Life presents challenges that require building physical solutions with useful outputs, necessitating deadlines for progress and control.
Deadlines are a modern construct; our ancestors followed a more natural rhythm based on our energy and instinct, not strict time constraints.
Nature's deadlines are determined by the structural complexity needed for solutions to hard problems, so focusing on invariant, abstract aspects early on can help us align with those deadlines.
Quality is important in both consumption and creation, but assessing quality in consumed items can be challenging as it is determined upfront.
Defining quality involves considering an object's ability to solve the problem it was created for, with high quality objects more likely to maintain their category membership over time.
Assessing quality in objects involves looking at their ingredients or components, with fewer ingredients often indicating higher quality, but also considering the heterogeneity of the ingredients in the context of the problem being solved.