0:00:00 - 0:00:22 Signal and noise are topics that excite normal people. But I'm going to try to get you to the point where you are excited about that. It turns out that it's extremely important. If I told you that the purpose of life was to hit the bull's eye of a dartboard, then you'd probably ask, well, where is the 0:00:22 - 0:00:00 dartboard right? Now? If you see it and I point to it and then we're done that that was quick and easy. But what if you don't even know what a dartboard is, right? Let alone where you could find one. It gets more complicated. Now, this sounds silly. But I'm telling you, if you honestly ask yourself, 0:00:00 - 0:01:02 what do you want out of life? Now, if you're, if you're watching this channel, this, this might be a sample size problem because there's obviously a bias, uh, with, with the people that watch this. Um, you probably do know an, an answer to that question, but most people don't know what they want out 0:01:02 - 0:01:21 of life. They have to think about it. And this is a shocker because every single person uses 24 hours a day. But to what end you see, it's completely unintentional in the lives of most people. Now. They, they think it's intentional because they're looking at short term obligations. You know, I gotta 0:01:21 - 0:01:46 pay rent or I'm hungry or I'm tired and, and they think that they're achieving some sort of purpose and they are. But if you say no, no, no, increase the size of the scope for all of your life. What do you really want? They're not gonna say I want to sleep eight hours tonight or I want a, a bacon cheeseburger 0:01:45 - 0:02:09 right now, right? Or I want to pay my rent at the end of the month. Those are all means to an end, but they haven't defined the end. So that's a huge problem. But let's suppose that they know the answer to that question. What do you want? The next question is how are you going to get it now? Both of 0:02:09 - 0:02:34 these questions. So, so how are you gonna get it? Is, is like, where am I gonna find the treasure map that leads to the treasure I want in both of these questions. Rely completely on information. How so? Well, hopefully the the treasure map one is pretty obvious, right? If you're looking for how to get 0:02:34 - 0:02:59 what you want, you lack information because there's information out there that tells you if you want X, you have to Y but what about what you want? Why is that reliant on information or in what way is that reliant on information. Well, what you want is based on what you think is available and that's 0:02:59 - 0:03:27 information that's based on information and how much each of those things cost and how much each of those things benefit. Now, all three of those are a function of information. So it turns out that if you look at normal life and the experience of most people in life, they're walking around unintentionally 0:03:26 - 0:03:48 . If you can upgrade from that to be able to define what it is you want, you're ahead of most people because they don't know, then if you can take a step above that and, and, and find a way to get what you want or at least start thinking about that and looking for it, you're a step above the people that 0:03:48 - 0:04:11 only know what they want. They haven't bothered to look at how to get it. But if you can understand that all of these things come down to information, then you understand that your real task is to learn what options are available and what they're worth. That's the chief duty in life because if you don't 0:04:11 - 0:04:29 figure that out, it doesn't matter what you're willing to do to get something because you don't know how to get it and you don't know what it's worth. If you don't know what something's worth, you won't pay the price to get it. You'll just pay the lowest price you can for whatever's cheapest. Do you 0:04:29 - 0:05:01 understand? It's a huge thing. It's very simple, but it's extremely important. So you only have so much time to figure all this out there is absolutely more to know than you can learn in one life. What you don't know already may well be more important than everything. You already know the people that 0:05:01 - 0:05:27 can process information the fastest and the most correctly will absolutely get the most out of life. There's, there's a caveat to that. You could know something and choose not to act on it. Ok. But what we're doing is we're freezing. The variable of willingness to do what's obviously best. The, the amount 0:05:27 - 0:05:50 of information you can process is super important and process correctly. And if you could measure this among people, you would find that it's Patto distributed. Now, I don't have time in this presentation to go into what that means. You could look it up. But what you'll find is that there are a whole 0:05:49 - 0:06:15 bunch of people that are abysmal in their ability to process information. They're very slow, they don't go out and search for it. They're slow to process it and they, they do not come away with the correct