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Comment by Katy Kelly (katy-kelly) on Don't Over-Optimize Things · 2022-06-16T23:44:20.667Z · LW · GW

This was such a good read, I made an account to say that it should be a post in and of itself.

This example gave me a big aha about left/right political divides. 

"One way to think about this is the following thought experiment. You have a tradeoff between how well you can track a setpoint and how well you can reject disturbances. If you make it very difficult to knock a system off a setpoint, it'll reject disturbances well. However, a change in that setpoint might also look like a disturbance, and the system will be similarly sluggish to respond."

Spitballing / overgeneralizing: 

Maybe the right could be seen as the part of society better at rejecting disturbances, and the left the side that's better at tracking changes in the set point. 

Makes sense of why conservative areas often seem to be more stable (and why most cultures have all these weird, unnecessary taboos - they're over-rejecting), and why the left tends to be better at art, and most high performance cities are left leaning (they're tracking the set point), but also generally less stable (they're overly responsive).