can be exposed to a lot of great stuff through social media.
You can connect with other individuals that uh that, that you would otherwise would not connect with. And uh that can be a very positive thing in your life. But then there's that threshold that you pass and all of a sudden it can be toxic. Maybe you're getting harassed online, maybe you're interacting with more people than you wanted to, you know, maybe you grew your Twitter account to 20,000 followers and up to that point, it was great.
And then everything after that you had to keep blocking people and blocking people and it just became a mess and then it wasn't even enjoyable and you weren't getting the benefit anymore. Um So we see this with diet, right? Uh We see this with, you know, social media, you know, MS G, how much MS G should I be exposed to?
You could say, well, I'm just going to cut it out but I want to go out and eat and maybe I'm going to a lot of restaurants that use MS G and, uh, so, so how often should I do that? I wanna be with family and friends and I want to partake, but I, I don't want to do that all the time. There's a dosage that you have to strike, right? Organizations. Again, we want some, you know, certain individuals to be eccentric and want that creativity. We want to be able to take risk.
You can't do an organization with zero risk, you wouldn't move, you wouldn't compete, you would die immediately. But obviously there is such thing as too much risk. Where do you strike that dosage? You know, and nations, you know, what do they do with their currency? How much do they trade? How much, uh you know, other kind of land or area might they try to take over or at least negotiate with in order to access resources? How much is too much, you know, is there a way to strike that dosage?
Because everything we do from an input perspective, all the resources that we take in physically and information are going to bear the seeds of our destruction. OK?
It doesn't matter what it is, everything from water and food to money, right, to, to information of all kinds social media, to, you know, the networking that we do with people, there's always too much of a thing and uh and it's very, and in one sense that sounds obvious, but I think we always kind of get caught in that situation or quite frequently, we we, we can get caught in that situation if we don't have good control over a dosage, that situation being we see something as good.
And so we just want more of it. We assume that more is better, more money, more connections, more people, more friends, right, more food, more water, more, going out, more drink, whatever it is. And it's easy to get caught in that, you know, or we go the other way and we kind of take that absolutist approach and we say, well, you know what alcohol is bad. So I'm just going to completely remove it from my life. Uh You know, uh someone said too much salt was bad.
So I'm just gonna literally try to completely eliminate that altogether, maybe eliminate all uh all the MS G. And we might think we're being kind of smart by taking that absolutist approach, but there's always a cost to doing that and I'll talk a little bit about later. There might actually be quite a bit of damage even from a health perspective in doing that.
Because what makes the poison is the dosage if you've heard that phrase before, uh, that, that phrase before the dosage makes the poison, right? In fact, uh, you know, we talked about Paracelsus on a previous episode and he was one of the people that alluded to that, right. Dosage makes the poison. Nothing is just definitively good or bad. Right? Um, it, it always comes down to dosage. It doesn't matter how extreme it is.
I'll, I'll use examples later and talk about cyanide and talk about arsenic. All those are definitely bad. No, they're not definitely bad. There's a dosage, there's a dosage. Water is definitely good. The cleanest purest water with all the minerals that you need is definitely good. No, it's not, can kill you. Ok. So it's, it, it doesn't matter what it is. There, there is always a dosage.
And so that's interesting, but also challenging as we go through life, we depend on our environment, we have to take in resources. We have to just constantly be immersed within our environment in order to survive. But the biggest challenge in terms of the set of decisions that we have to make in life, come down to what the dosage is. And that's what we have to get good at s shaped curve, what the dosage is.
So we can try to pick apart this, you know, from a mechanism standpoint, you know, like how do you find the dosage? Right? And so you can go into, you know, toxicology, for example, is a huge area that tries to obviously figure out what the dosage of a poison is. Right. Um, again, dosage makes the poison. So really, it's not just about, you know, classifying what is, and isn't a poison that's not really useful. It's more about what level of ex s shaped curves or is acceptable. Right.
And so you get these dose response curves that they'll make where you're basically plotting, you know, the reaction of an organism to the amount or the dosage, uh you know, of a chemical that they are exposed to. Right. So you, you typically get this kind of where, you know, the the organism won't necessarily have much response. And all of a sudden it spikes up really drastically and then it kind of plateau off at the top.