conclusions when they do. Ok. But the more a person's able to process a lot of information and 0:06:15 - 0:06:42 the more correctly they do. So the rarer they become very quickly, this is all really important. So what does signal and noise have to do with this? Well, when it comes to information, there's more than could ever be processed. But one of the things that makes it difficult to process information or even 0:06:41 - 0:07:14 to find it is that there's a whole lot out there that actually doesn't have any value. Now to, to be ultra specific, I'm going to, to add an addendum to that. What doesn't have value to you right now, this is important. So what we call signal is what has value to you right now and it exists in a, in 0:07:13 - 0:07:41 a huge pile of stuff that does not have value to you right now. The the search for information is, is always a needle in a haystack problem. So if you want to be able to process it quickly and accurately, you have to get really good at filtering hay for needles. So in order to help you to do this, I 0:07:41 - 0:08:01 want to share with you two properties of signal and noise. And I hope that as you apply this to your life, you're going to to find it much easier to process more information faster than you used to be able to do. OK. In order to do this, the way I'm laying this out, I'm gonna show you two different patterns 0:08:01 - 0:08:27 of information. And then I'm gonna try to help you apply those to your life. Here's the first pattern, one kind of noise that exists is what I would call background noise. So let's say that these dots on the screen are information. No, because that might be too abstract for you to think about. And maybe 0:08:27 - 0:08:51 you've never seen anything like that before. I'm gonna give you something that's more tethered to the world that you know. So let's say that you take a picture with a digital camera and it's, you've got some monstrous camera with lots of resolution. If you zoom in a lot to the picture, what you'll see 0:08:50 - 0:09:14 if you have a powerful enough camera is you'll see if, if here, if black, the background color, if that were the actual picture, you'd see these little dots of color that are clearly not in the the thing you took a picture of and those are noise. All right, there's a noise. But let's say that what you 0:09:14 - 0:09:34 took a picture of was a, a plus sign, right? A plus sign on a white plus sign on a black piece of paper. This might be what you see. And the thing is, is all these other points that aren't the plus sign weren't on the actual sheet of paper. It was just a black piece of paper with a, with a white plus 0:09:34 - 0:09:58 sign. This is all noise. This is exaggerated for the purpose of making my point. But you would actually see this if you did this right? And, and the exaggeration carries into the the plus sign. You, you'd see an actual plus here, not dots OK? But this is just for the purpose of illustration. So if what 0:09:58 - 0:10:19 you're looking for is to find out what signal might be on the paper. A plus sign in this case, and you need to know what that shape is and whether it's there and whether there are others because you don't know this, you're just looking at a sheet of paper and you try to learn, you have to be able to 0:10:19 - 0:10:43 filter out all this noise. Eventually, you may get to the point where you're studying each one of these dots on the on the plus sign. And that level of detail may well be critical to the task at hand. However, whether that task is recognized this as a plus sign or it's more intricate than that, and you 0:10:43 - 0:11:08 need to know the details of each, each little piece of that plus. However, if the way you do this is to, to put that much time and effort that you would spend on a dot on the plus into each of these noise points, you may never discover the plus. You might never notice it's even there because you're spending 0:11:07 - 0:11:36 a ton of time on these dots. So if you were trying to coach someone in this task, what would you tell them what would be needful? Even if you don't know what to tell them, what are you trying to, to help them to do? Well, you want to use your time as fruitfully as you can where most of the time is spent 0:11:35 - 0:12:03 learning about the plus sign rather than learning about noise points or identifying noise points, right? The point is the plus. So what you'd like to do is devise a strategy where you can very quickly identify where the noise points are and where the regions are that you should be concentrating on. Right 0:12:03 - 0:12:29 ? Because what these noise points are like in life is all the things you could spend your time on that don't actually matter that that either don't matter at all or harm you or don't matter as much as they cost. Because if you fill your life with those things, it's like taking a mason jar and say what 0:12:29 - 0:12:49 you wanna do is fill it with golf balls, but it's already full of rice. You won't be able to squeeze too many golf balls in that jar. You have to empty out all the rice and then you could fit a ton of golf balls in there depending on how big the jar is, right? If your life is full of things of low value 0:12:48 - 0:13:13 , you don't have room for the things of higher value because things of higher value tend to cost more just like rice is tiny compared to a golf ball, the golf ball or that is the thing of higher value. It has a higher cost, right? So one strategy for this is to say, I'm going to ignore all the small 0:13:12 - 0:13:37 things. I'm just gonna focus on the biggest things first. In fact, if I were writing a computer program, I might mark each of these larger circles in a first pass. So I would visit every single one of these points and then I would mark each of these ones that were larger. And I'm sorry for the deep dive 0:13:37 - 0:14:02 in, in nerdiness here. The way I would do this specifically is I would look at all the points and then calculate the average size of a point because I know the value is Pareto distributed. And so I would apply a filter. So a preto distribution, I don't have a picture here. And it's not easy to draw this 0:14:01 - 0:14:24 in this program on the fly. But preto distributions are, are like the bell curve shifted to the left. So the biggest part of the distribution is on the low end and the average is not in the middle of the graph, it's on the left side of the graph. So if you can identify things that are below average in 0:14:24 - 0:14:51 a preto distribution, you could wipe out all these tiny points from the first step, right? So just imagine me, sorry, imagine me selecting every single one of the smallest points and deleting them. And now the task becomes much easier because all we have left are the big points and suddenly a pattern 0:14:51 - 0:15:14 becomes very apparent right now. One of the interesting things when you're writing programs to actually do things like this, one of the problems you run up against is that many problems are easy for us to solve as humans using our eyes. Like if I said, pick out the things that ha have the highest intensity 0:15:14 - 0:00:00 , you don't actually have to specifically think about every one of these dots. But a program would have to touch each of these in order to do that task, right? But one of the downsides of this is we get tricked into thinking that this process of filtering signal and noise is a lot easier than it is. 0:00:00 - 0:15:59 It's easy when we can represent things in a way that lines up perfectly well with our natural ability with what our eyes and our brain can pick out very quickly. But it gets really difficult when we run up against what we're good at naturally. When we're in the opposite direction, when things are represented 0:15:58 - 0:16:22 in ways that, that immediately collide with our negative tendencies, our biases is humans. So, what are some of these? Well, you can look up cognitive biases but what about something that makes you seem worse than you thought you were? Is that gonna be easy to spot or you really gonna have to be careful 0:16:21 - 0:16:47 because you gonna take some work and some discipline. What about things that are uh uh carry a high price? Do you know that we all have a filter to pay less attention to things that are very costly because we don't wanna do them? Right? It doesn't matter if the payout is enormous. We, we just would not 0:16:46 - 0:17:05 be interested if, if I said this is just contrived, obviously. But if I said, hey, there's, uh, you could sell one of your kidneys and get $10 billion. I, that's illegal. And I don't even know if you could do it, even if you were willing to break the law, I don't think anyone would pay that much. But 0:17:05 - 0:17:29 let's say that that opportunity existed and it were legal. Almost no one would sign up for that still because we would just write it off out of hand and say, well, that's, I can't do that. That's too high of a cost. And you wouldn't even stop to think about the value of $10 billion right? So that's an 0:17:29 - 0:17:50 example. Anyway, you could go through all these. I, I don't wanna make this a terribly long presentation but it turns out that that filtering signal and noise is very difficult. It's easy to make a contrived example like this and to walk through and say, well, don't pay as much attention to things of 0:17:50 - 0:18:15 low value as you do to things of high value and that's easy. But I'm sorry, it's simple, but it's not easy. And as you start thinking about these biases that we have, you can very quickly enumerate a whole lot of situations where this is extremely difficult, even if it's easy to understand, it's not 0:18:14 - 0:18:34 easy to execute. OK. So, so then after you've narrowed it down to the most intense things, then you can dig in deeper and now you've apportioned your time instead of imagine you have, um, 100 units of time. I don't know how many dots are on the screen, but let's say it's 100 you just have one unit of 0:18:34 - 0:18:54 time