Context

Keywords

Summary

1. Autocatalysis is when the outputs of a reaction are the same catalysts needed to start it. When this happens the reaction becomes self-sustaining and happens rapidly

2. The Red Queen Effect: You can’t stop adapting, because no one around you is stopping. If you do, your competitive position declines, bringing your survival into question. Every living thing is constantly on the lookout for opportunity, the place to accrue advantage. From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: the Red Queen tells Alice, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

3. Gause’s Law: perfect competition between two species requiring the same resources to survive in the same niche is impossible. Two species of bacteria requiring the same resources could not coexist in a petri dish. One species will find its own niche by becoming increasingly specialized to require different resources from the other

Highlights

Relativity

• Galileo thus demonstrated that perspective influences what we perceive as reality and how we understand the world. These are two valid interpretations of the same event. Both are correct. The difference arises because of the perspective of each person.

• You are always going to have an imperfect perspective. You will never be able to see everything at once. Nor will you be able to completely trust that everything you do see is viewed by others. What you see is useful but limited.

• When you see someone doing something that doesn’t make sense to you, ask yourself what the world would have to look like to you for those actions to make sense.

• Perspective often comes from distance or time. If you’re trying to solve a problem and you’re stuck, try shifting your vantage point.

Thermodynamics

• If thermal equilibrium is desirable, we can expend our efforts to maximize the exposure of the two systems to each other. Conversely, in order to keep them from reaching a state of equilibrium, some sort of insulating barrier is required.

• To keep two substances in direct contact from adjusting to the same temperature is difficult. It requires an insulator and preventing any temperature change in the two substances is only possible with a constant investment of energy.

Inertia

• Starting something is hard, but so is stopping something.

• Our natural inclination to reject the new is in part normal resistance to the effort required to change. Keeping things as they are requires almost no effort and involves little uncertainty. We need force to effect change

• Inertia implies that once we stop doing something, getting started again is harder than continuing the whole time would have been

Friction

• Friction is a force that opposes the movement of objects that are in contact with each other. For objects to move, they must overcome friction that pushes in the opposite direction. This requires extra energy, which produces heat and sound

• Smooth surfaces cause less friction than rough ones

• There are two key types of friction: kinetic (slows you down when you're moving) and static (prevents you from getting started)

• To achieve our aims, reducing resistance can often be easier than using more force

Velocity

• Speed is just movement; even if you are running in place, you have speed. Velocity has direction. Optimize for velocity, not speed

• Figuring out how to improve your velocity must take into account the full scope of what you want arrival at your destination to look like. Better go the right direction slowly than the wrong direction with speed

Leverage

• Leverage is achieving results significantly greater than the force you put by using a lever

Activation Energy

• You need enough of it to power a reaction through to its conclusion. Sustaining significant change requires the same effort. You have to plan for not only the initial flame, but all the energy required to get and sustain the fire you want.

• The key to activation energy is to evaluate how much do you need to see the reaction through to its conclusion. At what point have you gone far enough that you can’t go back?

• Creating lasting change is harder than creating change. Don’t underestimate the activation energy required to not only break apart existing bonds, but to create new, strong ones.

Catalysts

• Catalysts accelerate change. While they cannot make a reaction happen that would normally not, they can significantly reduce the time required for change to occur.

• Autocatalysis is when the outputs of a reaction are the same catalysts needed to start it. When this happens the reaction becomes self-sustaining and happens rapidly

Alloying

• Alloying is about increasing strength through the combination of elements. One plus one can really equal ten.

Natural Selection

• Natural selection is very much about advantages in the here and now, not in the distant future. Traits conferring long-term advantages emerge because they also work well in the lives of individuals and produce positive feedbacks

• For a mutation to be successful, it can’t negatively impact an organism’s ability to survive at that time. Natural selection does not preserve changes that may be useful in the future. It preserves changes that are useful now

• The Red Queen Effect: You can’t stop adapting, because no one around you is stopping. If you do, your competitive position declines, bringing your survival into question. Every living thing is constantly on the lookout for opportunity, the place to accrue advantage. From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: the Red Queen tells Alice, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

• Vestigal Structures can emerge from natural selection

• The Law of the Minimum/Bottlenecks: The Law of the Minimum states that the yield of a crop will always be dictated by the essential nutrient that is available at the lowest level. No matter how abundant the other essential nutrients are, being deficient in one will always limit the crop’s growth. In manufacturing, a bottleneck is a similar concept.

• Gause’s Law: perfect competition between two species requiring the same resources to survive in the same niche is impossible. Two species of bacteria requiring the same resources could not coexist in a petri dish. One species will find its own niche by becoming increasingly specialized to require different resources from the other

Territorialism

• A core component of self-preservation for all organisms is ensuring access to the resources necessary to survive. This manifests as territorial behavior.

• Territorial behavior is not necessary if resources are abundant and organisms will generally cease to engage in it over time if this is the case. The scarcer resources prove to be, the more aggressive the territorial behavior is likely to be

Replication

• You need three things for replication to occur: A code that represents what you wish to replicate, A means of copying this code, And a place to process the code and construct the replication

• Effective replication requires enough structure and space to produce a copy, but enough flexibility to adapt that copy to changes in the environment

Cooperation

• You don’t require cooperation to survive, but with it the quality of your life improves. A shark doesn’t need little fish to clean its teeth in order to live that day, but overall the quality of the shark’s life is enhanced because clean teeth mean healthy teeth, which will give it more years to feed on prey. Cooperation significantly expands what’s possible, by creating emergent properties that have more power than the individual components.

Incentives

• Incentives shape behavior in all animals. We move in the direction of rewards and will easily take steps to avoid punishment.

• We are vulnerable to the influence of incentives—whether from money, prestige, or power. Most insidious is when an incentive is designed to appeal to our personal narrative about the kind of person we are. No one wants to be thought of as bad, so we often perform intellectual contortions to justify our pursuit of an incentive as good.

Tendency to minimize energy output

• The tendency in organisms to conserve their energy is what ensures they will have extra to draw on in times of increased need

• Heuristics are shortcuts and thus require us to expend less energy. The results may not always be the best that could have been (they usually aren’t), but they are often good enough for whatever situation we are in. In a process known as “satisficing,” we’ll often search for the first thing in our brain that satisfies our minimum acceptable conditions. This saves time and energy, but it doesn’t mean we get the best outcome.