And so you can try to come up with, you know, as toxicologists often do these, these dose response curves and try to figure out, you know, through that maybe where the dosage is, you know, what is acceptable, but this is massively challenging and, and the reason is you'll get, uh, you know, it's not just you get kind of these U shaped curves, you'll have to get into all these different models. Maybe the linear model isn't good.
You have to try to account for complexities because the organism like, let's say the individual that's getting exposed, it can depend on the, the mass of the individual, right? Like how heavy they are, whether they're male, they're female, maybe how much muscle, how much fat they have, how tall they are. Something about their biochemistry, things that we don't even know. In other words, substances can affect different people in many different ways. Right.
And this isn't just for, you know, potentially toxic compounds. This is anything, the water, the food, the MS G, the salt, the eccentricities of people, right.
That we bring into our organization, the amount of risk that we take in an organization, the amount of economic input or revenue that we expect each year as a nation, the amount of trade that we do as a nation, what we do with our currency, whether we go full blown, you know, fiat currency detached from the physicality and on and on and on, you know, the military strength, all this kind of stuff, there is no way to really land on uh an explicit dosage, you know, in a, in a, in a real analytical sense, you know, just take a look at the person that's in there and try to take in all the factors and again, toxicologists do this, but it's not a resolved issue.
It's very, very challenging, it's a complex issue. And so you can try to do this more, you know, you know, let's say less analytically if, if, if you will and, and try to approach it more from uh an approach that takes into account complexity, right, which is obviously something I recommend here on, on non-trivial all the time, right?
These analytical approaches where you try to kind of nitpick and deduce uh you know, a specific dosage for something is, is should not be expected to work in, in nontrivial or real world situations. And so we can try to take something like maybe catastrophe theory. So if you think about, I talked a little bit about this kind of thing in the snowball effect, the the free speech episode, right? But basically, if you think about an avalanche, you've got the build up of pressure over time, right?
Incrementally, it builds and builds and builds and all of a sudden it gives way. And that's kind of like what's happening. If you think about that dose response curve where you got this little bit of increment, little bit increment and then all of a sudden it takes off and then a plateau is at the top. So there seems to be this moment where there's a catastrophe, right?
So if you think about how much salt or how much MS G or how much carbs or how much protein or how much centric people to bring into our organization or how much trade we should have as a nation or whatever it is, you're looking at whatever the thing that you know, you need to bring in, but which could also be your poison. Uh Is there a way to understand kind of the threshold model or the catastrophe model?
Of where something, all of a sudden collapses where all of a sudden like an avalanche, the avalanche would occur. Ok. But again, this is a true property of how systems work.
The fact that you have these uh you know, catastrophic systems, all of a sudden take out uh take off or these kind of bifurcations where things go out a certain way and then all of a sudden something goes off in two different directions or these phase transitions, however, you want to do it, these are all true things that happen in nature.
But using it to predict what the dosage should be is by no means straightforward, not really any more straightforward than you would have with a more kind of nitpicky analytical, low level kind of linear approach to the to the process, right? So we've got the time toxicologist kind of doing their things with the dose response curves. They, you know, they have to do this from, from a political perspective, right?
Because, or, or, or a policy perspective rather because they have to put policies in place like the LD fifties, these ratings that you put on compounds, here's how much you were supposed to be exposed to. It's very, very challenging. It really depends on the individual and you're kind of just doing this to do this. In other words, like if we know this thing can kill us, let's just keep the dosage really, really small. It's not necessarily a proper dosage for the individual.
You know, if you're gonna be working with a cyano compound in the chemistry lab, meaning it has, you know, cyanide in it or the ability to, to, to be produced, to produce cyanide. Let's just keep this very, very low and let's have good ventilation as opposed to being, yeah, we know the exact dosage this is going to kill you. They don't know the exact dosage is not information. And then you've got kind of the failure of catastrophic models from a predictive standpoint.
You can go look at catastrophe models on Wikipedia, read all about their, their various manifestations. Very much true from a scientific perspective. Like catastrophes do happening, right? Avalanches do happening. There are lots of things where you build up over time and all of a sudden there's this inflection point and it takes off, but it doesn't mean you're gonna be able to predict when that inflection point takes place, right.
Uh, you know, you can think about this in terms of fat tail distributions or all this kind of other jargony stuff. If you get into probability and statistics, we know that they exist. But that doesn't mean, you know, when they're going to happen. And in fact, it's more important to know that it does exist than to know when it's going to happen because when isn't really gonna be available information anyways.
