IDEA ECONOMY MENTAL MODELS: checking your assumptions

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We all try to navigate life in this complex world by making decisions, big and small, based on assumptions on how things work.
Through my work in safety, which is about how complex systems can fail, I became more and more interested in the rules that govern complex systems.

There are a lot of lessons from complex systems that apply to day to day life, which is about forming part of the biggest complex system: the world economy and society. If you want to or not, everything is connected and increasingly so.

Complexity is constantly rising in our society, things are constantly and dynamically changing.
The result is that what worked before, is not guaranteed to work in the near future.
Like in safety, in life failure can happen if you don’t check your assumptions before you make your decisions.

First symptoms:
As we saw with the 2008 financial crisis already, the basic assumptions about what we are supposed to do to have a "successful" life in the developed world have been proven to be more and more faulty. Increasingly these assumptions will stop working in developing countries too, but there is probably a delayed action at work.

In this article I'd like to check some of the big assumptions most of us hold
Best way I guess is to work chronologically:

As a kid, you have to go to (primary and high) school, get good grades. It will be good for ya, promise!

Why? We assume school knows what is best for kids now to prepare for the future.
Actually school is built for a different era and the knowledge you learn is not relevant anymore.

Since knowledge itself is ubiquitous through Google etc., being knowledgeable is not an advantage anymore in itself.
What makes you valuable in the near future is what you can DO with your knowledge.
On your resume the things that will matter more and more are concrete things you have DONE and can DO in the future, what you can CREATE.
Time and money you spent in an institution to get that piece of paper with your degree on it will matter less and less.
In fact you can access most respected university courses on the internet for FREE.
A motivated person can probably zoom through all that in a YEAR. Check out Google’s Nano degrees

The assumption that you are valuable only when you are good in participating in this education system, leaves out a significant portion of kids who don't fit in this system.
They think they are worthless as a result, because they don't function well in a school environment.
Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

In fact they might have attitudes that make them extremely well positioned for the future.
Not being burdened with a school education will force them to find other ways to participate in the idea economy. Provided they start DOING and CREATING instead of playing video games of course.
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity

After school, go to college: get a degree it will get you a good job!

This was a tried and true recipe, but now there is a surplus of graduates, and serious academic inflation is happening.
The Return On Investment of a degree stops making sense.
The time and money students spend on getting a degree is INSANE. This is the biggest Ponzi scheme going and will soon implode.
Once some clever Tom figures out a way to solve the certification system, there will be a great University cull, a lot of them will become obsolete and have to close shop, because (good) professors like Jordan Peterson will figure out that Universities no longer are the only viable way to be paid to teach !

Hmm, could certification be something to be solved by a Blockchain approach? Sounds like it doesn't it? A proof of work system for your studies, verified by the Blockchain, doesn't sound bad now that I think of it. Better than a piece of paper which can and is faked often!

Second college assumption, college teaches what a professional needs to know,.
In fact in some degrees, the very nature of what they learn is obsolete, because of serious lag between progress
and writing textbooks. By the time textbooks are made, they are obsolete and then Universities keep using them for a loong while.
In most cases what you learn from your professors is what they learned during their education. So the knowledge can be 30 years old! This can be a serious problem in a rapidly changing world.

After college, If you get a "good job"" (somehow). Start climbing that corporate ladder

The assumption here is that promotion to more responsibility and money is almost automatic. If you just work hard and put in the time.
In fact there is a huge trend of "flattening" corporate hierarchies and outsourcing which makes middle management increasingly obsolete and to costly.
The ladder itself is disappearing because managers are a costly necessity.
They are not particularly productive other than generating paperwork which in most cases can and will be automated or outsourced. That means that "entry level" job is as far as many people will go... Promotion is becoming ever and ever scarce unless you can prove you are valuable through what you CREATE. Simply keeping your chair warm is going to be a less and less effective strategy to get ahead.

Then, with a "good job", and hence "steady" income it is time to "invest" in real estate

Multiple booby traps here:
No job can be considered "steady" anymore.
Housing value has become wildly unpredictable and instead of an investment, it can become an anchor which stops you from being able to adapt to changing job markets.

Few knowledge economy professionals will recognize that the above are not merely bumps in the road.
They assume that things will "go back to normal".
The above assumptions are becoming rapidly obsolete and are symptoms of what is changing and how fast things are changing. There will be no "normal" anymore.

Exponential change

The nature of this change is very particular, called exponential change, and the human brain is ill suited to recognize the rate of change. We are used to see linear patterns in our life and in nature which are steady progressions, e.g. put in x amount of hours get y amount of result.

This makes sense if you are working a field to get a crop or producing widgets but stops making sense when you are talking about information technology. To understand exponential change, try to answer the following question:

If you would fold a piece of paper in half 50 times (which you physically can't) how high would that piece of paper be?
If you don't calculate the mathematical function, your brain is very unlikely to be able to estimate that actually the height of the paper will reach 3/4 of the distance to the sun.

But in fact that is what is happening to technology, the rate of progress in computing is called "Moore's law" which states that the performance in transistor technology doubles or cost halves for the same performance, roughly every 18 months (that will last at least until 2023).

This means for instance that there are more transistors (and hence processing power) in your Iphone than in a 1990's NSA supercomputer. With a doubling every 18 months, a device in 2023 will not be merely 5 times more powerful, it will be 32 times more powerful than in 2016, all things being equal.

Not only are they becoming more powerful, for the same performance, they are getting exponentially cheaper, you can now buy a smartphone in India for 4 dollars (that was a scam, look at this South African smart phone for USD 30 ) which has roughly the same functionality as the first Iphone.
Of course it is not great if you compare it to modern standards. But that is not the point!
This progress will enable billions of people to have unlimited access to information and communicate with each other. It will also allow them to participate in things like Steemit.com more and more.

Things aren't equal to the world even 10 years ago. Even a basic smartphone can use the ecology of mobile software, which dictates what you can do with this hardware. Even having only a first gen Iphone now is much more valuable than having one 10 years ago because you can do so much more with it!

e.g.
get a free university level education through a MOOC or Khan academy,
get better prices for your goods through on-line market places,
figure out how to improve your crops or make them pest resistant through low cost field designs
figure out how to build an open source 3D printer or production equipment which allows you to make other stuff....

Google, Facebook and SpaceX are all working frenetically to connect the entire world with 1 Megabit connections from the sky.
That means that we go from 3 Billion people on the Internet to 5 maybe 7 billion in 2020.

Again an exponential function is in play here, the value of a network is not merely linear, it is the SQUARE of the people connected to it, that means that the

E.g. your clients for your writing will not only be US based, they can come from India, China, or just as well live on a Bolivian mountaintop!
Imagine a world through AI which would eliminate the language barrier completely, you might get competition from the most unlikely places, but you will also find customers in the most unlikely places!

So check your assumptions, probably you still have some that are based on what worked before. Will it work in the future?
Have you figured out which other of your life's assumptions are obsolete? Please share, you are not alone:
Here is a list of experts who made bad assumptions:
http://www.destination-innovation.com/the-20-worst-assumptions-made-by-experts/

Some of my other articles:
IDEA ECONOMY MENTAL MODELS: Abundance
The reason why I want to build a platform on Steemit and why you should too: THE IDEA ECONOMY

]My new article about the broken education system and how you can fix your learning](https://steemit.com/travel/@the-traveller/ok-i-get-it-the-education-system-is-broken-what-are-you-doing-about-your-learning-though#@yoda1917/re-the-traveller-ok-i-get-it-the-education-system-is-broken-what-are-you-doing-about-your-learning-though-20170621t113641680z)