per dot And that might be more than enough for these little dots, but it's not gonna be enough for the big dots. So if you get rid of all the little dots, now all of a sudden you have tons more time per dot This is why prioritizing your life is so absolutely important. You know, talk about this 0:18:54 - 0:19:16 in the book, Joy on purpose. Uh Not with any of these examples. This is completely orthogonal, but I'm making the same point. So if you prioritize by, by importance, all of a sudden, the patterns can stick out much clearer. And you can say even though this is a big dot It's still noise, right? Because 0:19:15 - 0:19:39 it's not the thing that we're looking for. This is, but you can't start to see the structural information that this is clearly these points are clearly connected to each other in some way. Whereas these probably aren't OK, you take out the small things and it becomes clear clearer. So let's get into 0:19:39 - 0:20:05 some more applications of this. How do you react to life? You probably are operating under the assumption that things tend to be of equal value. The truth is that you should always expect that value is Pareto distributed and you should focus your attention on the things of greatest value and those will 0:20:04 - 0:20:30 always be a small fraction of the possible options. You should think about that and what you do and who you spend your time with in the ideas that you think about even all ideas are not of equal value, it's preto distributed. So you've heard maybe of the 8020 rule. If not, you should definitely look 0:20:30 - 0:20:52 that up, but that's something you should be applying to every aspect of value in your life. You should, you should know in your mind who are the people, the, the 20% of people that you know, who provide 80% of the value in your life. Now, if you're married and you have Children, hopefully this is easier 0:20:51 - 0:21:13 because hopefully your spouse and Children are on that list, right? So you only have to fill a couple more slots after that to get to 20% of the people that you know, but there are 20% of the people that, you know, in life that provide 80% of the value in your life. And you should be spending 80% of 0:21:13 - 0:21:40 your time with those people. If you want to maximize the value in your life. What about the things that you do? If you listed out every single thing, you spend your time on 20% of those things provide 80% of the value in your life and you can even fractionate these things across domains. What do you 0:21:40 - 0:22:04 do at work? 20% of what you do at work provides 80% of the value. So what happens if you can isolate that and spend 40% of your time doing those things, you're going to roughly double your output at work. And as, as much as that seems like a magic trick or an impossibility, I'm telling you, it's absolutely 0:22:04 - 0:22:29 possible if, if you want to run circles around your peers at work, learn how to find and identi how to identify the things of greatest value in what you do at work and spend more time doing those things. OK? And it, it might not be things you do, it might be ways of doing things like let's say that he 0:22:29 - 0:22:52 , here's just a very real world example. If you're a programmer and you plotted out your production versus your time at work on a line graph, you're gonna find that there are spikes of productivity where you're really in the zone. And it's totally possible that in two hours or five hours, you could crank 0:22:51 - 0:23:16 out more productivity in a certain state of flow than you could in 10 hours or 40 hours. If you're in the zone for four hours as a programmer, you might get done more than you could get done in an entire week. Being out of the zone. And so how do you get in the zone? And how could you double the amount 0:23:15 - 0:23:37 of time that you're in the zone for? Because that will vastly increase your productivity if you do sales calls. And you notice that I'm just making things up here. But I do know that there are patterns like this. Maybe you notice that cold calls are twice as successful on Tuesday mornings as they are 0:23:36 - 0:23:56 any other time in the week. Well, maybe you should reserve your entire Tuesday morning to make cold calls instead of just making one when you don't happen to have something scheduled at that time because you will vastly increase your productivity. So it's not just a what you do, it's also how you do 0:23:56 - 0:24:25 it. But I'm telling you if you can find those big dots of value in your life and double down on them, you will at least double the value of your life. Think about that. Think about that. All right. One other noise pattern that I want to show you is this idea of noise that cours with signal and you could 0:24:25 - 0:24:47 call these things counterfeits. So in the first example, just to compare and contrast here, we talked about noise that was relatively easy to identify. OK. And if you just graph everything by value in your life and apply the preto