when investing....................

 

. . . lean more heavily on emotional intelligence rather than IQ.   Temperament is more important than brainpower in the markets.

-Ben Carlson

Just reading the list....................

 

..............................made me feel smarter.

My uncle is pretty smart..................

 

He collected over 28,000 forecasts made by 284 political analysts, economists, foreign policy bigwigs, and all the usual loud-talking necktie people. What Tetlock found (and I’m condensing 20 years of depressing data here) is that the average talking head was terrible at predicting real-world outcomes.

Not “mildly off.” Not “in the ballpark.” I mean barely better than chance. Turns out your uncle screaming at the TV is statistically equivalent to a CNN pundit in a bowtie.

-Eric Barker, from his post, 4 Secrets to Smarter Thinking

In praise of crooked trees..........

 

We have convinced ourselves that being “smart” is the same thing as being useful. It's not.

Language is a tool used to shape reality. When we continue to culturally degrade language that once pointed toward something difficult and valuable, we devalue the very thing it pointed toward. We no longer have a reliable way to name genuine excellence because we have spent the word on light bulbs, algorithmic patterns, and passive-aggressive comebacks.

It is time to retire “smart” from this type of casual drivel.

Let it rest until we're able use it to describe a mind that sees the wonder others dismiss, holds conclusions lightly but courageously, changes its mind when the evidence demands it, and remains humble in the face of what it does not yet understand.

-Rob Firchau, from this post

Smarts.......................

 

The smartest person in the room, I’ve learned, is usually the person who knows how to tap into the intelligence of every person in the room.

-Scott Kelly, as quoted here

a super power..................

 

A well-educated workforce always powers the economy higher.

-Barry Ritholtz

AI versus EI........................

 

Innovate. Break the rules, or at least use them to the human advantage. Be unpredictable in the best possible ways. Look up from that screen. Be a human.

-Kurt Harden, as he ponders Michael Wade's latest substack

All kinds.........................

 

The older I get the more I realize how many kinds of smart there are. There are a lot of kinds of smart. There are a lot of kinds of stupid, too.

-Jeff Bezos, as quoted here

begin..........................

 

The willingness to figure things out as you go is often the only difference between those who achieve difficult things and those who never begin.

-Farnum Street, from this episode

Good questions................

 

But now the machine has begun to encroach on domains of our intellectual lives that many had thought were essentially immune from competition with computing intelligence.

     The potential threat to our entire sense of self as a species cannot be overstated.  What does it mean for humanity when AI becomes capable of writing a novel that becomes a bestseller, moving millions? Or makes us laugh out loud?  Or paints a portrait the endures for decades?  Or directs and produces a film that captures the hearts of festival critics?  Is the beauty or truth expressed in such works any less powerful or authentic merely because they sprang from the mind of a machine?

-Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West

smarts..................................

 

I make progress by having people around me who are smarter than I am and listening to them.  And I assume that everyone is smarter about something than I am.

-Henry J. Kaiser

granted....................

 

To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

Ed. Note:  Methinks if he had added "heart" to "intellect and judgment", he would have been on to something.

Restless intelligence.......................

 

...................or whatever you want to call it.

The trouble with really smart people......

 Comedian Robin Williams was a terrible student. During a macroeconomic class at College of Marin, Williams’ final paper contained a single sentence to his professor: “I really don’t know, sir.”

He failed the test, but it’s the right answer to most economic problems.

-Morgan Housel, from here

It's a process........................

 Human intelligence is collective. Pretty much everything I know I learned from other people, either directly or indirectly.

-Arnold S. Kling, from here

Re-runs...............................

 Wesco continues to try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric. … It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying, `It’s the strong swimmers who drown.’

-Charlie Munger, from here

by way of

perpetual student...................

  In school, the people who never make mistakes are called “intelligent.” But after we grow up, it’s the people who make mistakes and learn that are truly “intelligent.”

-from this Barking Up The Wrong Tree post

The core............................

 The core here is realizing that people are not spreadsheets. They are emotional, hormonal, misinformed, status-seeking, insecure creatures trying their best to make it through the day. So if you have to choose between understanding how the world should work in theory vs. how it actually works in practice, lean towards the latter. It’s like historian Will Durant once said: “Logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe.” That is so smart.

-Morgan Housel, from here

Smarter.......................

 more fun here

kindred spirits.................................

      On the surface, the two men were quite different.  Churchill was more robust in every way; born twenty-eight years before Orwell, he outlived him by fifteen years.  But in crucial respects they were kindred spirits.  In their key overlapping years in the middle of the century, the two men grapples with the same great questions—Hitler and fascism, Stalin and communism, America and its preemption of Britain.  They responded with the same qualities and tools—their intellects, their confidence in their own judgments even when those judgments were rebuked by most of their contemporaries, and their extraordinary skill with words.  And both steered by the core principles of liberal democracy: freedom of thought, speech, and association.

-Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom