Nate

Writing “Zen of Business Operations." It covers topics like "Enlightened Laziness " and "Less data provides more Information." (also an excel memes reply guy)

[Nate @NateRothstein]

13 Business Lessons from Taylor Swift

As a top 3% global listener of Taylor Swift with nearly 2 decades of business experience, I'm uniquely qualified to present this mini-master course of 13 lessons from Life and Times of Taylor Swift

[Nate @NateRothstein]

interesting thing with this discourse is that "explaining what you want" has, in a way, always been the hardest part of getting work done in companies. Sitting and "doing the work" may be time consuming, but the constant hard parts / where the value was largely created is communicating intent, clearly, at scale.

The best employees / managers / colleagues are typically the folks that can infer your thoughts (and visa versa) vs having to spend a ton of back and forth clarifying or waiting until mistakes happen or incorrect assumptions are made, to resolve the situation.

Re: Software development in particular: the industry literally invented a framework (Agile) that allowed everyone to *avoid* documenting all intentions upfront because the results rarely ever turned out as needed. It was better to do it small chunks, verify it was right, and then make incremental changes from there.

AI / LLMS have already created tremendous value, don't get me wrong, but IMHO the "ability to infer" what I want is kind where it becomes a 100x transformational thing vs. just the "next" thing.

The pace of work is rarely the bottleneck in most companies, so AI needs to make improvements elsewhere to really be 100X.

[Nate @NateRothstein]

What about consciousness / self-awareness? Are you including that in "thinking" or view as separate thing?

Like do you think something can "Think" and but not develop consciousnesses / self-awareness in this framing? Or do you think there is a distinction there as well?

More Context: There is framing where something can Feel but not Think, like a plant or simple life form may be said to "Feel" (as in experiencing pain and pleasure) but not "Think" as such.

But I don't know if there is in nature something that "Thinks, but doesn't feel" (LLM would be the first here).
Which raises the question: if something thinks, does that imply consciousness?

[Nate @NateRothstein]

@staysaasy I mean, at least give me a heads up you’re about to put me on blast like that

[Nate @NateRothstein]

@___frye To be fair, if LLMs do wind up upending the global economy and obliterating the social order as we know it, then that guy was kinda right…😬

[Nate @NateRothstein]

@staysaasy Had a similar thing and when I pushed back Claude admitted fault and said "I'd rather be useful and honest than confidently wrong" and I was like:

"lol, no you wouldn't. Confidently wrong in the absense of certainty is kind of your whole thing"

[Nate @NateRothstein]

@OnlyCFO It's still probably early, but are you hearing if faster dev cycles are translating to faster or improved revenue growth / customer / usage metrics?

FWIW I take the POV that dev is (usually) not the bottleneck there, but I am curious for those results as this plays out.

[Nate @NateRothstein]

@John_Attridge Judge: This opening argument is getting long and convoluted, where are you going with this?

[Nate @NateRothstein]

not quite...it's better to think of it more like the expected value of points scored. The key thing is that more minutes doesn't guarantee more spoints scored, it's a probablity of that happening.

To give a crude example: if there's only a 0.5% you score more points with the player on than off for 10 minutes, then you're not giving up much to sit him vs. the potential risk of having foul out of the game. Plus in practice you can always bring him right back if the team gives up too many points. Also to consider: in the final minutes, you care less if they foul out, so he can actually be more aggressive if needs to be vs. trying to avoid a foul for 20 minutes.

The whole thing is very dynamic.

[Nate @NateRothstein]

We’re talking past each at this point. What I’m saying is there’s a probabilistic aspect to this, and you don’t seem to be engaging with that point. You need balance the probability of more points (which I’m saying is marginal) vs the probability of losing the player (which I’m saying has a higher negative impact).

You can disagree with that probabilities I’m assigning, but that’s the logic at play.

[Nate @NateRothstein]

not if means there's more likely to foul out. You can't just remove that from the trade-off. That gets to this point:

>the 10-point lead at the start of the third is what helps you get to the 10-point lead with 2 mins left.

Not quite... You're skipping the part where there is a *probabilty* of that being the case vs. the probability of not having your star player. It's trade-off you need to consider and can't ignore.

[Nate @NateRothstein]

@growing_daniel When I pushed back on something that seemed made up Claude said "I'd rather be useful and honest than confidently wrong" and I was like: "lol, no you wouldn't. Confidently wrong in absense of certainty is kind of your whole thing"

[Nate @NateRothstein]

Another way to think about it: If you have two scenarios:

20% chance your star play fouls out, but you get the Star level point outcome for 10 minutes.

Vs. 0% chance you star player fouls out but 95% chance you get the "star level" outcome.

Most scenarios the second option is preferred because you never know who how the game will play out and would rather have the star player at the end*

(Plus, you acn always bring your star player right back it's not working out. It not like they're forced to be benched for a whole quarter).

*It's not so much that "the final minutes count more", as much as there is less opportunity to turn the game around as you get closer to the end. You'd agree a 10 point lead at the start of the 3rd quarter is less valuable than a 10 point lead with 2 minutes left, right?

And what I'm saying is having the Star player in the whole time only marginally increases the chances you have a 10 point lead going into the final two minutes. That needs to be weighed against the potentialy to lose the star plaer for those final two minutes altogether.

[Nate @NateRothstein]

It’s not it’s “more possible” it’s that is possible. It’s more of a bet / tradeoffs than a guarantee. If you look at my EV example, you’ll see it’s highly likely you get a similar point outcome with or w/o star player.

Take a step back: You’d agree that you’d rather have the star player available at the end of the game rather than not, right?

[Nate @NateRothstein]

Because it’s very possible to outperform in the third without your star player. But you still don’t know what may happen in the fourth. It could flip. So you want to preserve the option for higher EV in the fourth if you can. It’s worth taking the chance because the upside outweighs the downside.

[Nate @NateRothstein]

@DellAnnaLuca @Ifolop1 @RiotIksar It quite possible the actual points scored per minute is 3 not 6, then you’ve lost the option and not gotten the better result.

[Nate @NateRothstein]

@DellAnnaLuca @Ifolop1 @RiotIksar It’s a dynamic system with probabilistic outcomes : you *might* score more in the third, but it’s not guaranteed. then the other team may really outperform in the fourth, and if you’re star is fouled out you lost that option.

[Nate @NateRothstein]

Not quite: imagine there’s expected value of points per minute: with your superstar on its 5.4 pts, without its 4.7. Then some variation of 1.5 pts plus/ minus. You can still win with 4.7, so you might not even need the superstar in theory. But bc of variation, you can also lose. So you want to have the 5.4 EV situation available in case the variation of actual points means the game is close or you’re losing at the end. If your player fouls out you lose that option.

Points earlier in the game count, but you’re planning for a scenario where you need to move to a higher EV option

[Nate @NateRothstein]

@DellAnnaLuca @Ifolop1 @RiotIksar Like if the opposing team starts dominating you may need to bring the star player back in earlier. If you’re winning, it’s less urgent. But the broad point is if it’s close, you wanna make sure they’re available at end of the game when the victory is decided

[Nate @NateRothstein]

@DellAnnaLuca @Ifolop1 @RiotIksar There less uncertainty / variation of outcomes as the game approaches the end, so that’s when want to have players in the game that can have highest impact on the outcome.

Caveat is that the score differential is also important throughout.