Special holiday edition! Today, we explore a balance of forces and how to be less wrong more often than your friends, family, government, and media.
Things will look pretty simple if we take a snapshot of the world. The outward appearance of almost everything we observe with human eyes hides a lot of detail. Every observable object has an inner state and is currently responding to a net sum of external forces.
We have spent a lot of time on Hack the Verse discussing the inner states that matter most, but often, we can’t observe those inner states in others. After all, it’s hard enough to introspect within ourselves, so we can’t fully trust even when someone else tries to communicate theirs.
Once the inner state of a person is understood (which we argue isn’t going to happen), the external forces being applied to that person begin to make sense. But how might we make some of the same conclusions for inanimate objects? How can we apply what we know to complex systems like shared experiences, the economy, and everything else in the physical world?
Balance of forces
External forces often point in different directions but not always. Governments can be simultaneously stimulating their economies like crazy but also raising interest rates. Populations will vote for popular shiny national policies while concurrently blocking those policies locally due to their inevitable unintended consequences. Consumers can allocate their purchasing power in wildly different ways. Finding ways to integrate the opposing forces in play helps us be less wrong more often.
Let’s use the standard picture to describe a balance of forces. Pictured below is an airplane experiencing (at least) four forces. The jet engines thrust the plane forward but are contradicted by the drag imposed by air resistance. The weight of the aircraft is offset by the lift on its wings.
Each of these four forces has a direction and magnitude which can and will vary over time. The pilot controls the throttle which alters the amount of thrust provided by the engines. The drag increases with speed (relative to wind speed). Once in the air, the weight of the plane tends to slowly lessen as fuel is converted to exhaust. Lift is a function of speed and flap position. All four forces change over time and for good reason. The pilot increases thrust on takeoff to start the trip and increase the lift, and she’ll reverse the process nearing arrival. Various other lateral forces can be experienced and exerted as desired to steer and compensate for crosswinds.
The point is, at any given moment, the jet is subject to several forces, and its motion (actually, its acceleration) is a result of the sum of those forces (both direction and magnitude). Mathematically, we would take the summation of the force vectors to arrive at the net force at a given time. We would find the net force of an airplane points forward and upward shortly after takeoff but later points backward and downward on the final approach.
Getting paid for being wrong
Most of the time, pay increases with experience because it means we’re better at our jobs. Ideally, we’re less wrong more often with greater experience. How many careers can you think of that pay well for being consistently wrong? Off the top of our heads, we can think of the following.
- Weather forecaster
- Economist
- News reporter
- Politician
The weathermen get a bit of a pass. They already understand what we’re trying to describe here better than we’re able to write in a single post. Forecasting weather is about enumerating probabilities, converting them into opposing forces, and summarizing the likely result in a way consumers of the information can grasp. They’re not going to report a probability table detailing all possible outcomes. Rather, the weather report is going to be a single temperature along with a chance of rain. This simple report is a terrible misrepresentative of the weather model’s output, but it is a balance of correctness and usability.
The rest of the careers are subject to our poking fun.
The media is the virus
Imagine a news program with four guests of competing points of view for the sake of being fair and balanced. Today, they’re trying to argue about the next direction of the airplane. Guest one says the airplane is going to crash because of gravity. The second guest says it’ll ascend forever upward because of the wings’ lift; we’ll never see the passengers again. Number three says it’ll eventually start flying backward somehow because of air resistance. Forth time’s a charm guy says it can only go forward so long as there’s fuel.
The example is intentionally silly to prove our point, but this is how news programs operate. They choose guests who are willing to argue one-dimensional points of view in a very limited time slot. Each point of view is designed to contradict other points of view for the sake of getting us to watch through the next commercial break.
Maybe another less silly example. A news program has two or three guests arguing for whether we’re entering a recession or not. They’re literally calling it a hard-landing, soft-landing, or no-landing scenario. Each guest argues only one force. None of them are willing to admit that all the forces are in play and vary over time. We can’t blame the guests entirely as the entire format of the program prevents any kind of nuance.
Yes, the governments are raising interest rates to slow the economy which pretty much always causes breakage and recession. Yes, the governments were still stimulating like crazy which produced large economic growth last quarter. Both forces are in play, but they vary over time. For example, the throttle was seriously pulled back on the stimulus just as last quarter ended, so what happens to our force diagram then? Anyone who wants to be less wrong should update their force diagram once the stimulus dried up (at the end of Q3 2023).
Wrong more often
Perhaps the most complicated version of the balance of forces explanation above involves hundreds of millions of consumers making different decisions for different reasons on different days.
People can arrive at the same choice but for entirely different reasons. The forces in play can point in (nearly) the same direction and add together. Again, it’s not one or the other but all. All forces are in play, and each contributes to the final result proportionate to its magnitude. Maybe it’s worth understanding the ratio of the forces, but we have to acknowledge all the forces to understand what’s driving the end result. Understanding the extent that each force contributes to the effect allows maximal impact for our effort. Obviously, treating the root cause is more productive, but since almost everyone on planet Earth ignores the root cause (present company excluded), this is how to best address the mechanisms to produce a new result (assuming no unintended consequences; good luck with that).
