Reflexive Markets & Irrationality:
We underestimate how smart people are — and often, people are highly irrational, childish behaviour — and ego, and pump, and hype…. all of these are essential parts of the human psyche.
What economics gets wrong, and what marketing gets right, is that people are not ‘perfectly rational’ in fact, more often than not, people are perfectly irrational.
They do things out of spite, they do things to prove people wrong, they do things to serve their own self-agenda– they do things, because it looks like it benefits them, not because it actually benefits them in the long run.
Soros — in the Alchemy of Finance, talks about this concept, in the concept of Reflexivity… how market expectations, shape market performance– though this seems like common sense, it’s not very common. But the funny thing, this is also what the ‘woo woo’ side of the world, says — in their ‘manifestation’ stuff.
I would know — because I used to write in that industry, until I genuinely got tired, of reframing manifestation like 30 times a day, and trying to say the same thing in different ways.
It got exhausting after awhile, but it was a great learning experience, that taught me about the structure of belief, and how people really work.
The funny thing was — I never really wrote like a ‘copywriter’, I wrote more like a coder… and I would write 20,000 word sales letters, all from the frame of ‘hacking’ the human mind.
I would line up cognitive biases, I would see which one the market was currently believing in — in order to find the right angle. The copywriting ‘frameworks’ were never really nuanced, or dynamic enough for me.
Eventually, I did create some sort of a reputation for myself, in this process — and it was fun while it lasted. The trolling, and the shitposting that I got from ‘renowned’ names, that were stuck in the marketing paradigm, was pretty entertaining to watch.
But I digress.
The fundamental truth — is that the truth, is never perfectly defined, and it’s always evolving, it’s why cultures evolve, it’s why paradigms evolve, it’s why beliefs of societies, evolve…
Because at the end of the day — if the value doesn’t serve the growth of a ‘population’ / ‘species’ what good is it, and what use is it?
Are there any real ‘fundamental laws’ of the universe? idk– maybe it’s just that change is the only constant.
And that’s why I’d rather embrace change — than to stifle it, and pretend it doesn’t exist.
Most people — will desire templates, hacks and ‘formulas’, because it gives them a sense of certainty, instead of taking up the burden of proof, on their own — they pay someone else, and hold them responsible for it, even though they still pay the price of the ideas, that the person that they’re paying provide.
I know that I’m speaking on many levels of nested ‘sentences’ but please bear with me.
At the end of the day — to truly even create wealth in business… you simply just need to identify where people are fucking up, or are going to fuck up, and solve the problems, that they’re going to create for themselves, that’s all you need to do really.
That’s why buffet, and every single investor… said that if you could tell the future– just milliseconds in advance… the quants, would be able to profit millions, and invest their entire portfolio — with just a 1 second headstart against the market.
And with the world getting increasingly interconnected, I don’t see any of this slowing down…
So I suppose, sac up, and let’s go lightspeed lol.
Zander,
Khaos Dynamics.