distribution, basically nuke everything below average. And then you're 0:24:47 - 0:25:11 going to find that it's very easy to pick out the things of greater value. Well, what about when the noise appears like this? So you see instead of a uniform blanket of points, the the noise is clustered around the signal you and it's it's never so easy as to say that the the bigger things are always 0:25:10 - 0:25:37 going to be the best things, right? But um in this pattern and you'll see this pattern a lot in in actual examples of information in, in the in I should say just the world. So for example, if you look at mass spectrometry data, there are signals in the data that will will always follow this pattern where 0:25:37 - 0:26:10 the noise increases around the actual signal. So how do you deal with this? Well, this one's more of, of fighting your natural reaction? OK. So let me give you an example of this. Uh and we can pull this from the Bible. So in the New Testament, Jesus was born at a time where there had been and there 0:26:10 - 0:26:37 would be after him many false messiahs. And so when he came along, many of the people who lived when he did dismissed him as yet another false Messiah. But there is a problem with this, the prophecies had had specified that there would be an actual Messiah. And so if the way that you react to the presence 0:26:36 - 0:27:07 of counterfeits is to ignore the fact that the counterfeits indicate that there is something real, by definition, you're in big trouble, you will miss the real version. Guaranteed, guaranteed. So instead of dismissing Jesus as another false messiah because he was, was acting like one, like all of the 0:27:07 - 0:27:31 false ones also had what they should have done is paid very close attention to what made the false ones, false ones. In other words, to learn what the true signal is better than you knew before. So that you can more clearly distinguish the counterfeits, right? Because again, we're looking at a plus sign 0:27:31 - 0:27:57 on a black sheet of paper. So everything that's not on the plus is a counterfeit, including some big dots, right? I could color this if I wanted to. But I think you can use your imagination and see. So if the prophecy say there's going to be a Messiah, don't assume that every single person that comes 0:27:57 - 0:28:25 with the with the color of a Messiah is a false Messiah, even if everyone who has until now has been a false messiah. So the this is the funny thing about counterfeits. People assume that the presence of a counterfeit means that anything like the counterfeit is also false. Actually, the presence of a 0:28:25 - 0:28:48 counterfeit by definition means that there is a true version of the thing. And we dismiss as having no value many things which are actually just counterfeits. And the pitfall is that guarantees that you're going to then dismiss the value of the real thing that the counterfeit is imitating what are some 0:28:48 - 0:29:10 examples of this I gave you one. Uh And in fact, to keep beating this drum, let's just go through some more of the danger topics in Christianity that should be titillating. So what do I mean by the danger topics? These are all the things, particularly in the Old Testament, but there's also a whole bunch 0:29:09 - 0:29:37 of them in the New Testament. The Christians really don't like to talk about because they, they erode the shouldn't all secular people be happy about Christianity argument. So what am I talking about? Well, like what about slavery in the Bible? Now, that's a big topic because there are different versions 0:29:36 - 0:30:02 of that in the Bible. Um It's too simple to say to ask the question is God for or against slavery because we've wrapped a whole bunch of very different things under the same heading there. But there are examples in the Bible where this is, this is something that was Condoned. Now, does that, does that 0:30:02 - 0:30:30 stipulate that anything else that could be put under the heading is good? Of course not, of course not, right? The fact that there were slaves using the, the modern very broad definition at different points during Bible times during theocratic reigns that does not indicate that therefore anything that 0:30:30 - 0:30:52 could be called slavery today has God's blessing, right? That's do you see how this is an example of this? And we could go through a whole bunch of other examples. We could talk about marriage in Christianity, which is not just monogamy. If you look at biblical marriage, there are different versions 0:30:51 - 0:31:13 and that it's the same thing as slavery. You could put a whole bunch of things under that header. But it doesn't mean that they're the same that they, there are many counterfeits to the actual thing. All right, there are a lot of other topics like, like ministry and money is a big one in the New Testament 0:31:12 - 0:00:00 Church. The apostolic church after Christ, uh people who wanted to join that church had to put, give all of their money, they had to sell