A few more snippets......................

 .................from Radical Uncertainty:  Decision Making Beyond The Numbers by John Kay and Mervyn King:

Evolution has produced a collective intelligence and social norms and institutions which are the 'secret of our success'; these social capabilities provide the reason that humans dominate the planet.

The World Values Survey shows a strong positive correlation across countries between per capita income answers to the question 'Do you think that most people can be trusted?'

Most behaviour is the product of both nature and nurture.  The biological determinism that it is 'all in our genes', and the behaviourist claim that the mind is a 'blank slate' on which anything can be written, are both untenable.

Evolution has fitted humans to deal with many kinds of radical uncertainty encountered in large worlds.  Different attitudes to uncertainty influence the chances of survival of individuals and groups.

. . . as Taleb has emphasised, evolution favors those who survive, and they are not necessarily those who maximise expected value.  Perhaps rational economic man dies out because no one would want to mate with him.

Humans are all better off because we are all different, and because there is no single way to be rational.

Scary.....................................

Gone but not forgotten.........................

 ...............................................Sean Connery.

The Longest Day

Goldfinger

The Man Who Would Be King

Molly Maguires

The Untouchables

The Hunt For Red October

The Rock

Entrapment

Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade

This day in history........................

   November 1, 1952:  The world's first hydrogen bomb was exploded in a test on some unfortunate atoll in the Pacific Ocean.  The difference, for those who care, between an atomic bomb and a hydrogen bomb may be found here.

Opening paragraphs..........................

      From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.  There was a wistaria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children's feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust.

-William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

Ed. Note: Your editor confesses to finding Faulkner heavy going hard work.  No denying the man was a craftsman with words and has much to teach about life its ownself, but..........

the infinite permutations of life....................

 "While we can never render complexity simple, we could embrace it as an adventure, calling us to investigate the infinite permutations of life that it contains. Surrendering agency, action and adventure for convenience is a miserable bargain. In the uncharted world, who is content to be left hugging the shore when we could use our freedom to explore."

-Margeret Heffernan, Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

via

Opening paragraphs.....................

      I am an invisible man.  No.  I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.  I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind.  I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.  Like the bodiless heads you sometimes see in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.  When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.

-Ralph Ellison, from the Prologue to Invisible Man

selective attention test

Did you see the person dressed in the gorilla suit who enters the picture, walks slowly across the screen, thumps her chest, and moves off the screen after about nine seconds?  If you did not, you are not alone - about 70% of the subjects in the experiments did not notice the appearance of the gorilla.  And most were astonished to discover that they had missed the gorilla when the video was replayed to them.  Kahneman argues that the experiment reveals that humans are 'blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.'  But how should we interpret the result?  Is it the result of a human failing?  Or a human strength?  Surely it is sensible when asked to carry out a specific task to blot out any extraneous observations irrelevant to the task, and the experiment demonstrated the power of human capacity for concentration.

     When confronted by the challenges of living in a complex world, we know that there are many stimuli that we would do well to ignore in order to concentrate on the matter at hand.  Indeed, the phenomenon of 'blindness', far from being a failing, may be regarded as a positive virtue.  The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi has found that individuals are happiest when in 'flow', completely focused on difficult but rewarding activities.

-John Kay and Mervyn King:  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-making Beyond The Numbers

Differently the same...................

 "The imperfect is our paradise," Wallace Stevens wrote.  If the entry of genetics into the human world carried one immediate lesson, it was this: the imperfect was not just our paradise; it was also, inextricably, our mortal world.  The degree of human genetic variation—and the depth of its influence on human pathology—was unexpected and surprising.  The world was vast and various.  Genetic diversity was our natural state—not just in isolated pockets in faraway places, but everywhere around us.  Seemingly homogeneous populations were, in fact, strikingly heterogeneous.  We had seen the mutants—and they were us.

-Siddhartha Mukherjee,  The Gene: An Intimate History

Can I get an Amen..................................?

 "If lockdown were a treatment undergoing a clinical trial, the trial would be halted because of the side effects. "

-as excerpted from this letter

It's a good thing "social" media hadn't.................

 ................................been invented yet, or things might have gotten really nasty:

"At the beginning of the contest the Progress had declared that Huey would not resort to criticism of his enemies but would discuss issues.  Then, with a fine disregard for logic or consistency, the paper predicted that his speeches would be a welcome contrast to the 'tawdry howls of his senile, asinine, scurrilous' foes."

