Checking in with................

 

...............................Barry Ritholtz

There is a flaw in the human wetware that leads to a demand for predictions.  The evolutionary propensity humans suffer from is the desire for specific claims from self-confident leaders.

To avoid bad advice, you must always ask yourself, "What is this person selling?"  Once you figure out what the product is, you can put the sales "advice" into better context.

. . .  we must constantly check our own knowledge base as it ages and decays over time.

Recognizing how little you know is a superpower.  If we were less certain of ourselves and had more humility, we would all be better investors.

Pessimism is a bet against human ingenuity, and for half a million years, that has been a losing bet.

You might be surprised to learn that I believe the three most important words in investing are, "I Don't Know."

"I don't know" is a very powerful tool that will help keep you out of trouble a lot, if only you have the courage to say it.

wisdom..........................

. . . getting another opinion seldom is a lengthy process and not getting extra insight may wind up gobbling massive amounts of time.

-Michael Wade, from here

If the past few years have taught anything.....

 ............it is do not trust the "fact-checkers."

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Acceptance............................

 One is acceptance that an insane market doesn’t mean a broken market. Crazy is normal; beyond the point of crazy is normal. Every few years there seems to be a declaration that markets don’t work anymore – that they’re all speculation or detached from fundamentals. But it’s always been that way. People haven’t lost their minds; they’re just searching for the boundaries of what other investors are willing to believe.

-Morgan Housel, from this blog post

What a country....................................

     Madison's genius was to understand that the best bulwark against tyranny was not virtue—virtue helps, but should never be relied upon—but ambition countering ambition, faction countering faction.
      You see it even in the confirmation process for Neil Gorsuch, Trump's supremely qualified and measured Supreme Court nominee.  He's a slam dunk, yet some factions have scraped together a campaign to block him.  Their ads are plaintive and pathetic.  Yet I find them warmly reassuring.  What a country—where even the vacuous have a voice.
      The anti-Trump opposition flatters itself as "the resistance."  As if this is Vichy France.  It's not.  It's 21st-century America.  And the good news is that the checks and balances are working just fine.

-Charles Krauthammer, from his 3/24/17 essay found in this book

Antidotes.........................

     Habits deliver numerous benefits, but the downside is that they can lock us into our previous patterns of thinking and acting—even when the world is shifting around us.  Everything is impermanent.  Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you.
     A lack of self-awareness is poison.  Reflection and review are the antidote.

-James Clear, Atomic Habits

Check.........................

Certainty............................

     In the midst of this mutilation and mayhem, Holmes (Oliver Wendell Jr.)  did an extraordinary thing:  he road tested his beliefs.  Lying in a hospital on Harrison's Island, watching his comrades dying around him and listening to rumors that the building was about to be shelled, he interrogated his philosophical convictions in order to discover whether there were any he now might want to revise.  He was undergoing an experience of terror that nothing in his life had prepared him for, and he decided to solicit his own reactions to it...He found he did not require a religious faith.  Uncertainty - "I am to take a leap in the dark" - turned out to be all the certainty he needed.  The assurance that he had done his duty was a wholly adequate consolation.

-Louis Menand,  The Metaphysical Club:  A Story of Ideas in America

Fun with quotes...........................

“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.” 
-attributed all over the Intertunnel to Mark Twain

Now, I'm not certain why people doubt that Twain said this, but many, lacking kindness, do.  For instance, here.  So, the search for accuracy via the internet (which may be a contradiction in terms), leads us to Christian Bovee, who may also have said this, "At all events, the next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to quote another's wit."  Can I get an Amen?

Checking in with Montaigne..............

“The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness. ” 

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” 

“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.” 

“If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.” 

"There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”

“Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.” 

“I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.”

"Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.”

“Que sçais-je?" (What do I know?)” 

Wiki on Michel de Montaigne is here.

Freeing...................................

      Once we are committed to a spiritual path, it is essential to check that over the months and years we are actually freeing ourselves from hatred, grasping, pride, jealousy, and above all from the ego-centeredness and ignorance that cause them.  That is the only result that counts.
-Matthieu Ricard, as excerpted from here

Uh-oh...........................................................

“Our irrationalities will necessarily overwhelm us unless we do everything we can personally so as consistently to check our work and have it challenged by smart and talented people we encourage to 'tear it apart.'  That’s because we don’t see things as they really are and are consistently and dangerously much less rational than we assume.” 
-Robert Seawright

thanks

Mad.................................

REALITY, n.  The dream of a mad philosopher.
-Ambrose Bierce,  The Devil's Dictionary

We're 1/12th of the way.....................

.................into the new year.   How you doing?

Think like a researcher........................

"At some point along the way... I learned to think like a researcher. When presented with a newspaper story, a "fact" from a friend, or a seemingly plausible argument, I learned to treat it like a witness to be interrogated, instead of a truth revealed."
-Gene Callahan, as excerpted from this blog post

How big is big.......................?

The always interesting Via Meadia blog, the home of one of my favorite bloggers, Walter Russell Mead,  has a post up about China and water and big, big problems.  In said post can be found this excerpt:

"The Gobi desert is expanding by an area almost the size of Rhode Island every year."

Hmmm..............I don't know if that is a big deal or not.  As usually happens at times like this, the Oracle Google was consulted.   Here are a few tidbits:

The Gobi, at 500,000 + square miles, is the largest desert in Asia, but only the fifth largest on the planet.  Can you guess the largest?  If your first reaction was  "Sahara",  we both got it wrong.    Apparently sand is not a requirement for a desert.   The largest desert in the world is the Antarctic (at 5,339,573 square miles) and the second largest is the Arctic.  Next comes the Sahara, followed by the Arabian desert.    The tenth largest is the Great Basin, which covers most of Nevada and a goodly bit of Utah.

As it turns out, Rhode Island, the smallest state, only has 1,045 square miles of area.  Doesn't seem like that big a deal to add 1,045 to 500,000 every year.  Not much of a growth rate percentage wise.  Unless,  of course, you live there.  We live in Licking County, which has 688 square miles of area.   If some desert came and ate our county in a shade less than two years,  I would think that was a pretty big deal.

Nope.......................

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Just check him on Facebook...............

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