On 29 July 2020, my life changed. I stopped drinking, bought a kayak, and went fishing. My wife and I had purchased a trailer and straps and all the necessary accoutrements so loading should've been a breeze. It wasn't. The kayak would get crooked, the straps twisted, and it took half an hour. "This system needs to be better", I thought.
There is one system in particular that has always fascinated me: the positive feedback loop. That is when the output is increased by a factor, and fed back into the same system as an input. With it, scales near infinity can be reached fairly quickly. Drinking is a positive feedback loop. You drink, you become hungover, and you drink to overcome it. It's a dirty hack of our own minds. And as I said, drinking at scales near infinity can be reached fairly quickly with this particular feedback model. But what if you applied a positive feedback loop, well, positively? What would happen?
I thought of that while spending another thirty minutes trying to tie down a kayak. If I could just incrementally make it easier, the efficiency would skyrocket, and quickly too. The first trip I discovered it's far easier if you remember which direction the clip needs to to be facing. The second trip I discovered the straps won't twist if you lay them out before wrapping. The third trip I found you only need two straps, not three. Those incremental improvements, while insignificant in their own right, become part of a system to tie down a kayak as quickly as possible.
The best part is no one had to teach me. There are hundreds of YouTube videos about tying down kayaks; I know, I've seen them. I could've asked my in-laws how they do it. But I didn't have to. All it took were small inputs, multiplied over time. It no longer takes me 30 minutes to tie down my kayak, but I thought to myself, "okay, that worked, but it was too easy. A feedback loop can't possibly be the secret to menial chores." With that I started experimenting.
Sobriety, nobody wants it but some people need it. I'm not one of those people, but I was drinking a lot, and I did want to cut back. So how can we reduce something with feedback? Introducing the negative feedback loop, the deranged twin of positive feedback. How can we take every input to a system, and reduce it over time?
Well, step one: remove alcohol from the house. That's easy enough. Step two: don't go places where there is alcohol. Step three: do something else. Kayak fishing was perfect. All I had to do was go fishing and not drink at the same time, and I would not drink. When I got home, if I had to mow the lawn, I would mow the lawn and not drink. Starting at day one, this seems impossible. However, every single task or miniature adventure led to some dopamine being released with a lack of alcohol, and that was important to me. This is the negative feedback loop; every input goes through the system, the output is lower than it started, and it goes through again. You can reach zero, or approach an asymptote to zero, fairly quickly with these as well.
That's two points for feedback loops. Then I started getting cocky, what if we tried layering feedback loops onto each other. I'm just gonna apply some negative feedback to combat my urge to sleep in, throw in something positive to take better care of my house, I'll figure out how to best structure my weekend by developing a feedback loop for planning the day. Oh, it went well. I was tackling three or four house projects per weekend, working out everyday, reading, still had time for fishing and screwing around; the implication was clear. This system works. And it works a lot better than the previous system I had.
There were THREE WEEKS of this bliss in life. Things worked, I worked, the system worked. Sometimes the line was blurred with trial and error, that's how much I can trivialize efficiency. Can't back a trailer on the first try at your favorite fishing spot? Well pick a tree, try aiming for that. Didn't work? Pick a new tree. It's still positive feedback as long as you get closer to the goal with each stroke. After a handful of tries, if you have a good memory for which tree worked, you're gonna back that trailer in dead center every time from then on.
So, where did it all go wrong? Things got weird after that. Really weird. MacDill found a guided missile at the Lakeland Airport and the US Postal Service was being sabatoged by the president and there's this website called Imgur. and I had the bright idea of applying a positive feedback loop to gain fake points on the internet.
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