Go out of your way to be good to an older person. You'll discover that you can make somebody's entire day with a smile, a phone call, some fresh-picked daisies, or whatever it is you've got.
Our elders have so much to give to those who listen, but that are the ones who deserve to receive. Don't pass up the chance to brighten their lives. An old adage reminds us that they need only a little, but they need that little—a lot.
...................................................This is what it looks like.
Long-time readers will remember that my library card is one of my most valued possessions. Still, it important to know that said library is filled with traps, snares, sink-holes, and very long cul-de-sacs. I fell into one of those places around Thanksgiving. It was my intention, as the days got darker, to read some of the very important books that The-Wonder-That-Is-Amazon recently delivered to our home. Instead, I picked up a C. J. Box book at the library. Eight books later, I am not quite halfway through his Joe Pickett series. Sometimes the mind just wants to spend time in very long cul-de-sacs. The very important books will just have to wait. I highly recommend him to you.
...........................................he can stop with 100.
Most professions would benefit from at least one a day month where you did nothing but think. No meetings, no calls, no deliverables. Just a seat on the couch thinking about what’s working, what’s not, and what to do about it. One day a week is necessary for some fields. But it’s rare, because sitting on the couch doesn’t look like work, so managers raise an eyebrow – even if it’s obvious that if your job involves thinking you should be given time to think.
-Morgan Housel, from this post
..........................Step #1 is the hard part.
Step 9. You need to set the right expectations. . . .Whatever your reasoning, just go into it with low expectations. If you surpass them, that’s icing on the cake.
Mentally, we are all time travelers We might exhort one another to live in the moment, but the truth is that we can't, we don't—and wouldn't want to. What give life meaning is the rich and constant interplay between past, present, and future.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
47. Survey the circling stars, as though yourself were in mid-course with them. Often picture the changing and re-changing dance of the elements. Visions of this kind purge away the dross of our earth-bound life.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Seven
Despite all the high-level concepts consultants advertise, the bread and butter of every consultant's business is undoing entropy—cleaning up the debris and weeds that grow in every organizational garden.
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One of the clearest examples of entropy in business was the gradual decay of the order imposed on the early General Motors by Alfred Sloan. In this decay, one can see the value of competent management by its absence. Indeed, you cannot fully understand the value of the daily work of managers unless one accepts the general tendency of unmanaged human structures to become less ordered, less focused, and more blurred around the edges.
-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
It is astonishing what you can do when you have a lot of energy, ambition and plenty of ignorance.
The greatest real thrill that life offers is to create, to construct, to develop something useful. Too often we fail to recognize and pay tribute to the creative spirit. It is that spirit that creates our jobs. There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile, especially when it is new and different.
Growth and progress are related, for there is no resting place for an enterprise in a competitive economy.
We must move toward a soundly based and widely distributed economic well-being. This is the 'theory of plenty' as distinguished from the 'theory of scarcity' which has dominated our recent economic thinking and politics.
Bedside manners are no substitute for the right diagnosis.
I never give orders. I sell my ideas to my associates if I can. I accept their judgment if they convince me, as they frequently do, that I am wrong. I prefer to appeal to the intelligence of a man rather than attempt to exercise authority over him.
Get the facts. Recognize the equities of all concerned. Realize the necessity of doing a better job every day. Keep an open mind and work hard. The last is most important at all. There is no short cut.
If we are all in agreement on the decision - then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.
It turns out that, if you ask yourself “Can I keep going?” rather than “Can I make it to the finish?” you’re far more likely to answer in the affirmative.
-Alex Hutchinson, from this essay
I hedge this out by investing like the glass is half full but saving like the glass is half empty.
-Ben Carlson, one fairly smart guy, shares his investment strategy
Yes, the actual act of making the work is sometimes a solo activity (drawing, writing, editing a film, etc) but the real driving force behind every creative pro is their community: their clients, collaborators, peers and the rest of the humans in the complex web of symbiotic relationships that give us inspiration, support and (ultimately) an income. Creativity cannot live in a vacuum. We depend on each other, like the members of any other ecosystem.
-Chase Jarvis, as cut-and-pasted from here
The ease of underestimating how bad things can be in the short run and how good they can be in the longer run is a leading cause of bad forecasts, bad decisions, and confused people. It’s common because it’s easier to go all in on either optimism or pessimism – having one foot on each side feels waffling.