When the talking heads say “the consumer is strong,” what they really mean is that some consumers are strong (lately it’s those closest to the money printer). To say “snarled supply chains caused the inflation,” really means that printing a ton of money produces more demand, and the far side of the supply chain can’t possibly ramp up production fast enough especially when there aren’t enough workers. “The labor market is strong,” is another way of saying Baby Boomers are retiring in droves taking their labor supply with them.
It doesn’t help when the name of the game is apparently to extend and pretend the economic confidence game until the next election has passed. Nothing they say is genuinely well thought out. It’s all geared toward clicks and advertising. There’s no attempt at being less wrong, and in fact, being more wrong seems to increase their viewership.
To say your viewers don’t have the attention span for nuance is the same as saying you’re not worth listening to for very long.
Politicians make these types of mistakes on purpose. Well, we admit that the especially dumb ones probably do it on accident. Ok, ok, we also admit most of them are especially dumb. Maybe their decision-making process is optimized for getting elected. Which of the following talking points get more voter support?
- A balance of forces argument that admits all points of view play a part in the result
- We’re right, and they’re wrong
- Any change we force on a complex system is going to have unintended consequences
- The government can fix all your problems
Being less wrong is the goal
Looking at the people and objects in our world within the frameworks of the law of attraction and cause, mechanism, and effect is a tremendous head start. When the internal state is understood to us (which is rare outside ourselves), we can understand that the balance of forces is often part of the mechanism in the cause-and-effect chain. The law of attraction assembles all components that are a match to our internal state (often called vibration).
Absent any great knowledge about the internal state, we also like to apply a balance of forces framework. When we look for news sources that actually communicate real-life actionable information, we look for a balance of forces arguments. We practically never see this on television and certainly not high production value television. Podcasts, on the other hand, are a format where guest speakers often take an entire hour to flesh out the balance of forces involved in whatever topic is being discussed.
A recent example with major consequences
For example, two information sources are giving two flavors of actionable information. Assuming you have the attention span required to read this article, which seems like better quality advice?
- It’s safe and effective for everyone, and everyone needs it every N weeks.
- Here’s when it’s helpful, and here’s when it’s not remotely necessary. This is how we hope it works, but these are the unknowns. These are the problems we’ve seen so far, and unfortunately, none of it’s playing out like anybody wanted. The suppliers are finding it to be a very nice cash cow, but the existing regulations aren’t very well suited for this new kind of product or its manufacturing process.
Without getting too snarky, we also tend to consider who the largest purveyors of bad information have been in the last few years. Who’s gotten everything wrong at every step? Do they at least visibly update their viewers when they find they were wrong? Or do they pretend they’re right and double down? Are they even pretending to be less wrong? Does it seem they are simply shilling for their donors, lobbyists, and sponsors?
Maybe the easiest gauge of the quality of information is the desire to censor anyone who disagrees. This doesn’t happen in normal times, but when it does, it’s tremendously telling. Any information source that wants to censor any disagreement never has the truth on its side. Maybe they can point to a few facts in support of their position, but the truth can win any debate. To say your viewers don’t have the attention span for nuance is the same as saying you’re not worth listening to for very long.
Certainly, the most useful gauge of the quality of information is how it feels. As you get more adept at utilizing your emotional guidance system, you can use it to locate universal truths or act with cosmic morals.
Less wrong and better vantage points
Everything discussed above helps us better understand how the physical world works. Everyone appreciates being less wrong more often, but we also enjoy speaking intelligently on a wider variety of topics. Realizing that various forces are often at play helps us understand how a wider variety of phenomena operate in the real world.
We’ve also discussed how to better recognize quality information sources. When we fill our heads with less crap information, we internalize a better understanding of how the world works. Armed with a better understanding of how various things work, we can more quickly learn more information and recognize bad information. This quickly becomes a virtuous cycle when we stop internalizing junk data points. Less wrong, more often.
Vibrational tipping point
Our final contribution to the topic is to apply the balance of forces to the law of attraction. When a new desire is recognized, our inner beings become the new desire entirely. Our physical selves don’t get to experience the new vantage point until our belief system permits it. Simply, we must first allow it by becoming a vibrational match according to the actual rules of the game. Our vibration is our internal state, and it’s the only real control we have in our lives.
Until you allow your desire to comfortably enter your experience, there’s a balance of forces in play. In one direction, your larger broader self is already living the desire. Contradicting your inner being, the physical you is disallowing the experience of your updated self. These are two opposing forces acting in opposite directions at least until you soften your resistance. Once the net force starts to point toward your inner being’s vibration, your vibration shifts in that direction with various signposts along the way signaling your progress but also accelerating your acceptance.
Your inner being wants you to be less wrong more often, but it’s never too late to steer in the right direction.