-T. Harry Williams, Huey Long

Ed. Notes: The contest was for a seat in the U. S. Senate.  The Progress was a newspaper controlled by Huey.  The year was 1930.

It's good to remember.............................

 

via

Yeah, what he said....................

“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”

-G.K. Chesterton

A few morsels.................................

"The idea is that you have to take risk to get ahead, but no risk that can wipe you out is ever worth taking."

"You can plan for every risk except the things that are too crazy to cross your mind."

"A good rule of thumb for a lot of things in life is that everything that can break will eventually break."

"In fact, the most important part of every plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan."

-Morgan Housel, from the chapter Room for Error in his The Psychology of Money:  Timeless Lessons On Wealth, Greed, and Happiness

It's Miller Time.................................

On persistence..............

 The important thing is how we work with something that isn't working.  Being pig-headed and repeatedly doing the same thing over and over again is not the answer.  Persistence should be coupled with the ability to adjust how you approach your challenge.  Trying multiple angles is the key to making your persistence work for you.

-Ben Aldridge, How to Be Comfortable With Being Uncomfortable

Stop it..............................

 “You are not a failure until you start blaming others for your mistakes”

-John Wooden

good ideas/bad ideas.........................

"History is littered with good ideas taken too far, which are indistinguishable from bad ideas."

-Morgan Housel

Wishing and hoping..........................

 When we agree to live simply, we have little to protect and no desire for acquisition, even for acquisition of any “moral capital.” When we imagine that we are better, holier, higher, more important to God than others, it is a very short step to “justified” arrogance or violence toward those others. It is almost inevitable, in fact, and we are witnessing today how it manifests itself at every level of our societies. If we could eliminate such manufactured and desired superiority, religion might finally become nonviolent in thought, word, and deed. 

-Richard Rohr, as cut-and-pasted from here

Even 93,000,000 miles away...............

 ..........don't you think it has something to say about our climate?

From the wondrous Astronomy Picture of the Day site, where you can learn lots of cool stuff.

Fun with numbers...........................

 NPR’s “Weekend Edition” tried to illustrate the US national debt by saying, “If you stack up 14.3 trillion dollar bills, the pile would stretch to the moon and back twice.”

That does not help. Indeed, it is triply unhelpful, since most of us lack an intuitive grasp either of how far away the moon is or of how many dollar bills there are to the yard, and even if we had both we would still be stuck with the question of whether $14.3tn was a worryingly large debt or not.

More useful is to think of the debt as a sum per person. At the end of 2019, US federal debt was nearly $23tn, which is about $70,000 per US resident. I don’t know whether that is more or less alarming than trying to measure it out in trips to the moon but it is certainly vastly more informative.

-Tim Harford, as lifted from here

On the uneven scales of judgment................

       It's possible to statistically measure whether some decisions were wise.  But in the real world, day to day, we simply don't.  We prefer simple stories, which are easy but often devilishly misleading.

      After spending years around investors and business leaders I've come to realize that someone else's failure is usually attributed to bad decisions, while your own failures are usually chalked up to the dark side of risk.  When judging your failures, I'm likely to prefer a clean and simple story of cause and effect, because I don't know what is going on inside your head.  "You had a bad outcome so it must have been caused by a bad decision" is the story that makes the most sense to me.  But when judging myself I can make up a wild narrative justifying my past decisions and attributing bad outcomes to risk.

-Morgan Housel,  The Psychology of Money:  Timeless Lessons On Wealth, Greed, And Happiness

Luck...................................

 Years ago I asked economist Robert Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, "What do you want to know about investing that we can't know?"

     "The exact role of luck in successful outcomes." he answered.

      I love that response, because no one actually things luck doesn't play a role in financial success.  But since it's hard to quantify luck and rude to suggest people's success is owed to it, the default stance is often to implicitly ignore luck as a factor of success.

-Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money:  Timeless Lessons On Wealth, Greed, And Happiness

A lifetime of learning.............................

 . . . we can learn from out failures only if we accept responsibility for them and examine exactly why we failed.  Blaming someone else and shirking responsibility is a missed learning opportunity.

-David Clark, The Tao of Charlie Munger

Pascal's wager........................

 If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is....

..."God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. "No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all."

Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

-Blaise Pascal, Pensees  (easy version is here)

Waxing philosophical.........................

 Virgil spent some time with God that night, thinking about the way things were—about how somebody like Jud Windrom might now be lying dead somewhere, for no discernible reason—and why they were like that, and why a believer like himself would be going around cursing as he did: goddamnit.

