Smart Friends #011 Eric Jorgenson: Metagames, Feedback Loops and Transcending The Muggle World
Moneyball's Metagame Innovation
- Billy Beane revolutionized baseball by challenging conventional wisdom in Moneyball.
- His new norms for player valuation changed how baseball teams compete and win.
Choose and Commit to Metagame
- Pick games where you can play the metagame for leverage and breakthrough.
- Cultivate courage to sustain social criticism and see the game change.
False Barriers Protect Ego
- False barriers to success protect ego by labeling difficulty as impossibility.
- This preserves social standing but blocks attempts at exceeding norms.
Just me and you today, dear listener -- and I’m going to talk through some ideas that have been fascinating me recently, weaving together authors like Rory Sutherland, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nassim Taleb. As I reviewed my highlights from books, blogs and articles that I’ve been collecting over the past 10 years the main ideas that jumped out at me are playing the metagame and feedback loops. Both of these are ways to transcend the muggle world and start playing a different game.
I hope you enjoy this format -- if you love it (or hate it, actually), please tweet or email me so I know whether to ever do this again. It’s all part of the sandbox experience!
Additional resources to help enrich your experience below:
Topics Covered:
- What are Metagames
- How Metagames change the game and allow you to dominate
- What are feedback loops
- Why we accept false barriers to cushion our egos
- Places to intervene in a system
- The power of transcending paradigms
- How a system can be destroyed by ignoring feedback
- How to expand your theoretical fish tank
Favorite Quotes:
“In any system where there are norms, there are strengths and weaknesses to those norms. If you follow the norms of the system, the results you get are likely to be the norm. When you play a different game, a metagame, you have the opportunity to outperform.” -fs.blog
“Play the metagame in your domain too, whether you’re head of an organization or just starting out. Blowout the walls of your fish tank and transcend paradigms.” - Eric Jorgenson
“False barriers are accepted because they are the path of least resistance for the ego” -Eric Jorgenson
Additional Resources:
- Alchemy Rory Sutherland
- Moneyball Michael Lewis
- Inadequate Equilibria Eliezer Yudkowsky
- Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Systemantics. The Systems Bible John Gall and D.H. Gall
- User Friendly Cliff Kuang
- Structures J. E. Gordon
- Mike Barton Runs England’s Best Police Force. What Sets Him Apart?
- Readwise
- Eric Jorgenson Newsletter
- Eric Jorgenson Leverage Course
Additional Episodes If You Enjoyed:
- Codie Sanchez: Learning Leverage From Drug Cartels, Vanguard, And Goldman Sachs
- Sky King: The Next Level of the Internet, Decentralization, and Becoming a Player in the Game of Life
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