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The danger, and you see it often in investing, is when people become too McNamara-like – so obsessed with data and so confident in their models that they leave no room for error or surprise. No room for things to be crazy, dumb, unexplainable, and to remain that way for a long time. Always asking, “Why is this happening?” and expecting there to be a rational answer. Or worse, always mistaking what happened for what you think should have happened.
The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a neverending chain of absurdity, confusions, messy relationships, and imperfect people.
Does Not Compute
collabfund.com
To Eliminate Undesirable Behavior, You Have to Eliminate The Stimuli That Precedes It
Summary:
Self-control problems require structuring life to avoid stimuli that tempt bad behavior, similar to avoiding walking past a tavern if you're an alcoholic.
Investors can improve mental hygiene by unfollowing negative sources and following those with a long-term perspective to reduce hyper reactivity to market fluctuations. Changing exposure helps in turning down the amplitude of emotions.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
But if you 're an alcoholic, you would be crazy to walk past the tavern and say, i will demonstrate the will power not to walk in. You can't do that, and you know you can't, so you walk on the other street. And that's the kind of governor that people need to put on their behavior. If you know that you have self control problems, you have to structure your life so that the things that tempt you into bad behavior don't get surfaced in your stimuli. And that's very easy for investors to do. If you, if you know you have a tendency toward hyper reactivity to, you know, red arrows pointing downward on stock market displays, then turn that web site off, un follow that person On twitter. Follow people who take a longer term perspective and aren't rattled by this kind of thing. Improve your mental hygiene. You can't turn yourself into someone who's unemotional, but you can turn down the amplitude of your own emotions if you change what your exposures are.
#4 Jason Zweig — Elevate Your Financial IQ
The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish
The tension between the ambiguity of individuals' goals and large scale collective organization
Transcript:
Speaker 2
Here's the pessimistic nightmare. It is really good and healthy for human beings to live in an ambiguous environment with a pluralistic set of goals, many of which are in Kuwait. That is an essential tension with the methods of large scale collective organization. If it's true that for an organization to cohere, it needs to have clear policies so it can act coherently, then we should not expect that kind of ambiguity to survive at scale. And I think what you're describing, so I tend to think about since I'm a philosopher like what makes something constitutively coherent. And what you're describing is a kind of evolutionary process. You know, some organizations are going to be more coherent than others and some people are more interested in coherence. And the people that are more interested in following the strict outcome are going to arise in the organization. And the organizations that have clear outcomes are going to be better at achieving those outcomes. And so our world is going to be full of large organizations staffed with people that have very, very clear specifications of outcomes. And there's something inhumane and bad about that for individuals. But that's what happens when we need to organize in large scale collectives.
Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale
COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life
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