     Virgil held intricate unconventional beliefs, not necessarily Christian, bun not necessarily un-Christian, either, derived from his years of studying nature, and his earlier years, his childhood years, with the Bible.  God, he suspected, might not be a steady-state consciousness, omnipotent, omnipresent, timeless.  God might be like a wave front, moving into an unknowable future; human souls might be like neurons, cells of God's own intelligence. . . . 

      Far out, dude; pass the joint.

     Whatever God was, Virgil seriously doubted that he was worried too much about profanity, sex, or even death.  He left the world alone, people alone, each to work out a separate destiny.  And he stranded people like Virgil, who wondered about the unseen world, but were trapped in their own animal passions, and operated out of moralities that almost certainly weren't God's own, if, indeed, he had one.

     Virgil further worried that he was a guy who simply wanted to eat his cake, and have it, too—his philosophy, as a born-again once pointed out to him, pretty much allowed him to carry on as he wished, like your average godless commie.

     He got to "godless commie" and went to sleep.

     And worried in his sleep.

-John Sandford, Rough Country:  A Virgil Flowers Novel

The more things change............................

 Astonishingly rapid now is the progress of society . . . but whither the progress is to lead, and where it is to end - except in the bosom of the Almighty, where it began - human imagination cannot conceive.

-excerpted from The Economist in 1853, and found here

Hallmarks...............................

       A hallmark of true expertise and insight is making complex subjects understandable.  A hallmark of mediocrity and bad strategy is unnecessary complexity—a flurry of fluff masking an absence of substance.

-Richard P. Rumelt,  Good Strategy/Bad Strategy:  The Difference and Why It Matters

Grappling...........................

 The sensible answer to the question 'Will there be another global financial crisis in the next ten years?' is 'I don't know.'  Both professional economists and economic agents, whether business or households, grapple with the question of 'What is going on here?'  When experts claim knowledge they do not and could not have, they invite the response that people have 'had enough of experts.'

-John Kay and Mervyn King,  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers

Mutually constitutive............................

 The ultimate success of a ruler thus derives from his ability to recognize the mutually constitutive relationships between political power, military force, prosperity, and justice for his people.

-Alan Mikhail,  God's Shadow:  Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

Riding the wave.......................

      Major Devereaux, with twenty-seven years of service, was aware that the lives of men are dictated, to an extent far greater than most men wish to admit, by events beyond their control.  Man rides the ocean of history and does what he can to weather its storms.

-Louis L"Amour, Under The Sweetwater Rim

A foolish idea long departed..................

       One day in 1933, Arthur Krock, the Washington correspondent of The New York Times, met Huey Long coming out of the Senate.  Huey stopped Krock and said that he could not understand the paper's treatment of him:  it opposed him editorially but carried lengthy accounts of his speeches.  "Why do you print what I say?" he demanded.  "We have this foolish idea that the news columns should be honest," Krock explained, "and since you make news, we print it."  The Kingfish seemed dumbfounded.  "Godddamn it! I wouldn't run a newspaper that way if I owned one," he said.

-T. Harry Williams, Huey Long

Inversion...........................

       Inspiration came to Sanger unexpectedly in the winter of 1971—in the form of inversion.   He had spend decades learning to break molecules apart to solve their sequence.  But what if he turned his own strategy upside down and tried to build DNA, rather than break it down?  To solve a gene sequence, Sanger reasoned, one must think like a gene.

-Siddhartha Mukherjee,  The Gene:  An Intimate History

About strategy.............................

      Unfortunately, good strategy is the exception, not the rule.  And the problem is growing.  More and more organizational leaders say they have a strategy, but they do not.  Instead, they espouse what I call bad strategy.  Bad strategy tends to skip over pesky details such as problems.  It ignores the power of choice and focus, trying instead to accommodate a multitude of conflicting demands and interests.  Like a quarterback whose only advice to teammates is "Let's win," bad strategy covers up its failure to guide by embracing the language of broad goals, ambition, vision, and values.  Each of these elements is, of course, and important part of human life.  But, by themselves, they are not substitutes for the hard work of strategy.

-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy:  The Difference and Why It Matters

On voting....................

The Licking County Board of Elections has their "A" game working.  Lots of people helping lots of people vote.  Ample spacing for those worried about getting too close to people.  Easy traffic flow.  Machines that are easy to operate, let you double check your vote, and generate a paper ballot.  What more could you ask for.*

*that was a rhetorical question, but if I could get what I asked for, it would be to be delivered from any further political advertising for the next month.