But straddling both sides is usually the best stance.
-Morgan Housel, from this post
". . . the existential challenge of today's capitalism is to break the habit of both companies' and governments' reluctance to encourage innovation, despite their words.
Schumpeter's 'perennial gale of creative destruction' has been replaced by the gentle breezes of rent-seeking. Corporate managerialism is gradually squeezing the life out of enterprise as big companies in cosy cahoots with big government increasingly dominate the scene." . . .
". . . The economist Luigi Zingales argues that most of the time 'the best way to make lots of money is not to come up with brilliant ideas and work hard at implementing them but, instead, to cultivate a government ally."
-Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
Eliminating the power of choice and action, Popper believed, is what autocrats seek to do. Identifying choices for ourselves is how we remain free.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
". . . improvements come from reexamining the details of how work is done, not just from cost controls or incentives."
-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
His name was Dave Farkus, and he'd recently taken up fly-fishing as a way to meet girls. So far, it hadn't worked out very well.
-C. J. Box, Force of Nature
Those who say that indefinite growth is impossible, or at least unsustainable, in a world of finite resources are therefore wrong, for a simple reason: growth can take place through doing more with less.
Much 'growth' is actually shrinkage. Largely unnoticed, there is a burgeoning trend today that the main engine of economic growth is not from using more resources, but from using innovation to do more with less: more food from less land and less water; more miles for less fuel; more communication for less electricity; more buildings for less steel; more transistors for less silicon; more correspondence for less paper; more socks for less money; more parties for less time worked.
-Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
The difference between Hopper's version of history and IBM's ran deeper than a dispute over who should get the most credit. It showed fundamentally contrasting outlooks on the history of innovation. Some studies of technology and science emphasize, as Hopper did, the role of creative inventors who make innovative leaps. Other studies emphasize the role of teams and institutions, such as the collaborative work done at Bell Labs and IBM's Endicott facility. This latter approach tries to show that what may seem like creative leaps—the Eureka moment— are actually the result of an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together. Neither was of looking at technological advancement is, on its own, completely satisfying. Most of the great innovations of the digital age sprang from an interplay of creative individuals (Mauchly, Turing, von Neumann, Aiken) with teams that knew how to implement their ideas.
-Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
The innovative success of a market economy does not result from individuals or firms trying to 'optimize' but from their attempts by trial and error to navigate a world of radical uncertainty. In practice, successful people work out how to cope with and manage uncertainly, not how to optimize.
It makes sense to live our lives under the assumption that physical laws hold and do not change, but it does not make sense to live our lives under the assumption that the world of human affairs is stationary.
In a world characterised by radical uncertainty, there are many things we don't know, even with hindsight. And others we know only with hindsight. But since we are reluctant to acknowledge the role that radical uncertainty—and luck—play in human affairs, we apply hindsight anyway.
Good decisions often work out badly, and bad decisions sometimes work out well.
Different people will make different judgments faced with the same information because, given radical uncertainty, many different interpretations of the same data are possible.
Human intelligence is collective intelligence, and that is the source of the extraordinary human economic achievement.
The abject failure of models in the global financial crisis has not dented their popularity among regulators.
Certainty is unattainable and the price of near certainly unaffordable.
-John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond The Number
F. Scott Fitzgerald, describing his own mental breakdown, observed that 'the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.' And the mark of the first-rate decision-maker confronted by radical uncertainty is to organize action around a reference narrative while still being open to both the possibility that this narrative might be false and that alternative narratives might be relevant. . . . The willingness to challenge a narrative is a key element not only in scientific progress but in good decision-making.
-John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers
"the thing I have noticed is that when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you're measuring."
-Jeff Bezos, as quoted here
Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize for economics at least in part due to the beauty of his models, once quipped that he thought the data left out of his models might be more important that the data that went in. It is an explosive and challenging remark, revealing the intrinsic difficulty of models: they will always be subjective and incomplete representations of complex reality.
-Margeret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
You cannot derive a probability or a forecast or a policy recommendation from a model; the probability is meaningful, the forecast accurate or the policy recommendation well-founded only within the context of the model. . . . And our own experience in economics is that the most common explanation of a surprising result is the someone has made an error. If finance, economics and business, models will never describe 'the world as it really is'. Informed judgment will always be required in understanding and interpreting the output of a model and in using it in any large-world situation.
