Jason talks about this kind of thing. I thought it was an interesting post. I even bring up the idea that “sitting back” and letting things play out is, at bottom, a problem that involves the idea of free will. Check it!

I need to actually sign my name when I post those things. Dang generic ID.

I did attempt to state it was mostly relative to me and it was my personal exploration.

However, I do propose there are general concepts at play in this exploration.

Trivial, though used relatively here, probably has some level of degree for each person - trivial is what is “easy”, “without consequence”, “not valued”,”not impactful”. Those aspects are, of course, relative to the person.

Is there an absolute measure of triviality? No. Is “trivial” a general concept. yes.

Richness, that I can not make a general case for. I should perhaps state my Get Rich as Succeed without Effort or something to that effect. This too is has a relative scale, but there’s something general about “getting ahead” without expending much of ones own energy.

In some sense I’m trying to get at STRUGGLE as a general function. The tugs of changing values, of success and failure, of leaving trusted methods behind… and so forth. Exhausting all possibilities - moving into uncomfortable situations to grow, learn. Those are my struggles, maybe not yours, but you do have struggles. Struggle fuels learning and vice versa. Struggle enhances selection by consequences (perhaps helps it work faster)….

I don’t know. Riff on that and see what comes out.

Consider the following…
****[I want to attack the idea of “homeruns” in business head on. … I conjecture most pursuits of the business homerun fail because the Get Rich outcome is trivial. It is trivial to Get Rich in method and outcome. Where does fortune alone lead? If I had a big bag of money, what would I do with it? Methods of just getting rich are tried and true - sell sex, invest in stocks, drugs, organized crime, arbitrage (fuel, clicks, tickets), corporate ladder hopping and variations on those themes. Many people engage in these things - usually without knowing how trivial it is. This is not for me.]

This blog entry is an attempt to hit just such a “homerun”. There is a lack of generalization to others based assumptions that are subjective, i.e., what is *trivial* and what isn’t trivial…as in “It is trivial to Get Rich in method and outcome.” All descriptive properties mentioned are subjective; what is ‘rich,’ what is ‘trivial’ and what has ‘value’ which complicates transfer for some. While the interrogatives that follow that statement (above) are common and mettlesome, they are not everyone’s issue and, again, depend on what each reader has learned to ‘value.’

But the spark here can’t be denied. What we read here is writing and publicizing what is of value to you in the context of what you provide… now and presumably in the future.

That is something that is not reinforced in life, business, work, sports, etc. which is more complex for the person doing it than can be stated here. Its complexity, in short, is what keeps the rest of us from stating what it is we value (and not) and revising it on a regular basis that approaches the frequency we consider our 401K donations. To leave it at the ending cascading challenge is pivotal…

****[Defining and refining the project selection strategy is non-trivial and this is not my final effort. The methods are trivial - write it down, test it, edit, test, repeat. (oh, and don’t go broke while testing project selection / creation strategies!)]

At some point we’ll have framed what it is that we value; we’ll lose count a million tests later and hopefully look around and discover the complexity and the methods led to just the right consequences.

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, you are right in a sense about my inconsistent. That’s some of my point. A known outcome IS trivial. Unknown outcomes are sometimes non-trivial, and thus they have risk. I am not drawn to risk, I am drawn to the unknown (potentially non trivial!)

Yes, you are also right that trivial outcomes are centric to almost every business and PM. Most businesses are trivial.

I make no judgment on ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’.

How do you select projects? employers?

Another bombastic bag of wind surfaces to proclaim… science is really hard!

Hell, we’re going to have another saint in a couple of years so why not claim something equally bombastic “THE END OF THEORY’!

These claims and similar ones [..."end of the Internet as we know it,"..."unification bridge theory"...etc] come about when people spend too much time in front of their computers AND they look for the “thing” rather than the relationships.

I, for one, think there is a media conspiracy to chip away at the basics of science and replace it with myopic musings of scientific nilhists. Oops! I wasn’t suppose to have anymore theories…

Its just that I am at a loss on how to explain the latest epilog “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” being run on the 4th of July right before Larry King Live has the UFO special on with astronauts and experts to answer the question, “Did a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico 61 years ago? Military cover-up, hoax or the real thing? The truth is out there!” A startling coincidence or… an organized plan disguised as a correlation?

We need an algos to tease this apart…

This question is yet unresolved, though I suspect it will be explained soon enough.

I don’t mean complexity and undecidable in the sense that one day we will have the technology to unravel it. There are simply phenomena that we will never be able to fully unravel - literal undecidable/unknowable problems. e.g. we cannot know how, when, if the universe will end until, well, it ends (if it ends!). There will be no way of knowing this. We would have to somehow “get in front of it” to be able to predict it (lack of prediction doesn’t imply no way of understanding). It’s the halting problem in some sense. There’s no way to know if a computer program will halt before it halts. if you don’t like that metaphor - there’s not enough time to collect and make sense of the data that would tell you if the universe if going to end before the universe ends.

There are “smaller” problems though that are complex enough to be out of our reach of total knowledge. I suspect behavior and derivatives of behavior (markets, organizations, politics) will remain mostly uncracked. and so on…

So my question really is… imagine if we could crack it all. Imagine we could know everything fully (which would imply the universe is simple enough for us to understand it all).

a) what would that be?

b) could something that simple produce something like “us”

c) would anything made up of that simple stuff ever need to understand all that simple stuff

my thoughts:
a) i think it would be a very static system that is nicely stable

b) no. and this is a weird thing. truly simple things cannot do interesting things like produce something like us. Most things we think are simple actually are not.

c) no. simple things would just keep going according to the plan.

I’ll hit MAson’s comment next….