But knowledge of the fact that things can take off and explode on you can be used in decision making in life. And I kind of get, get, get to that a little bit more in a bit. But the point is let's go back to, to kind of, you know, the story here at the beginning, I said, we must partake in environments all the time. We have to input, input, input, we depend on those inputs. So you can't get away from that. We're not self sufficient.
We, we have to be immersed in our environments and take things in all the time. And then I said, but you know, the challenge here, the constant challenge that we're dealing with is that everything that we bring in has a bad side to it, right? It has a good side at the beginning and then it bears the seeds of its own destruction, right? It's the exact same thing. Nothing has to even change.
It's just water, salt, chemistry, fat people personalities compromise, risk, money, revenue, profit, whatever it is, it doesn't matter, it's not good or bad, it's good up to a point and then it becomes bad. And then I said, so the big kind of realization of all of this is that it all comes down to dosage in life. We have to try to figure out what the dosage is.
And then I said, let's try to kind of pick that apart from a mechanistic standpoint, mechanistically as I always do, I non-trivial, right? And they said, well, we can kind of look at what the toxicologists are doing. And these are an example among others of who are trying to come up with these dose response curves. And we could take a look at an organism or an individual and we could try to see how they react to a given exposure.
You can imagine a bunch of mice studies going on exposing them to DDT or cyanide or arsenic or whatever it is, you know, mercury and kind of looking at when they die, right? And trying to figure out, ok, well, they were this body weight and they were this age and they were this, you know, sex, whatever it is. And here's when they died. And so we can kind of try to guess at a threshold but they're just, it's never never that simple. It's really hard to kind of pinpoint something analytically.
And then you can take a look at things, you know, scientific models that deal with things like uh avalanches, like catastrophe theories. They look at when all of a sudden things take off, right? It goes a really long time where it's ever, you know, it's peaceful and there's a build up of pressure, build up of pressure and all of a sudden it gives way and there's all kinds of mathematics around that.
Although it gives you an understanding that these things do exist in nature and you can understand a lot of the properties of those catastrophes it doesn't give you any real predictive ability or it's really hard to put much prediction around it. And, and there's this kind of whole story of catastrophe theory, kind of having a failure to offer much in the way of, of predicting when cat are going to occur. Right? You think about avalanches happening themselves.
It's not that people are predicting when avalanches are gonna occur. They just know that what, what they do is they, they know that they happen, they know how they happen. And so they go blast the mountains on a regular basis in order to make sure that there's no major build up. Ok. Uh Analog to that would be something like, you know, maybe with COVID, OK, a new virus hits, we don't know much about it. So we know this thing can take off drastically.
It's got this exponential takeoff behavior to it. We know that scientifically mathematically, we understand that property, but that doesn't mean you're gonna be able to predict what happens that doesn't, you know, doesn't mean you're gonna be able to predict um when it's going to take off or when it's going to be a problem. And so the right kind of decision there is just at least initially start to shut a lot of things down, let's try to get control over it.
And then go from that point on, obviously, the, the COVID situation is a lot more complex than that. But the point is is, you can make decisions just from the knowledge that these things can take off in a really bad way. So you can do this with avalanches. You can blast on a regular basis. You can do this with viruses or at least initially you shut down and try to get control and then deal it from that point on, you can do it with uh you know, forest fires.
You could try to maybe allow forest fires to burn themselves on a regular basis so that you don't get this build up of material, uh, where all of a sudden it explodes. Right. And in, in other words, you know, don't keep putting out all the fires, don't keep putting out all the forest fires. And they got this big matchstick powder keg scenario where you've got all this forest that wasn't allowed to burn and then all of a sudden a really bad one happens and it explodes.
So we can appreciate the catastrophes. We can appreciate the things all of a sudden explode off, but it doesn't necessarily tell you what the dosage is. Right. And so it's not gonna help you from a dosage perspective, right. We know that too much carbs is going to be problematic, but how much carbs is, right. And if I try to eliminate carbs altogether is that the answer?
Probably not, which I'll talk about in a bit, same thing with salt and same thing with anything, any of the things that we talked about at the individual level, at the organizational level or at the, the the nation level or the countries, you do need these things, you need input, you need to take risk. You can't just shut the world down altogether. You can't just shut yourself all and down altogether. You have to partake in these things. It really comes down to dosage. OK?
