I’ve always enjoyed Taleb’s use of stories for teaching a lesson. Given today is Thanksgiving, the above video is a reminder of the scores of fallacies we entertain daily with confidence.
Category: Thoughts
The Reward
Reward is a function of risk
A Terrible Dilemma
“Perhaps the deepest problem is the problem of conjecture in foreign policy. Each political leader has the choice between making the assessment which requires the least effort or making an assessment which requires more effort. If he makes the assessment that requires the least effort, then as time goes on it may turn out that he was wrong. And then he will have to pay a heavy price. If he acts on the basis of a guess, he will never be able to prove that his effort was necessary. But he may save himself a great deal of grief later on. If he acts early, he cannot know whether it was necessary. If he waits, he may be lucky or he may be unlucky. It is a terrible dilemma.” — Henry Kissinger 1963
The above quote surmises the ever-present dilemma any leader faces when making choices (or not). We grant too much agency to our leaders and neglect the role luck plays in their leadership outcomes.
Measure What Counts
This past summer, I took professor Roberto Rigobon’s MIT Executive Education course on Macroeconomics, and I found it to be a fantastic course on a broad subject. I enjoyed the material as presented by him and his engaging and charismatic teaching style. He provides excellent insights into the inner workings of the forces that shape our economies and always brings it back to the individual and our choices around our values and how they, in turn, shape and inform our choices.
In this short webinar, Rigobon discusses the importance of measuring what counts. He notes that too often, we measure outcomes and not the processes that lean to them, and as a result, we create statistics that give us a false sense of accomplishment.
F + C = T
I have been thinking a lot about the importance of curated content. It just seems that with all that specialization of information, we are losing a sense of balance and context.
Our generation is obsessed with the facts. Every news organization prides itself in presenting the facts. Politicians pride themselves on being guided by facts. Yet facts alone do not equal truth. The formula for truth is:
F + C = T
Facts + Context = Truth
Curated content provides context to the information presented, be it an art exhibit or a series of news articles. And even if you disagree with those curating, it is a lot easier to understand what is being presented, knowing its context. Without context, the truth remains elusive, and the facts amount to noise.
Killing Ideas
“Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.”
Heinrich Heine
I still remember the confused and scared emotions when I first saw the images of books burning. It was an old World War II documentary back in the late 70s, early 80s. The date fails me, but I remember it was not long after my dad had died. My mother dealt with the depression of her husband’s loss with an addiction to valium.
Initially, books were a liberation for me from the fears and pains of the world I had been thrust into by my father’s unexpected death. I found refuge in the adventures of heroes like Conan the Barbarian, a loner who, through his brawn and smarts as a thief, made his way in an unforgiving, violent world. I also found wonder in sci-fi stories by Asimov and Clarke. I was moved by Shelly’s version of Frankenstein, which to my young minds surprise, was very different from the movies I had grown up watching. So it was with a sense of horror that I watched Nazis burning books on a pile. Why would anyone do such a thing?
Over the years, I learned that book burning was not a Nazi phenomenon but a weapon used by those seeking to control people’s minds. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 came into my life during my teens. It brought the whole subject into context, helping me frame lifelong values around all forms of censorship. Censorship is the first sign of tyranny, a signpost to sound the alarm.
When you burn books, you are attempting to exterminate ideas. And when you have no more books to burn, the only repository of ideas left are minds.
I find book-burning, for any reason, repulsive, and I consider it a crime against humanity. Humanity would be nothing without ideas. Our culture, our traditions, the very essence of what makes us humans comes from our thoughts. Books are mediums that document ideas, good or bad. And they serve as a testament to where we have been and where we can go. They help to inspire and to warn.
During the summer of 2013, while on a business trip to Berlin Germany, I found time to visit the site of the book burnings of 1933. There is a memorial there, a room with empty bookshelves. The moments I was there brought me full circle to that moment so many years ago when I was a kid.
Jackasses from every corner of the political spectrum will argue that banning books is for the good of this or that group. They will claim that it’s not all books, just the ones that “shouldn’t be.” Fear these people and do not trust their intentions; they are never good. Anyone that seeks to erase ideas will rewrite histories and have no restraint from erasing people.
Here Be Dragons
Love walking through San Francisco. Nuggets of art peppered throughout the city.
Red Skies Earth
The fires engulfing most of California have been casting a red film across the sky. And it feels like living on Mars. It is a bit distressing yet somehow peaceful.
Something about nature’s subtle reminder that it will be here long after us places everything into context.
CYBERTONIA 