52 Aces

Learning, competition and capitalism

competition

Losing Games

This is part of my 5 Minute Concepts series, which is designed to help you understand fundamental concepts about subjects like learning, memory and competition in the shortest time possible. Each episode is available in video format on my YouTube channel and audio via my podcast. If you prefer to read, the transcript is below.

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Much of what I create revolves around the idea of competing intelligently. My overall hypothesis about competition is that most people do it haphazardly, and expect their own intuitions — mixed with a recognition of incentives — to carry them to victory.

Thinking this way is a serious error. It leads to making the same mistakes over and over again, and creates situations where meaningful learning takes much longer than it should.

What’s more important, in my opinion, is that we recognize just how competitive the world is. Competition exists at all levels of life, all the way down to single-celled organisms. Competition is a key component of evolutionary biology, and there isn’t any form of life on earth that can escape this dynamic.

There’s competition for money, competition for status, competition for relationships. There’s competition everywhere.

Life is competition and competition is life.

With all that being said, there’s an idea that’s just as important to keep in mind: sometimes, you’re playing a game you can’t win — no matter how intelligent you are or how hard you work. When you find yourself in this kind of game, what can be called a losing game, you need to exit that game as fast as you can.

Recognizing losing games like this is a skill in and of itself, one that many people find hard to develop. It’s particularly common in American culture, where we’re constantly told that hard work is the answer to all of life’s problems.

An extreme example I like to use is professional basketball. The first requirement for playing basketball at the pro level is to be very tall, which is something you can’t train for. You’re either born with tall genetics or you aren’t.

This can be a hard pill to swallow for people who don’t hit those height requirements but love the game enough to dedicate their lives to it. Someone who is only average height can spend every waking hour refining their game, doing everything they can to get better, and still come up short.

The problem in this situation isn’t that the player isn’t committed or intelligent enough. It’s just not a game they can win — and there’s nothing they can do about that.

Instead, this same player could find another way to be involved with the game. Maybe they could find work as a talent scout, or a commentator, or a sports writer, and still play for fun in recreational leagues.

Maybe they’re an exceptional programmer or mathematician, and that could allow them to build some kind of technological product that is intertwined with basketball.

Those are all winnable games for this fictional person: they offer odds with large payoffs and none of them have requirements that are impossible to train for.

What tends to drive people like this crazy is the search for glory. They want to do what’s most admired in society, like playing a sport professionally.

The irony is that wasting time on paths like this more often than not generates an excessive amount of unnecessary misery. Most people don’t really know what they want, they just think they know, so they waste their time pursuing goals that other people or society set for them.

That same player who wants to be a player more than anything might find more fulfillment in an auxiliary role than they can estimate.

Instead of wasting years pursuing a professional playing career that ends badly, they should find something else that might even end up being more fulfilling (or even lucrative).

Sometimes you can create the game yourself, and sometimes you have to go play someone else’s game. Either way, you should be doing this kind of analysis on a regular basis. Every now and then, stop and ask yourself: Is this a game I can win?

I’ve failed at this more times than I can count, and it’s cost me dearly on a few occasions. Hopefully you can heed my words and not make the same mistakes I have. Don’t play games you can’t win — find a place where you can play with favorable odds, and then throw yourself into that.

The Exploration-Exploitation Dilemma, Simplified

This is part of my 5 Minute Concepts series, which is designed to help you understand fundamental concepts about subjects like learning, memory and competition in the shortest time possible. Each episode is available in video format on my YouTube channel and audio via my podcast. If you prefer to read, the transcript is below.

Want to know when new content shows up? Sign up for my newsletter here.

Transcript:

I’ve written about the exploration-exploitation dilemma before, but only in a long-form essay format. Since I think this is such a critical concept, and I realize that not everyone has the time to read a big essay, I’ve created this simplified explanation.

Just a warning: like any other 5 Minute Concepts piece, there’s always more to the story. I’m just trying to give you the most important parts in 5 minutes or less.

Anyway…

Let’s start with a stripped-down definition: the exploration-exploitation dilemma is the choice we all have to make between learning more or taking action with the knowledge we already possess.

Learning more is exploration, acting with current knowledge is exploitation.

With either action you’re trying to find some way to maximize what’s often referred to as “reward,” or some end-state that you find desirable.

The reason this is a dilemma is simple: you can’t explore or exploit exclusively and win in the long run.

If all you do is explore, you’ll never take action in the world — which means you get a predictable payoff of exactly zero. There isn’t much to be gained from passively gathering information until you die.

On the other hand, taking action without learning anything is also a long-term losing strategy. You do get some kind of reward by exploiting a known path, but that means you’re giving up any chance at a higher payoff that might be staring you in the face without you knowing about it.

The real kicker here is that exploring is what drives the value of exploitation, and vice versa. You need to explore in order to find good paths for exploitation, and you need to exploit in order to get a reward for your exploration. Both actions are dependent on each other.

What you’re balancing in either case is opportunity cost. You have a limited amount of resources, such as time and money, to work with over the course of your life. If you explore, you’re by default not exploiting, and vice versa.

Consider this example: Let’s say you’re scrolling through Netflix, looking for something to watch for the new couple of hours.

You notice that a movie you’ve seen a dozen times is one of the choices and consider watching it. Right next to that is a movie you’ve never seen before.

Choosing the movie you’ve seen provides a specific emotional payoff for you. You know all the best parts and you’re well aware of how the entire experience will make you feel.

Choosing the movie you’ve never seen means taking a certain amount of risk. There’s an unknown payoff for watching this new movie, and it might end up being a waste of two hours. Those two hours will be gone, never to return.

But you might also discover a new favorite movie, or genre, or director, that you never knew about.

It’s easy to get sucked into either extreme. I’ve known people who spent their whole lives reading, accumulating a veritable library worth of knowledge in their head, but never tried to do anything with it.

And, of course, I’m sure we both know people who have never read a book or stopped to think for even a moment about whether their beliefs and actions should be altered in some way.

While this is an unsolved problem (and trust me, many people have tried to figure it out), there are some good rules of thumb to run with. First of all, don’t favor a binary approach. Only exploring or only exploiting doesn’t work in the long run.

Secondly, it pays to spend a lot of time exploring early on and then shifting more and more to exploitation over time. But — this is critical — you never stop exploring completely. For a person in the real world, exploring should always be part of your strategy.

There’s always some accommodation made for learning new things. This is known as the epsilon-decreasing algorithm, and, if you just want a simple heuristic for managing this dilemma, it’s a pretty good place to start.

Third, there are always inflection points where it makes sense to shift from one to the other. Sometimes it’s a moment where you realize you’ve finally reached a level of knowledge that grants you a new level of competence and the time to utilize it has come. Passing a professional exam is a simple example of this.

Other times you might suffer a bitter defeat and receive an unfiltered signal that it’s time to explore. If a big project you’ve been working on fails, for example, you might need to go back to the drawing board and evaluate how to improve for your next attempt.

I could talk about this for hours, but in general I want you to understand this: figuring out how to spread your time between exploration and exploitation is perhaps the most important problem you’ll ever face.

Don’t push this into the background — be conscious and deliberate about it. Doing that might just change your life in ways you never saw coming.