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Diet, Dying, and Demographics

Why study the below unintended consequence? When we seek to understand consequences of our actions and the hidden complexity that underlies them we can make better decisions. One set of decisions that everyone participates in throughout life is choice of diet. The impact of what we consume on a daily basis is often only felt many years later — and can be an accident of birth.

Life expectancy has increased in most of the world over the last century due to many factors, a big one being lower infant and child mortality. Accounting for that and other factors, as the percentage of a population that is “old” grows larger, some populations have a natural advantage in the way they age. Some of this advantage can be attributed to dietary traditions that were adopted before a significant percentage of the population was older (65+). Continue reading “Diet, Dying, and Demographics”

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The Cobra Effect Redesigned (Examples & Antidotes)

The “cobra effect” is a type of perverse incentive. The effect occurs when a solution actually worsens the problem it is trying to solve. Named for a supposed bounty program that went awry in colonial India, there are many examples of incentives that lead to more of the very thing that should be reduced.

Interestingly, when you search for cobra effect, the other top examples all concern animals — an attempt to decrease the rat population in colonial Hanoi, Vietnam and an attempt to reduce the number of feral pigs in Georgia. This is strange because these animal-related problems all contain the solution within themselves.

If you read about these examples, you’ll learn a bit (and often just a bit) about the history of each time and place. But what you won’t read is how these incentives could have been aligned with their intended outcomes. In this post, I propose some changes that the designers of these incentives could have used so that they might have actually gotten their desired outcomes. Continue reading “The Cobra Effect Redesigned (Examples & Antidotes)”

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Voice AI, Telecom, Scams, and Co-evolution

What a time to be alive. I was inspired to write this based on seeing a friend’s work get some new attention (more on that below). And by the way, this is my first post on this new second-order thinking project so I’m diving in even before I had the chance to write a piece on why I’ve started the project itself.

Let’s discuss new opportunities with interactive voice AI.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s the Google Duplex demo from two days ago that has everyone fired up. Google Duplex is a voice AI that, at this point, can make a transactional phone call for you save you time by talking to the human on the other end. Continue reading “Voice AI, Telecom, Scams, and Co-evolution”