Knowing that catastrophes and fat tail things exist can definitely help with decision making. But if you think you're gonna take an absolutist approach on everything, uh I think that's definitely the wrong way to do it. So let's get into that a little bit because why wouldn't you just take an absolutist approach on whatever it is? Right? Um I heard salt can be bad, right? So, so I'm just gonna literally try to eliminate salt altogether. Now you might say, well that, you know, isn't that dumb?
I mean, obviously we need some level of electrolytes and we need, we need salt. But maybe the decision to take the absolutist approach is still best because no matter how much I try to eliminate salt, I know I'll probably still be getting too much, let's say, or I know I'll still be getting a certain amount. So maybe the absolutist approach is still good.
Maybe if I just make the decision to completely eliminate MS G, then I know I'm probably still getting a little bit MS G. But then I know that it's low, right? Um Why, why can't we just take that absolute absolutist approach? Try to eliminate all the things that might just be bad at all? Right. Uh This is called hormesis EDT.
Why don't we just absolutely eliminate it knowing that, you know, via entropy, there's still going to be some disorder there, there's still gonna be some that creeps in and that way we keep all our dosages really low. Well, this is still kind of problematic because there's a big cost to eliminating things from your life. And there's also a property that things are not necessarily bad. Ok. You could say, well, I'm going to uh literally try to uh eliminate, um, you know, arsenic from my life 100%.
But that's not necessarily a good thing to do because arsenic could play a bio role, a bio active role at very low concentrations that are useful. And we don't really know where that concentration is. If something is hermetic, it means uh a little bit of that thing that is bad can actually do a lot of good things for you. And this occurs a lot in nature. You can look at a lot of substances and it could be every substance, every substance.
Again, it's not a poison necessarily, the dosage makes up and it, but, but it's not just that you want to eliminate things that could be bad for you. It could be really good for you in the low dosage. So I don't think the absolutist approach necessarily gets you there even though you could take the absolutist approach and maybe you're only exposed to a little amount, but we don't know what the amount is supposed to be.
So you don't know if you're really getting that, that dosage in a good fashion, right? And so the question is, what do we do? How do we, how do we go through life? Got these dependencies, everything seems to bear the seeds of its own destruction. It all comes down to dosage in the end. I don't think the absolutist approach is going to get you there because you do need to strike a a dosage somehow.
But there's no way to analytically know what those dosage, the dosage is supposed to be, you know, dosage response studies isn't going to give you that understanding the properties of catastrophes, you know, avalanche where all of a sudden things take off in a kind of a uh a catastrophic fashion super useful from a decision making standpoint in a lot of situations, you know, avalanches, forest fires, you know, um you know, viruses and things like that, there are certain things you can do.
But at the end of the day, you still have to try to figure out what the dosage is. In fact, going back to the COVID example, that's probably a good example. I think up front, you can take a very kind of precautionary principle approach. And say, look, we're just going to shut things down right now right at the beginning, right, because we know how these things could, could, uh, could take off. But you're not gonna do that for 10 years. You probably shouldn't do that for five years.
You are still going to have to find a dosage somewhere. You can't just wait around forever. Right. We need to partake in life. You know, you can try to eliminate carbs 100% because you think carbs are bad for you. Maybe you're right, probably a little bit is actually good for you. Maybe the little bit is really, really good for you. And then past the point, maybe it's really, really bad for you. There's probably a dosage you need.
And even if that weren't the case by eliminating carbs altogether, you couldn't go to a lot of restaurants. You could, you, you, you'd be have to be really picky with the food that you're eating. There might be a social cost to doing that. You know, MS G. There would be quite a big social cost if I was like, no, I absolutely cannot eat any MS G whatsoever. I have to completely eliminate it.
There's gonna be a cost to that and there could be a physical cost to that too because as per Hermes says, maybe a little bit of MS G is actually ok, we just really don't want to pass that threshold. Ok. So understanding that things can be bad for you is important. Understanding that things can all of a sudden take off and be bad for you is really important because that can help with decision making. But at the end of the day, we still have to figure out a dosage. So how can we do that?
Well, let's take a look at nature if we think about nature itself, right? I mean, obviously humans are nature, but think of any organism, right? Think about what goes on in the cell. You can imagine there's mitochondria in a cell, these kind of little organelles that are within the cell, whatever level you want to look at, it doesn't matter. You can look at the whole earth, you can look at an individual cell, let's just use a cell and you got these organelles within there.
You can imagine that there are dosage requirements for all of these things, right? They are interacting in an environment, right? The mitochondria is within a cell and it has to be in communication with the body of fluids that are within that cell and the other organelles and it's partaking like anything else, right? Analogous to an individual organization, being in a market, an individual, being in a company, whatever it is, right? So how is it coming up with those dosages?
I mean, obviously it's kind of doing this in a mindless fashion, right? It's not doing a bunch of analysis and trying to figure out the right amount. Well, I think it really comes down to signals. Right.
I think that at every level, uh whether it's the mitochondria, whether it's the cell, whether it's the organism that is composed of cells, whether it is the group that, that, that is composed of a bunch of organisms like an ant colony, a termite colony or herd of buffalo, whatever it is and on and on, doesn't matter what scale you're talking about. There are signals that exist at all levels that get paid attention to. And those signals can be indicative of whether or not a dosage is being met.
So we have to kind of reframe how we're thinking about understanding dosage instead of trying to think about where it is exactly. Instead of trying to understand, well, this person's body weight and this person's height and this person's gender or sex and this person's yada yada and I'm gonna add all that up. I'm gonna tally it all together and then I'll have enough information to know uh what the dosage of something is is supposed to be. I'm saying that's impossible.
I'm saying that, that, that, you know, the causal opacity that I talk about a lot doesn't give us access to that kind of information, but there are high level signals that we can pay attention to and those signals can be indicative indicative of whether or not we're on the right track. So let's go back to, let's say the individual. Ok. And then I'll come kind of bring it back to how nature is doing it.
But if, if, if I am trying to understand how much carbs to consume, there is a very good signal that can help me with that and you can do this yourself. And a lot of people might not realize because they're doing all these other things and maybe they're not paying attention to carbs. They don't think there's a signal there, but there is too much carbs is definitely going to have a physical manifestation. You will notice it, you'll really notice it.
If you try to cut carbs, you will see a lot of your fat disappear. It just is what it is. Now, I'm not saying that's the only thing to do, but carbs do definitely play a major role here and you can pay attention to the signals in your body, how you feel, how you look, how much energy you have and that can help dictate what's going on. And I'm not saying this is going to be obvious right away.
But if you start to play with the amount of carbs, the amount of salt, the amount of sugar in your life, there are a lot of signals there to how you're feeling and some people might think, oh, that's kind of hand wavy. That's kind of wishy washy.
But you're only thinking that because you kind of got this what I would consider an old school analytical approach to trying to, trying to tally everything up that works for simple systems that does not work for complex systems and complex systems, we have to pay attention only to the high level signals. Paying attention to the high level signals is a much more scientifically rigorous way to go about understanding complexity. OK. Talk about this all the time on non trivial.
So signals can be indicative of whether or not you are getting the right dosage. You know, if you do a uh too much salt, you're gonna be feel dehydrated. If you do too much MS G, you could say, oh, we don't really know if this is bad for you. Maybe it's bad for you over the long run. No, I think you do have signals there. I think there is a, you know, there's a pastiness in your mouth that comes from eating too much MS G, there's a dehydration that comes from too much salt.
There's a discomfort that happens in the stomach when you have too much coffee. It's not like you're just ingesting things and you have no idea that this is necessarily bad for you. Even things like radiation that you can't even see. There are signs there are signals that are worth paying attention to. There's even a paradox that a low amount as per Hermes of radiation can be good for you. A certain amount of radiation. It's not that it's all bad, right?
What is the dosage, there are signals that you can pay attention to. Right. How much coffee, how much salt, how much MS G, how much carbs? How much protein, how much exercise? Ok. Exercise. Is it good or bad? Well, it's both, it has the seeds of its own destruction. You can definitely exercise too much, too much oxidative stress is going to be a problem in your life. You can definitely work out too much, you can work out incorrectly and you can try to analyze it. You can try to go take advice.
How should I work out? How should I lift the weight? How should I supinate the dumbbell? You know, what exercise should I do? What equipment should I use? Just go to the gym, start lifting and pay attention to your body. It's not a hand wavy, uh, uh, you know, kind of non rigorous way to go. It, it's a very rigorous, scientifically way to do it because, because, because that's how complexity works is you pay attention to the high level signal.