We don't normally quote Woodrow Wilson......

 ..............but when we do, it is because he says stuff like this:

The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.

-as excerpted from this Morgan Housel post

Ah, history......................................

      At the turn of the sixteenth century, most of the era's expanding empires faced the same challenge:  minority rule.  Whether in the Americas or in Asia, small bands of military elites conquered vast new territories, thereby gaining the right to rule over huge populations.  The ascendent Muslim Mughals, for example, moved south from Central Asia to India, where they governed an enormous restive population of Hindus and other non-Muslims.  The Aztecs, in their conquest of the Yucatan peninsula, ruled over peoples who shared neither their culture nor their worldview.  And European global expansion in this period brought the continents's armies face to face with peoples they had never before encountered, in places they did not fully understand.  These early modern empires changed the ethnic, linguistic, economic, and religious landscape of the world, creating new cultural synergies and new political possibilities even as they foreclosed others.

-Alan Mikhail. God's Shadow:  Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

Ed. Note:  The context for the paragraph above was the author's acknowledgment that much of the early Muslim Ottoman empire was populated by Christians, with Muslims being the ruling minority.

a cool young man............................

Michelangelo's David's not a warrior,
not just a clever boy—he's a cool young man.
Weight on the right leg, eyes left
brow crinkled, calculating, estimating
                           the text says Goliath is already down. 

Left arm to his left shoulder and the stone-pouch,
right hand down at his side,
holds the ends
                   long leather sling straps—he has not
thrown it yet.  Stands still, in a deep place
a hinge in time 

modesty
and naked grace.

-Gary Snyder, Young David in Florence, Before the Kill

more than you wanted to know about Michelangelo's David may be found here

Re: Personal wholeness..................

      The disease of the modern character is specialization.  Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough.  The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people.  The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint—that of individual persons.  We then begin to see the grotesquery—indeed, the impossibility—of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness.

-Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America:  Culture & Agriculture

Wisdom...............................

 The reason I like blogging over other social media formats is that bloggers seem to understand that they will disagree with some things written by a blogger and agree with other things written by the same person.  They don’t get too ruffled about it.  Life is too short and they have their own blog.  When I read what others write, I take the information in and don’t feel any strong obligation to express either agreement or disagreement on every topic.  I take it in and move on.  I also appreciate the differing points of view.

-Kurt Harden, from this post, which reminded me of this:

Fifty years ago...........................

The Rolling Stones.......................................Street Fighting Man

On Goodhart's Law...........................

       Reflexivity undermines stationarity.   This was the essence of Goodhart's Law - any business or government policy which assumed stationarity of social and economic relationships was likely to fail because its implementation would alter the behaviour of those affected and therefore destroy that stationarity.   In an early example of reflexivity, Jonah prophesied the destruction of Nineveh, having received inside information concerning God's plant to punish the city (his journey to Nineveh was interrupted by a bizarre encounter with a whale).  But after his arrival the citizens repented on hearing his forewarning and the city was spared.  This outcome 'displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry', feeling (unlike many modern forecasters) despondent at the very public refutation of his prediction.  But God persuaded Jonah that the happy outcome was more important than the failure of his forecast.

-John Kay and Mervyn King,  Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers

The biblical story is found in Jonah 3-4.

Goodhart's Law = Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.  Also phrased as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

"What is going on here?"........................

 A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on.  Not just deciding what to do, but he more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation.

-Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy

Fifty years ago..........................

 ........The opening paragraphs to Louis L'Amour's Galloway:

      The old elk walked up the knoll where the long wind blew.  The wolves followed.

     The elk realized what was happening, but he didn't know it was only part of something that had been going on since life began.

      He didn't know that it was because of these wolves or their kindred that he had been strong, brave, and free-running all his past years.  For it was the wolves who kept the elk herds in shape by weeding out the weak, the old, and the inept.

      Now his time had come, and the wolves were there.

A secret power..............................

 

the hidden justice...............................

 A man only begins to be a man when he ceases to whine and revile, and commences to search for the hidden justice which regulates his life. And he adapts his mind to that regulating factor, he ceases to accuse others as the cause of his condition, and builds himself up in strong and noble thoughts; ceases to kick against circumstances, but begins to use them as aids to his more rapid progress, and as a means of the hidden powers and possibilities within himself.

-James Allen, As A Man Thinketh

Much truth here..........................

