Virtuous Cycles

Published: 17 May 2021

A cycle is something which repeats over and over again. Clothes go through a cycle. You put them on. You take them off. You wash them. You fold them. Then you put them on again. On and on it goes until the stress of the experience renders the clothing unsuitable for further use.

Cycles are common. They ought to be. If something is working people are going to continue doing it. If something doesn’t work, people are less likely to continue doing it. So successful things are more likely to lead to the production of cyclicity than failure is.

Since cycles are common and because they ought to be common we’re going to see them in many different cycles over the course of our life. Given their nature we’ll also see the same cycles repeated many times. As a result, getting an understanding of cycles is important. Just like basic math skills are certain to find application because of the generality of mathematics, an understanding of cycles is sure to prove useful because of the omnipresence of cycles.

This blog post is about how not all cycles are alike. It explores how some cycles have valuable properties that a wise person can take advantage of to get better outcomes for themselves and the people around them. In particular It is about a type of cycle people commonly call a virtuous cycle. Virtue means to show high moral standards. So a virtuous cycle is a label used to get at the idea that not only is a cycle occurring, but that the cycle tends to make things better over time.

One notable virtuous cycle, notable because of how effective it has been throughout time, is the reproductive cycle. In the case of clothing the end of the cycle is the destruction of the clothing, but the reproductive cycle takes advantage of wear and tear. Instead of the stresses destroying, the the reproductive cycle turns the stress into a means by which organisms are improved. Some organisms die out, but the ones which don’t are the ones which continue to reproduce. This produces not just a cycle, but a cycle which gets more fit over time.

A virtuous cycle is one in which each stage of the cyclic process helps to improve the next stage and at the end of it the last stage loops back around to the first stage. This sort of system can end up optimizing itself to greatness with relatively little effort on the part of the person who worked to set up the cycle.

The reproductive cycle is a great example of how powerful virtuous cycles can be after many iterations, but it is a harder example of the cycle for some people to wrap their heads around. The timescale of the virtues expression and the gain in fitness can be lead to a revelation on a longer time scale. Long time scales and fast thinking don’t play well with each other. So it is worth giving more examples of virtuous cycles.

Another example of a virtuous cycle are most online platforms that allow users to post content which have a revenue sharing model wherein users who post content receive income in proportion to the popularity of their content. On a platform like that the people who create good content keep producing it, because they know they will get paid for doing so. This ends up creating more and more content over time. That good content attracts audience. This results in greater revenue. Which attracts more people. Which leads to a competition in producing good content. Which leads to greater content. Which leads to greater revenue. Which attracts more people. So as time goes on the platform ends up having people who are producing truly professional content and being rewarded for doing so.

A third example of a virtuous cycle is bootstrapping an intelligence such that it can play a game at a superhuman level. If you start with something that makes random moves and have it play against itself it will make terrible moves, but presumably one of the agents will eventually win. That win can be used as signal to determine what good play actually looks like. The game playing agent can be modified by that signal such that in the future it plays a little better. Now you can have the agent which is slightly better play against itself. Doing this repeatedly leads to a better and better agent. After many iterations the the resulting game playing agent will be better than the best humans. This type of virtuous the cycle has the name of self play in the context of machine learning research.

At this point you should have an idea of what virtuous cycles are about. They are about a loop in which improvement occurs. This is a pretty simple idea. So why it is worth thinking about more deeply?

Let’s say you are trying to do something hard. Maybe you are trying to become the best in the world at something or you are trying to start a billion dollar company.

In a situation like that the task is so hard that it isn’t reasonable to expect that you will achieve your goal in a short time frame. Yet you think in real time. You can’t afford the cost of fully thinking through the consequences of everything that you need to do. So you are going to end up making an approximation.

If you don’t recognize that virtuous cycles exist then you are likely to make a bad approximation. Your approximation is going to be conditioned on where you are versus where you expect to be, but your own current inadequacy is going to dominate the prediction. It will be easy to project a future which looks similar to the past, but if you don’t already have a history of success to motivate you this will result in a lack of motivation. That same lack of motivation can lead to giving up on the hard thing.

The scary thing here isn’t that you were wrong: you aren’t wrong to project your failure. The danger is that you will look correct to yourself. When you give up because of a lack of motivation you are justified in doing so because your lack of motivation is causally connected to your failure. You don’t just fail. You fail because you thought you would fail.

A recognition of virtuous cycles produces a different outcome. While you can’t know the whole future you can take a shortcut by appealing to the properties of virtuous cycles to know that improvement occurs and that improvement is substantial. Now, despite being limited in time, you have a cost effective way for your brain to make a decent prediction about the future that suggests success. So now you don’t give up, because of a lack of motivation. You go on to accomplish all that you dreamed and more.

Now your prediction also looks good in hindsight.

Notice that you are going to think you are right whether you go down the path without understanding and the path with understanding. In both cases your overarching prediction is justified by your most probable experience, because your most probable experience is a function of what you do and what you do is conditioned on your expectations about what the future holds for you.

So understanding of the cycle is critical for success. The difference between failure and success was perseverance when operating under a virtuous cycle. You’ve likely heard it said before that the trick to succeed is to keep failing until you don’t. That is because learning is a type of virtuous cycle wherein your failures are signal which improves your future actions. Wise people recognize this and love getting signal about their failures. People who don’t recognize this see their failures in a different way.

When failure and weakness isn’t opportunity, people can think of it like damage. Something to defend themselves from. Something to avoid. They can quit going down the route they were going down. Worse, they are no longer inside the virtuous cycle when they do so. A kind of inevitability of success is now lost to them, because they didn’t recognize the processes that were operating on them.

Since recognizing that cycles exist and their properties are critical to our success it would be good to be able to discriminate between the cycles we are in. In order to do so I have two tools that I used to understand what is happening in a cycle.

The first is measurement. Measuring what is actually happening tells you what the cycle is actually doing at the present moment and in the past. If you do that for a while you end up getting a signal that is telling you how things are going.

What it doesn’t tell you, but what it seems to tell you, is how things will go in the future. For that historical data can be misleading. A trick I’ve found to getting around this is to work backward. Just assume that whatever is rewarded is going to be the thing that ends up happening. If the reward indicates that you are going to trend in the direction you want to go and the measurements are also saying you are heading in that direction then you have a lot of reason to be confident that the cycle is actually taking you in the direction you think it is.

There is a kind of intentionality that can be applied here. You have a bit of a superpower.

You know what a virtuous cycle is. You know how to create one. Just like a person can make a hammer a person can make a virtuous cycle. Just like you can use a hammer to solve a problem you can use a virtuous cycle to solve as a tool.

Are there things you should be rewarding but aren’t? Are there places where feedback loops should be created? If you are already in a cycle is there a way to go through it more quickly so that you can get more benefit from that cycle?

Understanding implies the existence of underwalking which implies the existence of undersprinting. So get going. Knowing without applying means little.