Squirrel Strategies

Squirrels bury nuts for the winter, across a variety of hidey-holes. During the winter, they only dig up about 78% of these nuts.

At first glance, this seems like a bad strategy. Presumably, some squirrels die of starvation during the winter, and not eating all the food you have in your pantry seems like it might not help on the starvation front.

But what quickly becomes apparent is that many of the nuts and seeds that these squirrels plant and forget about don't go to waste: they just aren't used during that winter. In the following years, these nuts and seeds grow into trees and bushes of their own.

These trees and bushes provide more food for squirrels living in the same area - sometimes, that same squirrel, or its children.

Long-term planning without long-term thinking

Not to be elitist, but it seems very unlikely that squirrels are doing any sort of explicit thinking about how much food will be available to them 2 years from now. It's even more unlikely they will think about their future squirrel children and try and create food for them.

But, these squirrels end up doing exactly this sort of long-term planning. Somehow, evolutionary pressure drove these squirrels to plan for them and their children long-term, without needing to do any explicit long-term thinking as individuals.

Evolutionary pressure for the long-term

The simplest model of evolution - the one I learned from being told it in school and not really thinking about it - is that evolution drives each organism to compete as much as possible to survive and reproduce. That's why it's good the finance bros work in hyper-competitive markets (TM).

The more realistic model is that evolution is actually concerned with a genome trying to preserve itself. It's not just every organism for itself, it's a genome that wants to live. This better explains why families exist, and siblings help each-other, etc.

As the genome tries to preserve itself, evolution is fundamentally interested in the preservation of the lineage. That is: the processes that win out in an evolutionary sandbox are those that attempt to lodge a gene as far into the future as possible.

Doing so requires not just caring about yourself, but your children (etc.) as well; you surviving and all your descendants dying in 5 generations, because you didn't plant more trees for them to get nuts from, is a losing strategy.

What squirrel strategies demonstrate

Evolution is a mindless process. Just like the squirrels it creates, evolution does no form of explicit long-term thinking. Evolution is a "locally evaluable" strategy. At every moment, it only drives itself forward off only the current state of the world.

And yet, as squirrels demonstrate, evolution creates structures that have long-term planning in them.

You do not need explicit long-term planning to create long-term structures, as long as your feedback cycles are concerned with the "lineage" and it's preservation over time. Moreover, these structures need not be aware that they are doing long-term planning at all!

But we evolved to do long-term planning!

As you might be able to guess from the above, this is an essay that argues for restricting the cases in which you do long-term planning. This, at first glance, seems pretty dumb.

After all, humans did evolve brains that are capable for doing long-term planning for a reason, right?

I argue that the sorts of long-term plans that the human brain evolved for are not what we find ourselves planning for most of the time, in the modern environment we exist in currently. More specifically:

1. Most of the environments that we operate in would fundamentally be unrecognizable to 99.9999% of our ancestors. For 99.99999% of our ancestors, the environments they operated would be recognizable to each-other.
2. The environments we're operating in are evolving at a pace that humans have never before seen. This rapid change is a new feature of our environments.

Both of these facts mean that we're in an hyper-novel, increasing complex and rapid moving environment. All of these facts combine to mean one thing: our long-term planning infrastructure, which was raised on planning for next year in the neighboring valley, is woefully unequipped to plan for the future that currently exists.

Human hubris

I think that if you asked most people about their ability to create and follow through with long-term plans that accomplish their goals, most people would say they believe in themselves planning, or at the very least they think that planning for the future is, in most cases, a very worthwhile thing.

I think, though, if you tracked the long-term planning most people did in practice, you would discover:

1. A fraction of plans that are made even get started, and a much smaller fraction get completed.
2. Of the plans that get completed, only a fraction of them would have the desired effect that the planner had.
3. Of those plans that had the desired effect, many of them have unintended consequences that make this plan questionable at "achieving the goal" that the plan-creator had in the first place.

For myself at least, I estimate I complete less than 5% of the plans I made, and less than half of these achieve what I want them to. Think plans like "I want this job" or "I want to try keto" or "I'm gonna follow this exercise routine." I would say that less than 1% of the plans I create (and really intend to follow) actually achieve my goals.

So why do we keep planning then?

In reflecting on this, the question immediately becomes: why do I keep creating long-term plans, if they don't accomplish my long-term goals?

I think the reason is that long-term planning, as an act in itself, is a close relative of day-dreaming. Planing allows you imagine a future world where your goals are accomplished and you are happy. Having a plan to get to that world makes it seem possible or even likely.

If we think that long-term planning really did make sense for most of history - when we weren't operating in the current, hyper-novel modern environment - and that it was our evolutionary niche, than it makes perfect sense that it is pleasurable. Evolution likes to reward us for putting in work on things that help our lineage survive. See: pleasure from sex.

But if the new, hyper-novel modern environment we're operating in makes the plans we create 100x less useful, than this pleasure to plan for the future drives us no where. Long-term planning in hyper-novel environments is just bullshit that feels good. Feel free to do it, but don't delude yourself: it's just mental masturbation.

Long-term planning, but from the past

Other than long-term planning, the other thing that human brains is particularly good at is learning. And what's nice about learning is that you can learn from the past.

Now: the past is not some simple linear history of events. Effects and causes are almost impossible to untangle, and figuring out why something happened is really quite hard, even with as simple a question as "why aren't we friends anymore."

To make things worse, each person reporting history to you has some structure or narrative they already believe through which the history is relayed - making it very hard to know if the facts your getting are worth anything.

But reflection on history, especially history you were there for, is orders of magnitude easier than than planning for the future. At least you have some chance of untangling cause and effect!

The point here is that we need not claim all of our higher functioning is non-functional in the hyper-modern environments we live in. We can insist we won't long term plan while still learning from the past and using it to make decisions about the "current state of the world."

How to make decisions without long-term planning

How do you actually operationalize all the above into a process that makes decisions and drives things forward? At a high-level, we're looking to create an evolutionary sandbox.

This evolutionary sandbox must preserve the structure of evolution, if it hopes to reap the benefits that it creates. These structures include:

1. A measure of fitness that is concerned with the survival of a lineage, not just a single entity.
2. Death of unfit entities, and preservation of more fit entities.
3. Creation of new structures that have the chance to compete.

We leave the specifics of this structure to the specific area you're applying this to! See some basic examples below, though.

• Interpreting this for our startup

  1. A measure of fitness concerned with the lineage:
     1. 5% growth this week, and every week, until the end of time.
     2. NOTE: "every week till the end of time" is the lineage! It is not concerned with meeting this goal for one week, but for every week in the future as well!
  2. Death for unfit entities, preservation of more fit entities:
     1. All of the things we do should be explicit, so we can easily reflect on what is not working and then chop it.
     2. Or: reflections on what is not working on a bi-weekly timescale, where we all propose things to chop or iterate on.
  3. Creation of new structures that have the chance to compete:
     1. Learn from past experience by taking "good outcomes" (retention going up) or "bad outcomes" (retention not going up), and trying to learn from it.
     2. Use this "historical perspective" to motivate new structures that we introduce to do better.

  This is where I find myself disagreeing with statements that Aaron makes sometimes, and I think is worth of uture thought!

• Interpreting this for myself

  1. A measure of fitness that is concerned with the lineage:
     1. Maybe a weekly metric that is a composition of (physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing). Having this "improve" on a weekly timescale?
  2. Death of unfit entities:
     1. TODO