Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you strong evidence of submission.
Humans somehow fail to recognize situations outside the contexts in which they usually learn about them.
Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance, you study every day and learn something in proportion to your studies. If you do not feel that you are going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized.
We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It.
No, businessmen as risk takers are not subjected to the judgment of other businessmen, only to that of their personal accountant.
But the worst touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This “goal-driven” attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.
The Nation-state: apartheid without political incorrectness.
One general, Fabius Maximus was nicknamed Cunctator, “the Procrastinator.” He drove Hannibal, who had an obvious military superiority, crazy by avoiding and delaying engagement.
It is also related to a problem called denigration of history, as gamblers, investors, and decision-makers feel that the sorts of things that happen to others would not necessarily happen to them.
We practitioners and quants aren’t too fazed by remarks on the part of academics – it would be like prostitutes listening to technical commentary by nuns.
The only way we have left to control suicide-terrorists would be precisely to convince them that blowing themselves up is not the worst-case scenario for them, nor the end scenario at all. Making their families and loved ones bear a financial burden – just as Germans still pay for war crimes – would immediately add consequences to their actions. The penalty needs to be properly calibrated to be a true disincentive, without imparting any sense of heroism or martyrdom to the families in question.
Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much – but if you do, do not make big scientific claims.
Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners.
It was a different feeling: it is hard to focus on a conversation, especially when it is mathematical, when you have just personally earned several hundreds of times the annual salary of the researcher trying to tell you that you are “wrong,” by betting against his representation of the world.
Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed – but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.
We do not realize the full extent of the difference between near and far futures. Yet.
The market is like a large movie theater with a small door.
Anything one needs to market heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one. And it is highly unethical to portray something in a more favorable light than it actually is.
Things are always obvious after the fact. The civil servant was a very intelligent person, and this mistake is much more prevalent than one would think. It has to do with the way our mind handles historical information.
The Pyrrhonian skeptics were docile citizens who followed customs and traditions whenever possible, but taught themselves to systematically doubt everything, and thus attain a level of serenity. But while conservative in their habits, they were rabid in their fight against dogma.