Reflexivity is nodded to in the definition of complex systems in the piece!
I think what you're saying is poverty is actually simple, and the solution is to stop the bad actors causing poverty? But at the same time, you are correctly recognizing that attempts to stop bad actors from causing poverty triggers reflexive responses and cascading repercussions. Which sounds mighty like a complex system?
I think you need to distinguish between complex systems, and byzantine systems. You can have complex systems where every piece shares a common goal, but feedback loops are hard. You can also have systems which, if a common goal was shared, wouldn't be that hard to understand, modelize and optimize, but where the actors of the system are not acting in good faith.
And I agree with the above poster: often, a problem is described as "hard" as a way to make an excuse for the agents. Sure, the problem is hard. The reason why it's hard isn't some esoteric arcane complexity, it's that some of the agents aren't even trying.
No, I'm not saying the problem is simple, but I'm saying that in many of these cases a systematic understanding of the problem isn't what we're lacking in pursuit of fixes - the reason the problem seems so intractable is because parts of the system benefit from perpetuating the problem and take agency to ensure the problem does not get fixed.
Poverty is one of these, but I think Climate Change is the most direct - the climate is complex, but climate change is simple: we're releasing too much carbon into the atmosphere, we have been for a century, and we've known that for at least half a century*. The issue isn't that we don't have the capacity to model or understand the problem, the issue is that powerful actors have used the leverage available to them within the system to prevent us from making changes to fix the problem.
And, you're right, that makes the problem difficult, because the system includes those actors resisting changes to the system, but again, it's not difficult because we don't understand it, it's difficult because we're being actively resisted by people who do not want to solve the problem, and that should be acknowledged by people looking to make it an abstract mathematical modeling problem.
Not the intention at all. The part about mechanistic interpretability was meant to gesture at how building such systems can provide new tool kit for building further intuition and understanding.
Perhaps a failure of communication -- I was indeed attempting to say that Chomsky was wrong and his ideas were interesting, but more or less a dead end.
I have this little bookmarklet in my bookmarks bar that I use constantly. It removes all fixed or sticky elements on the page and re-enabled y-overflow if it was disabled:
A simple salary + percent commission is a great model.
That said, this calculator was built to model/simulate the things that are super common in enterprise SaaS:
1. It takes sellers time to ramp up. Experienced sellers might be willing to jump to your company, but not if they are guaranteed to only get their (relatively) low base salary for 1-2 quarters.
2. If you decide to do a ramp, you have to make a choice about the OTE.
If you can avoid doing these things, that's great. Though whether that will fly largely depends on whether your sales cycle and target talent market supports it!
I wonder if it would be reasonable to offer sellers a sliding scale to trade off their salary and commission rate over, say, ten graduations. Then let them choose whatever scale they want, maybe with some rules about how they can change it etc to prevent high frequency minmaxing.
Some companies do things like this, but I'd be cautious about it.
There's a few things I'd consider:
* If you have a bunch of reps, doing the periodic accounting to cut the right checks becomes more of a pain (though it's a pain anyways)
* When you give a choice, the employee might make what, in retrospect, winds up being the wrong choice. This can lead to pissed off sales people and regrettable churn.
OTOH, sales comp plans change every year anyways, so could just be renegotiated
Oh yeah, i definitely didn't take it seriously. worldgov.org?
The title "Crypto is Inevitable" was not supported in the article.
I do not believe the statement that "crypto is quietly rebuilding the plumbing of finance itself", and regardless of whether that's true, I don't see any reason why it would pick up any adoption beyond the speculators.
My feedback for you is that this community expects a disclaimer when you're promoting your own product, and that the product is too tangential for this plug not to feel spammy.
I think what you're saying is poverty is actually simple, and the solution is to stop the bad actors causing poverty? But at the same time, you are correctly recognizing that attempts to stop bad actors from causing poverty triggers reflexive responses and cascading repercussions. Which sounds mighty like a complex system?