The Goal: Meaningful Signal in a Noisy Environment

Discerning Signal vs Noise requires a focus.

Precision vs Accuracy is important here, since bias can tell us that we’re being accurate when we’re being precise (recency/confirmation bias), we need both in order to trust.

How do we filter through the relationships between experiences, stimulus, and story to know which ones are relevant to the story we want, and which are bullsh*t.

First, we need Precision.

We need to know that when we hear or see something, we’re seeing or hearing it accurately. This doesn’t involve story, but in the sense of story this is about finding commonalities between all of the data points in the story. Those commonalities should generally either be the same, or we need to find a way to abbreviate them so we can describe them. If we can describe them, we can change them all at once If we can accurate identify them…

Then, we need Accuracy.

We need to be able to hit the mark – to accurately reshape our stories to the ones we want. We need to know that the signal (relationships) we’ve identified can be where they need to be, and where that “need to be” place is. Essentially, the practice of obtaining accuracy is what we’re covering at length this week.

We’ll be getting into the specifics around how this applies to your money, and how to find signal in all the noise of wanting things or experiences later in this course. For now, it’s important to know why each is important, particular when it comes to finding your signal.