Inertia
What are things, which will not, happens in your lifetime if you do not take some initiative to see them happens, independent of geography, time, and capital extra.
So let us take Malcom Gladwell idea of 10,000 hours to master a skill- call it fitness landscape. Now how many things do you think we lack fitness landscape and therefore they are not our realities today? Broadly speaking- driverless cars are our realities because there has been over x amount of training to achieve such. NVDIA most successful business only became viable after the launched three products ahead of it. If they did not do the experiments and launched those products, they would not have been able to realize their largest payoff so far. However, they could not take shortcuts, you either release three products before getting a biggest breakthrough or not. The largest valuable feedback only happens after three trials. One need to pave the way for future opportunities, you cannot wait until the opportunity is sitting in front of you. Often it is no longer an opportunity if it is sitting in front of you.
Many drugs, gene therapy discoveries are the results of continuous learning of certain systems. If one narrows into individual level, fitness landscape is a dead-end. Most people do not train to benefit from the long-term learning curve. Inertia is the equilibrium state for many in many categories of their life and therefore many possible realities in one life are missed.
At a nation level — land of fitness landscape is reflected in obvious aging infrastructure, inability to build new things, invent new things and even ability to manage crisis. Natural disasters often exposes countries inability to manage them, but it also shows country experiences vacuums. Remember those roads, which have not been built for over 10 -15 years in many countries. Where geography and weather determine speed of events. If it rains -everything comes to a halt for weeks or month. It even threatens human life. Access is a luxury, which is not broadly shared by many.
Precision is a function of skills and time, where such is observable is clear, but on the event where progress takes time for fitness landscape to become obvious human tend to be bad at it. Thus, steady state is extremely expensive in areas where progress feedback has long cycles. Remember human are not very good at dealing with uncertainties- they will rather take a quick wrong decision than sitting it out for a better outcome in a week time. Such time inconsistencies nature of human exposes us to replete numbers of shocks we are not well prepared for. Or even rob society of the potential payoff of the mere patience and continuous building. It is very interesting to thing that as a society we don’t have long-term projects, which has long feedback cycles than rearing.
Even rearing is a preservation ends, which must be carried out for the fear of extinction- absences of such fear (forcing function) human, might opt out of that long cycle activity filled with uncertainties.
The second aspect of this is human inability to quantify risk. Naturally human are risk averse and therefore- not ready to tolerate certain risks necessary to achieve a certain competence level or reach some threshold of competence- but the matter of facts is that until one pays such initial cost-certain things won’t become realities in their life time, be at a country level or individual level. Most of things human achieve or attains in one lifetime are those which the fitness landscape has made it possible to attain cheaply. To go beyond them needs consorted efforts and willingness to tolerate absences of feedbacks for a long stretch.
Often the fight is against either entropy, inertia or latency. I prefer fights against either entropy (disorder) because there is movement in that, also fights against latency are better- because one is trying to accelerate something, which is moving slowly be it in the world of atoms or bits, but that is still a worthy fight. A terrible form of fight is against inertia- fighting this in a zero state- you do not get any feedback, just an agonizing fight with no results for it. Spend time understanding the nature of your fights. If you figure that certain fights are those of inertia nature, shift quickly or abandon that pursuit.