-John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision=Making Beyond The Numbers
22. It is man's particular distinction to love even those who err and go astray. Such a love is born as soon as you realize that they are your brothers; that they are stumbling in ignorance, and not willfully; that in a short while both of you will be no more; and, above all, that you yourself have taken no hurt, for your master-reason has not been made a jot worse than it was before.
-Marcus Aurelius. Meditations, Book Seven
What distinguishes the dark night from a depression is the fact that a person in the dark night normally has an intuition that these trials are going someplace. One perceives at times the fruits of the dark night in one's changing perspectives such as the growth of a nonjudgmental attitude toward everyone, greater detachment from things and persons, humility, and trust in God.
-Thomas Keating, Intimacy With God
15 And he said unto them, Take heed, and keep yourselves from all covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.
-The Holy Bible, Luke 12:15
One of the flaws in the way we recount stories of innovation is that we unfairly single out individuals, ignoring contributions of lesser mortals. . . . Innovation is not an individual phenomenon, but a collective, incremental and messy network phenomenon.
-Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
Two equally skilled chess players sit waiting for the game to begin—which one has the advantage? Two identical armies meet on a featureless plain—which one has the advantage? The answers to these questions is "neither," because advantage is rooted in differences—in the asymmetries among rivals. In real rivalry, there are an uncountable number of asymmetries. It is the leader's job to identify which asymmetries are critical—which can be turned into important advantages.
-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
We, human beings, are a species that's not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we're designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in out self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people. And in order to throw them off the trail, our brains often keep "us," our conscious minds, in the dark. The less we know of our own ugly motives, the easier it is to hide them from others.
Self-deception is therefore strategic; a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly. Understandably, few people are eager to confess to this kind of duplicity. But as long as we continue to tiptoe around it, we'll be unable to think clearly about human behavior. We'll be forced to distort or deny any explanation that harks back to our hidden motives. Key facts will remain taboo, and we'll forever be mystified by our own thoughts and actions. It's only by confronting the elephant, then, that we can begin to see what's really going on.
-Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant In The Brain
So what, exactly, is the elephant in the brain, this thing we're reluctant to talk and think about? In a word, it's selfishness—the selfish part of our psyches.
But it's actually broader than that. Selfishness is just the heart, if you will, and an elephant has many other parts, all interconnected. So throughout the book, we'll be using "the elephant" to refer not just to human selfishness, but to a whole cluster of related concepts: the fact that we're competitive social animals fighting for power, status and sex; the fact that we're somethings willing to lie and cheat to get ahead; the fact that we hide some of our motives—and that we do so in order to mislead others. We'll also occasionally use "the elephant" to refer to our hidden motives themselves. To acknowledge any of these concepts is to hint at the rest of them. They're all part of the same package, subject to the same taboo.
-Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant In The Brain
"The worst problems for people," says primatologist Dario Maestripieri, "almost always comes from other people."
The earliest Homo Sapiens lived in small tight-knit bands of 20 to 30 individuals. These bands were our "groves" or "forests" in which we competed not for sunlight, but for resources more befitting a primate: food, sex, territory, social status. And we had to earn these things, in part, by outwitting and outshining our rivals.
This is what's known in the literature as the social brain hypothesis, or sometimes the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. It's the idea that our ancestors got smart primarily in order to compete against each other in a variety of social and political scenarios.
"The way the brains of human beings have gotten bigger at an accelerating pace," writes Matt Ridley in his book on evolutionary biology, The Red Queen, "implies that some such within-species arms race is at work." Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom also emphasize intra-species competition as an evolutionary cause of our intelligence. In an influential 1990 article on language evolution, they write, "Interacting with an organism of approximately equal mental abilities whose motives are at times outright malevolent makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition."
Robert Trivers goes even further. He argues that it was the arms race between lying and lie detection that gave rise to our intelligence. "Both the detection of deception and often its propagation have been major forces favoring the evolution of intelligence. It is perhaps ironic that dishonesty has often been the file against which intellectual tools for truth have been sharpened."
-Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant In The Brain
"Good strategies for a radically uncertain world avoid the pretense of knowledge — the models and bogus quantification which require users to make up things they do not know and could not know. . . . Good strategies for a radically uncertain world acknowledge that we do not know what the future will hold. such strategies identify reference narratives, visualise alternative future scenarios and ensure that plans are robust and resilient to a range of plausible alternatives. . . . Robust and resilient plans confer positive options — opportunities to take advantage of developments which are not currently foreseen with any specificity or perhaps at at all — and avoid negative ones, which close off alternatives and limit future developments to those which can currently be envisioned. "
This is an interesting and worthwhile book. If it was 100 pages shorter, I would have recommended it.
Thales of Miletus, a Greek philosopher, made important discoveries in geometry and careful observations of the frequency of natural events. His prediction of the solar eclipse in 585 BC was described by Isaac Asimov as 'the birth of science'. Thales also used his scientific knowledge to anticipate an especially plentiful olive harvest. He bought options on all the olive presses in Miletus, and when demand soared he rented them out at a substantial profit. According to Aristotle, Thales' motive was not primarily pecuniary; he aimed to provide an answer to the question so often thrown at philosophers and economists: 'If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"
-John Kay and Mervyn King: Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers
Οὔ τι τὰ πολλὰ ἔπη φρονίμην ἀπεφήνατο δόξαν
"A multitude of words is no proof of a prudent mind."
That’s a big, broad takeaway of Covid that repeats itself throughout history: Nothing too good or too bad stays that way forever, because great times plant the seeds of their own destruction through complacency and leverage, and bad times plant the seeds of their own turnaround through opportunity and panic-driven problem-solving. The same story, again and again.
-Morgan Housel, from this blog post
*A theory from Carl Jung that an excess of something gives rise to its opposite.
Andre-Louis, on his side, had made the most of his opportunities. You behold him at the age of four-and-twenty stuffed with learning enough to produce an intellectual indigestion in an ordinary mind. Out of his zestful study of Man, from Thucydides to the Encyclopaedists, from Seneca to Rousseau, he had confirmed into an unassailable conviction his earliest conscious impressions of the general insanity of his own species. Nor can I discover that anything in his eventful life ever afterwards caused him to waver in that opinion.
-Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche
Says Sherlock Holmes:
"That process," said I, "starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. It may well be that several explanations remain, in which case one tries test after test until one or other of them has a convincing amount of support. We will now apply this principle to the case in point. . . ."
"There remained the third possibility, into which, rare and unlikely as it was every thing seemed to fit. Leprosy is not uncommon in South Africa. By some extraordinary chance this youth might have contracted it. . . ."
Enters the "great dermatologist", Sir James Saunders, who says:
"It is often my lot to bring ill-tidings and seldom good," said he. "This occasion is the more welcome. It is not leprosy"
"What?"
"A well-marked case of pseudo-leprosy or ichthyosis, a scale-like affection of the skin, unsightly, obstinate, but possibly curable, and certainly noninfective. Yes, Mr. Holmes, the coincidence is a remarkable one. But is it coincidence? Are there not subtle forces at work of which we know little? . . ."
-Arthur Conan Doyle, The Blanched Soldier
Ed. Note: In this story, the narrative is told by Holmes himself, for "The good Watson, had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action which i can recall in our association."
". . . innovation is not usually a choreographed, planned, or managed thing. It cannot be easily predicted, as may a red-faced forecaster has discovered. It runs mostly on trial and error, the human version of natural selection. And it usually stumbles on great breakthroughs when looking for something else; it is heavily serendipitous."
-Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
Go out of your way to find humility when things are going right and forgiveness/compassion when they go wrong. Because it's never as good or as bad as it looks. The world is big and complex. Luck and risk are both real and hard to identify. Do so when judging yourself and others. Respect the power of luck and risk and you'll have a better chance of focusing on the things you can actually control. You'll also have a better chance of finding the right role models.
-Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons On Wealth, Greed, And Happiness
.................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.
...............................................Sean Connery.
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| The Longest Day |
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| Goldfinger |
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| The Man Who Would Be King |
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| Molly Maguires |
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| The Untouchables |
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| The Hunt For Red October |
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| The Rock |
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| Entrapment |
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| Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade |
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.
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..........
"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
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
"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
"If lockdown were a treatment undergoing a clinical trial, the trial would be halted because of the side effects. "
................................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.
“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
"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
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
“You are not a failure until you start blaming others for your mistakes”
"History is littered with good ideas taken too far, which are indistinguishable from bad ideas."
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
..........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.
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
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
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
. . . 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
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.
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
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