facility..........................

 

The facility with which people bore the hardships of others was amazing.

-Louis L'Amour,  Shalako

shocking......................

 

The claim that Wall Street is gambling-adjacent is something I used to associate with cranky old people. Now I am old and cranky.

-Arnold Kling, from this episode

hard to tell........................

 

Outliers...........................

 

Meanwhile, the conventional path parades its rewards right in front of you every day: the promotions, the vacations, the security. You can see exactly what you’re giving up, while what you’re building remains invisible.

Most people optimize for comfort. They choose being one blade of grass among many over being a tall poppy, the safety of the group over the risk of criticism for being different.

Outliers pick their own game, choose how to keep score, and then pay the price to play it.

-Shane Parrish, from this week's edition

narrowing.............................

 

Serendipitous connections become less likely as increased communication narrows our tastes and interests.  Knowing and caring more and more about less and less.  This tendency may increase productivity in a narrow sense while decreasing social cohesion.

-Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone

consistency......................

 

"Never buck the other man's game, Val," Reilly said, "but watch the percentages.  It is not one or two pots that make a poker player, but the consistency with which he plays."

-Louis L'Amour, Reilly's Luck

Naval Ravikant.....................

 

Understand ethical wealth creation is possible.  If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.

Ignore people playing status games.  They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.

You're not going to get rich renting out your time.  You must own equity—a piece of a business—to gain your financial freedom.

-Naval Ravikant, from this Twitter thread

messy..........................

 

     What I love about Barry's work is that he views investing as a game of emotions and behavior, rather than one driven by intelligence and data.  That's important, because a) it's accurate and b) behavior is messy (if not sloppy), unpredictable, varies from person to person, and—unlike data—doesn't pretend to offer a simple answer.

-Morgan Housel, from his introduction to this book

On the importance of positioning.............

 

While most people understand that reputation matters, few recognize how it functions as a strategic asset that either unlocks opportunities or leaves you perpetually trapped. The mechanics of this process mirror an unlikely source of wisdom: the game of billiards.

A master billiards player approaches the table with dual vision. While amateurs focus solely on pocketing the immediate shot, professionals focus on how the current shot positions them for the next one. This deceptively simple insight—that present moves determine future options—perfectly captures how reputations function in our interconnected world.

-Farnam Street, from this week's episode

confine........................

 

Maria.   Ay, but you must confine* yourself within the modest limits of order.

Toby.    Confine?  I'll confine myself no finer that I am.  These clothes are good enough to drink in, and so be these boots too.  And they be not, let them hang themselves by their own straps.

-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, or, What You Will:  Act 1, Scene III

*i.e., clothe

image via

Why are we governed badly................?

 

....................Arnold Kling weighs in:

But I want to articulate two reasons for government failure. One is that without the profit incentive, government selects for the wrong behavior in managers. The second reason is that government tries to do too much. As a sprawling enterprise, government is bound to be clumsy.

One of my aphorisms is that an organization gets what it selects for. Successful firms select for people who can manage the business so that it meets customer needs.

Government and non-profits do not select for managers with the ability to deliver results. They select for people who are good at playing the game of status and power within an organization.

kids of all ages......................

 

Instead of being stuck interacting with electronics, children benefit greatly from interacting with the natural world.  The lack of time that children now spend outdoors immersed in the restorative benefits of nature was coined "nature-deficit disorder" by bestselling author Richard Louv.

-Gad Saad, The Saad Truth About Happiness

choices...........................

 Playing your own game in life means understanding what truly matters to you. It’s about self-awareness and knowing your strengths and weaknesses. It’s about recognizing what brings you joy and what drains you.

-Vishal Khandelwal

     via

Evolution.............................

 

..............................can be messy and painful:

The world rewards those who can best adapt to change. Legacy companies struggle to adapt because their businesses are organized to dominate a market that no longer exists. The game has changed, but media is far from dead.

an edge..........................

 

You have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.

-Charlie Munger, from here

thanks Chris

the chess-board.................

 The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.  He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or the strong prejudices which may oppose it.  He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful.  If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Games..............................

 I have a three-layer model of human behavior, in which we play games at the level of the individual, the tribe, and society. The games that we play at each level can undermine the other levels.

-Arnold Kling

Yes, but..........................

.......................eventually someone will win it.  In the meantime, I get at least $4 worth of enjoyable daydreams.  As investments go, that is better than some.  Back story here:

 What would you do if you won the Mega Millions?  It’s now up to a record $1.55 billion!  We would start a not-for-profit to educate people not to play the lottery.  Why? Your odds of winning are 1 in 302.6 million…you are 70 times more likely to die in a shark attack than win this lottery.

But it’s even worse than that because only 50% of the proceeds of ticket sales go into the prize pool.  Half of your “investment” is gone the second you buy a ticket.  The other half is gone when they do the drawing, unless lightning strikes, which is unfair to lightning because you are more likely to get hit by real lightning.  In other words, it’s a total waste of money. 

But people still play, and dream.  We think about this because government sponsors this crazy lottery at the same time it shirks its own fiduciary responsibilities. 

a metaphor............................

 

In the game of bowling, your score depends on where you roll the ball. You either knock the pins down or you don’t.

For toddlers, bowling alleys invented bumper bowling.. If you roll a ball that would have landed in the gutter, scoring zero, it instead hits a bumper and ricochets toward the center of the lane. You get points every time, whether you are good at aiming the ball or not. I see bumper bowling as a metaphor for what our culture is looking like nowadays.

-Arnold Kling, from here

image via

Stringing words together........................

 ........................in a fun sort of way:

“I’ll have to ask you to forgive me for sounding like I’m suffering from Sudden Onset Multiple Personality Disorder — that’s a thing, right? — because I’m only following a news cycle that spins and flips around like two fat kids riding a seesaw mounted to a trampoline inside a bouncy house.”