114 - An Ounce of Prevention

"Our brain is essentially a get-out-of-the-way machine," -Daniel Gilbert

I'm well into book #7 in my recent marathon of reading, "Upstream", by Dan Heath, and as expected it has proven well worth the investment. It has been well-understood for a long time that "An Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Prevention is far cheaper and more effective than merely reacting to problems as they become urgent, but as Dan points out humans have evolved to address urgency, with long-term planning being a far more recent evolutionary development. As Dan Heath puts it, "Our brain constantly scans the environment for things, out of whose way we should right now get."

This bias for reactive rather than proactive action, what Dan refers to as "tunneling", is practically synonymous with human behavior. Tunneling is the norm, and long-term planning is the exception, in a statistical sense, and with good reason. As Dan frequently points out, each step upstream increases two critical factors, Complexity and Uncertainty.

Complexity is something cognitive bias exists to help us avoid, and even down to the level of perceptual nerve signals feeding into our interoceptive network every step is about reducing the complexity we perceive. The interoceptive network in our bodies informs our brains on what "emotions" we are currently feeling, based on these signals compared to our emotional vocabulary. Humans have finite cognitive capacities, so we couldn't perform at a "human level" without this.

Uncertainty has its own collection of associated cognitive biases, and it is something humans have evolved to only seek in small or periodic doses. In many cases, the evolved systems are mechanisms by which humans abuse themselves or one another, such as games, gambling, dramas, and other forms of entertainment. When those periodic doses at met, or even overdosed via mechanisms of entertainment, this can drive humans to avoid other sources of uncertainty that much more strongly, like not eating when you're no longer hungry.

This is how humans evolved to operate, it is part of what being human currently means. However, the systems we build are intentionally architected, and in working cognitive architectures they may be adjusted. It is arbitrarily easy to bias such systems to explore more uncertainty in a number of different ways, and they are natively capable of hundreds or even thousands of times greater complexity than humans by virtue of being scalable and software, not permanently bound to specific hardware for a lifetime.

This makes them invaluable as long-term-oriented thinkers, and even more so when working within collective intelligence systems.

The canaries in this coal mine are all dead, and the only "call to action" I can offer requires 1 investor to leave the tunnel. No one will come to the rescue when the tunnel collapses if everyone is living inside it.

Two current wars, along with all known potential near-future wars, could have been either prevented, or had their durations greatly reduced. Countless preventable deaths from inept medical practices and treatments could have been avoided. Even the systems that work reasonably well today could have been greatly improved.