A heuretic’s impact is not endogenous to the technology but depends on the environment

# A heuretic’s impact is not endogenous to the technology but depends on the environment In the same way that a species has fitness *with respect to the environment* an invention or discovery has impact *with respect to the environment.* You can think of the environment as attenuating a heuretic impact. [[There are many heuretic environments]] - so while a technology might be worthless in one environment, it could be incredibly impactful in another. Heuretics can never exist *separate* from an environment, so it’s stupid to talk about “potential impact” of an idea. It is useful to think about “what would the impact look like in an optimal environment?” To formalize this, you could think of a heuretic as having some ‘feature vector’ **F** that you take a dot product of with the environment **E** to get some ‘impact’ scalar. This piece is both important to the [[Design for roadmapping system]] and tricky. One possibility is that [[You should be able to do a singular value decomposition to find the eigenvalues of a technology the things that matter]]. A technology’s impact can change with the environment much more quickly than an organism’s fitness because technology environments change much faster than normal ones. These rapidly changing environments are one argument for why [[Technodiversity is important]]. The environment includes (working list): * The economy * Culture * Heliocentrism didn’t have impact for a long time because it was heretical * On the flipside, Darwinian theory became embedded in culture * Legislation (Regulations) * Infrastructure for dispersing a thing * Politics around an idea * Perceived value It is useful to think about other technologies as *not* being part of the environment so that you can distinguish what the main blocker to impact is. The delineation between a technology and the environmental attenuation of that technology’s impact roughly maps onto the questions “will it work?” And “should we do it.” Environmental exogeneity is also important because it allows you to distinguish when a heuretic would be low-impact but could lead to a high impact heuretic for a fixed environment. [[The tech tree model suggests that explicitly drawing out tech trees is important]]. There is something about “carrying capacity” ### Related * [[neumannOneProcess2020]] * [[Knowledge frontier]] * [[Frontier Technology]] * [[§Tech Tree Model of Heuretics]] * [[Evolutionarily Stable Strategy]]  [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/A+heuretic’s+impact+is+not+endogenous+to+the+technology+but+depends+on+the+environment) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/A+heuretic’s+impact+is+not+endogenous+to+the+technology+but+depends+on+the+environment)