everything they had and give all their money to the apostles. You can't get around that. It happened, it happened and it was a big deal. There was, there was, uh, 0:00:00 - 0:31:56 there are two examples of capital punishment for people who lied about it. Ok? Does that mean that every situation where people are giving money to someone who is religious in some way is the same thing as what the apostles did? Absolutely not that those are counterfeit examples. Ok. Those are all religious 0:31:55 - 0:32:22 things. But what about topics in normal life again? If you want to oversimplify and say something is always bad. If it can be connected in any way to this idea, you are going to exclude yourself from a lot of real value. You have to be more sophisticated than that and you have to be able to recognize 0:32:21 - 0:32:44 when things that seem quote unquote bad are actually just counterfeits of something that could actually be good. It's really important. There are many, many examples of this. Uh, I, I feel like I'd, I'd be remiss if we didn't get some more real world examples. What about disciplining your kids? Right 0:32:43 - 0:33:27 . What about, um, oh, I'm trying to think of examples that aren't relationship related because that's, that's too much of a, a magnet here. Um 11 that might surprise you that's particularly relevant to the modern world is, is job choice. So, so we oversimplify career selection today and we say if you 0:33:27 - 0:33:49 have this, if you choose this career, you'll be well off and if you choose that career, you won't be. And as things get more complicated that ceases, it ceases to be so clean cut, the differentiation between careers where you can make good money and careers where you can't. The job title is not enough 0:33:49 - 0:34:13 to differentiate anymore. And, and there can be see how many small points there are around this. There can be many, many, many examples of low value career choices with the same title as a high value career choice. If, if you look for example, at, at the trades, uh I know a man who has a construction 0:34:12 - 0:34:32 company and it's a small company, he just has one crew, he makes an absolute fortune. And I know many people in a similar situation that make very little money I would argue less money than is worth the trouble for what they do. You could do the same thing with plumbers, you could do the same thing with 0:34:32 - 0:34:53 electricians. So it's easy to do this with the trades. It's easy to do it with other things too. You have to be more sophisticated than to say, than to use simple discrimination with these things. And this is, this is a hallmark of one of many problems with modern society is that we've oversimplified 0:34:52 - 0:35:15 things to the point where it's like Jesus castigated the Pharisees for saying you neither enter the kingdom of heaven. Uh You don't enter the kingdom of heaven and you hedge up the way for those who would if you didn't teach them your ridiculous ideas and provide them with your evil example. And, and 0:35:15 - 0:35:39 that's the way it is in society today where idea brokers, that's what I'll say. Idea brokers oversimplify situations in order to manipulate the people and they want you to associate good and evil with simplistic, overly simplistic classification schemes rather than being sophisticated and digging in 0:35:39 - 0:36:01 deep and actually doing a cost benefit analysis and thinking about particular situations, right? And these idea brokers, it's not just people you think of as being out there to manipulate you like the mainstream media or the government or any of these other rich and famous types. It's also pastors and 0:36:01 - 0:36:24 leaders of churches and faithful members of churches. They're, they're out there everywhere where they're trying to get you to oversimplify things. Um under the false perception that they want to help you, they're actually trying to get something out of you. And in the case of the first group, it's obvious 0:36:24 - 0:36:48 that they're trying to make money off of you or, or increase their power because of you. The second group. Like what does a person at church have to gain from convincing you to oversimplify the value of things so that you get, you dismiss the real, the real signal with all the counterfeit noise. Well 0:36:47 - 0:00:00 , by doing that, they gain reduction of the guilt that they feel for doing less than the best that they know because if you can reduce the value of all things down to a list of, you have to do what's on this list and you can't do any of the things on this other list and everything else is fair game. 0:00:00 - 0:37:33 If you can convince people to live that way, then you won't feel so guilty for living that way yourself when you should so be careful. And I don't wanna dwell uh more on, on this. But hopefully this has been a good traversal of a lot of information for you. And I hope that as you apply these tactics 0:37:32 - 0:37:36 to your life, you find things of much greater value.