for a given system (eg you) consider the degree to which it's trappable or non-trappable: can it get stuck forever? you want to become less trappable & play games with fewer traps in them eg have an emergency fund, don't play russian roulette / go all in
Trappability as a clearer replacement for ergodicity
7 tweets · March 2024 · 58 likes · 5 retweets · read on Twitter
^ this is my attempt to rearticulate what gets confusingly called "ergodicity", after @Morphenius asked about it and both me & @utotranslucence grumbled that we'd looked it up numerous times but the concept was insufficiently sticky and we couldn't even remember which was which
the way I came to this new clarity was via a conversation with Claude and my own scrolling the wikipedia page for ergodicity looking for anything that felt clarifying eventually found a sentence about markov chains being able to reach any other state eventually
seems the idea is morphing as it moves from math to finance eg in @TaylorPearsonMe's article he recommends becoming more ergodic (non-trappable) but technically ergodicity is also about memorylessness ie non-learning, which you don't actually want! taylorpearson.me/ergodicity/
there's a sense in which having learned something, you can't unlearn it. this too is a kind of trap never again can you thoroughly revisit the worlds where you never knew what it was like to go through puberty, or where you don't know how to read English these are lost to you
but losing these, in a finite-and-infinite-games sense, affords many many kinds of exploration that aren't otherwise available ie your capacity to explore at all is not diminished by going through puberty or learning English! unlike with financial ruin or dying
huh! the connection with learning here goes a layer deeper, into evolution it is precisely because individuals die that biological evolution can continue exploring and does not get trapped! likewise, memetically, some ideas die to others—and thus humanity's learning plays on!