And if you do that, when you feel good, when you recover, well, you know, when you, when your stomach doesn't feel good, when you feel dehydrated, there's all kinds of signals that your body provides and, and it's not more scientific to go and try to analyze every little piece because now you're getting into fairy tale that now you're getting into this kind of, you're trying to piece together this causal story of how you think things come together to produce the output and you don't have access to the story.
Statistics is not going to save you from that statistics. And even mathematics be quite problematic because it can make you think you have access to things that you don't, it can appear very rigorous because you can piece together the story. But if you're being in intellectually honest, you really don't have access to all those analytically available pieces that you can piece together to know what the dosage is supposed to be.
So I think paying attention to signal is a much better way to go about life. And you'll see that a lot of things that people talk about in terms of, of what has worked for them. They've tried many things and then they land on something and then it is kind of, you know, a little more obvious in hindsight and you gotta be careful because things are always, always, you know, hindsight is always 2020.
But if you think about what people put up with on a regular basis in terms of discomfort in terms of not being that healthy, not feeling that good, you know, you can strike a lot of good dosages just by paying attention to a lot of signals. Now, I'm not saying it's the perfect solution, right? I'm not saying go ahead and jump into a bath of arsenic and, and, and wait till you start feeling bad but again, let's not be stupid. We know, uh we have a lot of information available to arsenic.
The dosage is probably very, very low and you wouldn't want to mess with that. So you wouldn't start exposing yourself to a tonn of radiation. A ton of arsenic, uh A ton of DDT. And then seeing if you, seeing if you feel sick, you would already start really low, but you would pay attention to signals, you would pay attention to how things are going. And it's not just, you know, we're talking about physical health and stuff like that.
You know, think about an organization, how much risk to take on. Right. You're obviously not gonna go jump into a ton of risk right away. That would be stupid. You're also not gonna eliminate all risk altogether and barely have any. Well, actually, organizations probably do this too much, but that's also stupid. You're not gonna be able to compete.
So, you know, there's a dosage there and, and, and trying to tally up all the information to try to figure out where that dosage is, is going to be problematic. I don't think that's the way to do it, but there are signals you can start relatively low. But, but, but, but at least bring in a decent amount of risk and start partaking and then start assessing it on a regular basis. There's no magic formula but pay attention to the signals. This is what works.
This is what doesn't continually be, uh, able to pivot and adjust your approach. Right. And now what about nations? Now, the thing about nations is, you know, it's pretty ridiculous to say to a country, you know, look, don't grow too much. Right. You know, just, just grow a little bit and see how it goes and pay attention to the signals. We know that they're going to be, uh, they're always gonna want to increase the quality of life for the individuals.
They're gonna want to take over more land, they're gonna want to trade more, they're gonna eventually go fiat currency. They're gonna detach from the physicality, they're gonna borrow, borrow, borrow, borrow, they're gonna print money, print money, print money. There's no reason to believe this isn't going to happen, right? Uh Individuals are and, and organizations and nations especially just primed to continue to build, to continue to create and to continue to grow.
So it's not like we have these built in limitations, but we do know how to pay attention to signals. Now, you could say, well, how do you get a nation to pay attention to signal? Well, on that, remember in the democracy episode when I was talking about these um kind of watchdog organizations, right? Democracy by itself already has some things built in to pay attention to signals, right? We switch leaders on a regular basis.
Uh certain democracies anyways, right, let's say in the United States, we switch leaders let's say, every four years or eight years. And uh so nobody can take control for too long. Obviously, it's, it's put up for election. And so there's this kind of mechanism to place, to kind of have the checks and balances. Hopefully nothing goes out of whack, but it's not perfect. You can definitely, uh, pervert and subvert the process. You know, we talked about all that in the democracy episode.
So, what was the answer? Well, there was a higher level above the democracy that helped put watchdogs in place that could pay attention to the signals. At least this is the way I would think of it, of whether or not something is going bad. Right? There are uh Hallmark of kind of destructive practices that could happen within democracy, just like at the level of democracy, it can pay attention to certain signals and do things to make sure that at its level it seems to be going ok.
And so you can kind of thinking of it, think of it as a kind of shifting up. Remember my shifting up episode, right? Shift up, shift up kind of work at the upper level. Look, go one level up and pay attention to the signals instead of trying to ana analytically figure out and guarantee something's going to happen at any given one level. So for democracy to go, well, you should have watchdogs in place and maybe the watchdogs could be, you know, perverted to a certain extent as well.