 Reading dispels prejudices which hem our minds within narrow spaces. One of the things that will surprise you as you read good books from all over the world and from all times of man is that human nature is much the same today as it has been ever since writing began to tell us about it.

-Earl Nightingale

Lest we forget..........................

 12 Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

-Matthew 7:12   The Holy Bible, King James Version 

Just another thing to be thankful for........

 “Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.”

-Erwin Schrödinger

Fifty years ago.......................

Santana.......................................Hope You're Feeling Better

Sort of like us humans........................

      Ironically, the very features that enable a cell to read DNA are the features that make it incomprehensible to humans—to chemists, in particular.  DNA, as Shrödinger had predicted, was a chemical built to defy chemists, a molecule of exquisite contradictions—monotonous and yet infinitely varied, repetitive to the extreme and yet idiosyncratic to the extreme.

-Siddhartha Mukherjee,  The Gene:  An Intimate History

Let's talk...................................

 . . . humans are social animals and communication plays an important role in decision-making.  We frame out thinking in terms of narratives.  And able leaders - whether in business, in politics, or in everyday life - make decisions, both personal and collective, by talking with others and being open to challenge from them.  Humans, uniquely, produce artefacts of extraordinary complexity and are able to do so only by the successful development of networks of trust, cooperation and coordination.  Market economies function only by virtue of being embedded in a social context.

-John Kay and Mervyn King,  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers

Assuming that is not a good thing.................

 Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology because is cabbages up one's mind.

-Charlie Munger

If the first chapter is any indication...............

...............this will be an enjoyable book.  The yellow highlighter is already working over time.  A few snippets:

 " . . . humans do not necessarily comprehend the consequences of their innovations."

"But we do not make good decisions by professing knowledge we do not and cannot have."

"Uncertainty is the result of our incomplete knowledge of the world, or about the connection between our present actions and their future outcomes."

"With radical uncertainty, however, there is no similar means of resolving the uncertainty - we simply do not know.  Radical uncertainty has many dimensions:  obscurity; ignorance; vagueness; ambiguity; ill-defined problems; and a lack of information that in some cases but not all we might hope to rectify at a future date.  These aspects of uncertainty are the stuff of everyday experience.

This explains a lot...........................

 Most important challenges are inevitably judgements which reflect an interpretation of a particular situation.  Different individuals and groups will make different assessments and arrive at different decisions, and often there will be no objectively right answer, either before of after the event.

-John Kay and Mervyn King,  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers

Adaptable...................................

 The meaning of rational behaviour depends critically on the context of the situation and there are generally many ways of being rational.  We distinguish axiomatic rationality, as used by economists, from evolutionary rationality, was practiced by people.  Many so-called 'biases' are responses to the complex world of radical uncertainty.  Evolution in this uncertain world has led characteristics which are primarily adaptive to become embodied in human reasoning.  Humans are successful at adapting to the environment in which they find themselves, and have not evolved to perform rapid calculations of well-defined problems at which computers excel.  This is because the problems which humans face, whether sparkling at dinner party conversations or conducting international trade negotiations, are not well-defined problems amenable to rapid calculation.

-John Kay and Mervyn King,  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers

Got that right...................................

 Sensible - adaptive - public policy and business strategy cannot be determined by quantitative assessments of policies and projects, made by an industry of professional modellers using probabilistic reasoning.  In this book we explain how it is that so many clever people came to believe otherwise - and why they are wrong.

-John Kay and Mervyn King,  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers

The Week in Pictures.............................

 ..............................more fun here.

Morgan Housel..............................

 ..............writes some smart stuff.   A few highlights from his post on "Common Causes of Very Bad Decisions":

Incentives can tempt good people to push the boundaries farther than they’d ever imagine.

Tribal instincts reduce the ability to challenge bad ideas because no one wants to get kicked out of the tribe.

Lots of little errors compound into something huge.

Underestimating adaptation, both present and future, leaving you convinced that history will repeat itself and bitter when it doesn’t.

Being influenced by the actions of people who are playing a different game than you are.

Wrongly assuming that the information you have at your disposal tells a complete picture of what you’re dealing with. 

The most deadly.........................

 

I'm glad somebody has time to figure all this out.   Here is the ranked list of actors/actresses who have—in film—killed the most people.   I must not get out much.  Never heard of the "winner."  

Ed. Note: No, Helen Mirren is not on the list.  Just liked the clip from RED

via

Vitamin D............................

 ........................................read this post if you want to know more about it.  A snippet here:

The gold standard of medical research is the randomised controlled trial. Back in May, we had no such test for vitamin D and Covid-19. Now we do. The world’s first randomised control trial on vitamin D and Covid has just been published. The results are clear-cut. The trial, which took place in Spain at the Reina Sofía University Hospital, involved 76 patients suffering from Covid-19. Fifty of those patients were given vitamin D. The remaining 26 were not. Half of those not given Vitamin D became so sick that they needed to be put on intensive care. By comparison, only one person who was given Vitamin D requiring ICU admission.

Opening paragraphs................

 This little book arose from a course of public lectures, delivered by a theoretical physicist to an audience of about four hundred which did not substantially dwindle, though warned at the outset that the subject-matter was a difficult one and that the lectures could not be termed popular, even thought the physicist's most dreaded weapon, mathematical deduction, would hardly be utilized.  The reason for this was not that the subject was simple enough to be explained without mathematics, but rather that it was much too involved to be fully accessible to mathematics.  Another feature which at least induced a semblance of popularity was the lecturer's intention to make clear the fundamental idea, which hovers between biology and physics, to both the physicist and the biologist.

-Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?

Career advice........................

 Three rules for a career: (1) Don't sell anything you wouldn't buy yourself; (2) Don't work for anyone you don't respect and admire; and (3) Work only with people you enjoy.

-Charlie Munger

In the year 2020............................

 "All we can know is that we know nothing.  And that is the sum total of human wisdom."

-Leo Tolstoy

Still a good question......................

 

No matter how holy the motives..............

“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

-Robert A. Heinlein

Nature's way.......................

“Nature does not make mistakes. Right and wrong are human categories.”

-Frank Herbert

Hmm.....................

 “All evil is good become cancerous.”

-Isaac Asimov

Sharper focus.............................

 

Not crazy...........................

 

Forget this at your own peril........................

 We have the worst system except for all the others.  Remember that.

-Kurt Harden, from this post on the debate last night

Got the undisciplined part down..............

 “Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”

-Richard Feynman

Crazy, but not that crazy.................

“To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people.”

-Charles T. Munger

An invitation to a calamity.................

 “We are all members of the same flawed species. Putting our moral vision into practice means imposing our will on others. The human lust for power and esteem, coupled with its vulnerability to self-deception and self-righteousness, makes that an invitation to a calamity, all the worse when the power is directed at a goal as quixotic as eradicating human self-interest.”

-Steven Pinker

Sometimes he was mistaken..................

 It is a fact that no man improves much after the age of 60 and after 65, most suffer a really alarming decline. I could give some examples, but at the advice of my publisher will refrain from doing so.

-Henry Louis Mencken

A writer's craft..............................

I find myself amused by this unassuming paragraph, a bridge in the action, written by John Sandford in Dark of the Moon:

That was in the afternoon, in which some other things happened, but none that turned out to be important.

I read the rest of the chapter, unsuccessfully looking for the "some other things."  

The kind of blog........................

 ........this blog aspires to be when it grows up.

Opening paragraphs..................

 The war had not yet come to us.  We lived in fear and hope and tried not to draw God's wrath down upon our securely walled town, with its hundred and five houses and the church and the cemetery, where our ancestors waited for the Day of Resurrection.

     We prayed often to keep the war away.  We prayed to the Almighty and to the kind Virgin.  We prayed to the Lady of the Forest and to the Little People of Midnight, to Saint Gerwin, to Peter the Gatekeeper, to John the Evangelist—and to be safe we also prayed to Old Mela, who during the Twelve Nights, when the demons are let loose, roams the heavens at the head of her retinue.  We prayed to the Horned Ones of ancient days and to Bishop Martin, who shared his cloak with the beggar when the latter was freezing, so that they were both freezing and pleasing to God, for what's the use of half a cloak in winder, and of course we prayed to Saint Maurice, who had chosen death with a whole legion rather than betray his faith in the one just God.

-Daniel Kehlmann,  Tyll

Re-reading Shakespeare.................

The following lines are all to be found in Act 2, Scene 2 in Hamlet

Ay, sir; to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't.

Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god!

I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is
southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy,
comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-
comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or
poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor
Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the
liberty, these are the only men.

I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle: I'll observe his looks;
I'll tent him to the quick: if he but blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds
More relative than this: the play 's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

Quite the weekend...................

 Executing father-of-the-bride duties flawlessly:

Let's dance..........................

 

A happy day...............................