Well, there's no reason you couldn't have a level above that. Now, I'm not saying, you know, turtles all the way up so to speak, you know, you gotta stop somewhere but the higher and higher you go, as long as you're only paying attention to signals that will start to kind of dampen out in the sense of, I believe that will converge to a pretty good solution.
As long as you're only each level pays attention kind of watches over the level below it, right, the mitochondria gets the right dosage because that the cell level, it's getting signals. And if those signals are out of whack things can be kind of lowered or increased with its environment. In order to, to give the mitochondria its right concentration, the organism is paying attention to signals which will affect the cell.
The group is paying attention to signals so that the or the the individual can have what it needs and so forth. And this is why you see the emergence of a lot of hierarchies in nature. I believe that that is a major role that is happening is that each level of the hierarchy is paying attention to a signal at its level that helps control what happens to the level below. OK. So this signaling is always there. Now this has to work in a way that you're only paying attention to the signal.
So think of micromanagement, think about the hierarchy that exists in an organization. If the level above micro manages the level below, this is problematic. This is toxic, this is going to lead to fragility in the system because that's not the top level just paying attention to signal. This is the top level trying to intervene in the process, right?
That that kind of naive intervention where you dig too deep, it causes all kinds of fragility in the system because now you're not paying attention to signals, you're actually trying to control from above. You have to allow each level to have its autonomy to have its flexibility and only the level above pays attention to the signal.
So in order for these kind of hierarchies to work, it has to only be the the signals, the high level signals that I paid attention to and to use those to help make decisions. And I think that's a way that we can go through life to pay attention to dosage. I really think that's a more scientifically rigorous way than trying to analyze the crap out of something and pretend like we have access to information that we don't.
So whatever it is in life, you know, I said at the beginning, we gotta just to finish off here what we got to partake in our environments, we have to bring in inputs, bring in resources. There's no way around that we're not completely self sufficient, but in doing that, everything that we take in bears the seeds of its own destruction, right? Doesn't matter what it is, water protein, right? MS G salt people information, right?
We see this at the individual level, the organizational level and the nation level, there's always the seeds of destruction there. So really the big realization is that, you know, dosage does make the poison, it's not good or it's bad. You got to somehow strike uh the right dosage. I don't think the absolutist approach is really going to work, right? Remember the COVID example like, yeah, you could shut the down right away at the beginning.
Makes sense because you understand the properties of, of catastrophes of how they take off in an exponential fashion. But you are going to have to figure out a dosage, OK? You can try shutting out salt altogether. That doesn't make sense. And even things like arsenic and cyanide could actually be beneficial radiation, whatever it is in really, really low dosages in very low dosages. So you don't want to try to eliminate things altogether. It doesn't make sense to do that.
We don't have that kind of information to know that that's a good thing to do. There's no such thing as anything being completely bad or completely good. It all comes down to, you know, to, to trying to get what that dosage is. OK. Can't really do it analytically, can't really use things like the knowledge of catastrophe to actually predict where that dosage is, is is supposed to be.
So if we look at nature, we look at the emergence of hierarchies, we realize what those different levels are doing to make sure that the level below has what its need, what it needs, it comes down to paying attention to signals. And I think you can do this in your life, you can do this as an individual, you can do this with your company or the company or the organization can do this.
And I think nations can do this by putting in place um you know, kind of levels above each level that only pay it that don't intervene, but only pay attention to well known hallmarks or signals that would suggest things are going out of whack.
Ok. You can imagine, you know, we talked about monopolies with organizations that, you know, there, there could be uh organizations that get too big that get to, you know, have too much influence, maybe social media networks have, you know, too many followers, this kind of meta level information that you could use as signals to signify, something's out of whack, something needs to change. And, and we have to make sure things don't go out of control.
So I think it comes down to paying attention to signals. And I think if you accept that, instead of trying to analyze the crap out of everything, you'll realize that you can make better decisions in life, you can strike better dosages with people how much you compromise what you eat in terms of carbs, protein, whatever it is, how much exercise you can do this with your organization.
And I think nations can put things in place like white ST watchdogs and even meta watchdogs on top of that, that pay attention to signals to strike the right dosage. Ok. That's it for this episode. Thanks for listening. As always. Until next time, take care.