Category: Notes

5 Ideas By Matthew Clifford on the Infinite Loops Podcast

Introduction by Infinite Loops host Jim O’Shaughnessey:

Matt is the Co-founder & CEO at Entrepreneur First, and Co-founder & NED at Code First Girls. We talk with Matt about:

  • Internet in an era of “dampened variance”
  • Increasing democratic participation
  • Bull and Bear case for creativity
  • What Matt looks for in people before investing
  • Role of geography in entrepreneurship
  • And MUCH more!

Episode link

(Bold is mine)

  1. Variance dampening institutions

    Matt flips Jim’s question by explaining that “weird” has been the default until the last few hundred years

    Jim O’Shaughnessy: Why has the world gotten so fucking weird? So, I like weird. I’m an anomaly, I guess, and because I’m 61 and I love weird, but I’m super excited about what’s going on. I think that we are on the cusp of a golden age, not just in one sector, but in many, many sectors. But to get there, you have to go through some turbulence. You basically tell us that we are in the middle of this turbulence. And so what I’d like you to do is explain your thesis for what got us here, what should we expect?

    Matt Clifford: That’s a big question. I think the way I would think about this is if you zoom out, maybe the first question should be, how did the world get to be not weird? Why should we take that the natural state of affairs is non-weirdness? One way of thinking about this is to say that modernity, however you want to define that… let’s say the last 250ish years, is really about the triumph of non-weirdness. It’s about constant or apparently constant, apparently unstoppable motion towards the reduction of variance in our lives. And if you want to get out of that Hobbsian nightmare, you need to find ways to reduce variance. Liberal democracy, incredible reducer of variance. No longer do you hand over power by having a war or an assassination, you have an election. It’s reduced variance. Monetary economics is a way to tame the business cycle over some period of time. Reduced variance, reduced variance… we’ve developed all these institutions, the rule of law, constitutional rights, all these things make life somewhat more predictable. And so for most of, let’s say, the second half of the 20th century post Second World War, anyone who lived in, for one of a better term, the west, had a life of far less variance than say 3, 4, 5, 10 generations before that. You could call that the triumph of modernity. And then something happened in the midst of these fantastic variance dampening institutions, we somewhat accidentally unleashed the mother of all variance amplifying institutions, and it’s called the Internet. And what the Internet does, is it selects the weird and amplifies it. And so I’ll stop talking, but I think the brief history of the last decade is that we suddenly introduced this variance amplifying institution right into the middle of our somewhat peaceful variance dampened lives and chaos has ensued.

  2. The internet as variance amplifier and ambition

    Matt Clifford: One slightly provocative framing would be that the rise of modernity, the rise of variance dampening institutions was really bad for ambitious people. It was really good for the average person and if you’re a utilitarian, maybe on balance, that’s a trade that we want to take. But why is it bad for ambitious people? Because one of the main ways to reduce variance is to stop a Napoleon invading Europe every time they want show you how smart they are. Insert your favorite example here. And so the apotheosis of this, if you like, is the idea of the career. Napoleon, didn’t set out to have a career. He wasn’t looking to impress his boss. And yet if you look at what the 20th century was about from the perspective of work and ambition, it was really about having these more or less formalized tracks for ambitious people to climb. And it doesn’t mean that if you got to the top of that, you couldn’t be wealthy, powerful, insert your favorite adjective here. But what it did mean was that we more or less knew what someone at the top of that hierarchy could do and what they couldn’t do. In the age of variance amplifying institutions, what you see is the Internet selecting for people that are not willing to have careers. Like if you take Donald Trump, Elon Musk, these are people that were not built to have 20th century careers. They were not built to make their boss look good, to fill in the engagement performance review card at the end of every project and climb up the ladder. And so, one of the reasons… it’s a slightly different point, but one of the reasons I think there’s been such an enormous Renaissance of founding entrepreneurship. I mean, it was partly technologically determined. Partly it’s just that if you’re a super ambitious person today, you actually look back historically, I think, and look, well, actually it was possible to do more as an ambitious person. It was possible to find more leverage, to have fewer constrains in the past. It was then a period of about 50 years, like the great moderation, if you’d like, where a lot of that was constrained. And again, I’m not totally against that, despite both being an ambitious person and spending my entire career, trying to amplify the ambitions of ambitious people. I think in some ways it’s a good thing for the world, but we’re now in this new era where Elon Musk can tweet what he likes and send the pigeons flying and several regulatory agencies flying. Or Donald Trump can be the most powerful man in the world and do what he likes. And these are examples of the Internet as sort of a anti-career institution. An institution that breaks a lot of the assumptions of what ambition should look like.

  3. Bull vs Bear view of the internet as a net good

    Matt Clifford: You can make a bull and a bear case for where we are today in terms of how do we think about allowing each human to fully express all aspects of who they are as you were describing in this sort of internet age. I think the bull cases, well, actually, what you’re talking about, you already alluded to this earlier in the conversation you’re talking about. How do you let each person find hierarchies in which they are comfortable in which they can express who they are, but they have a chance to compete and to rise given that in the world at large, it’s very hard to do that. It’s most of us, if we constrained to the physical world, we’re just going to be in state hierarchies where we always feel unhappy. One of the great things about the internet is it allows these extraordinary niches of interests to come together where, I could be working minimum wage in a job that I hate, but maybe I’m in the top three, most celebrated commenters on this sub Reddit for this interest that I have. And I’m not trying to pretend that we don’t need to do something about the material conditions that person’s life, right. That’s clearly a different question, but there is an extraordinary, if you think about almost the equivalent of biodiversity for ecosystems of interest, genuine hierarchy, diversity, you can be someone within a particular group. I think the internet is the greatest force for that, that there has ever been. And you can even extend this idea into this very fashionable idea of the Metaverse. We can imagine and creating world, whole worlds in which people can fulfill their ambitions and like the fullness of who they want to be in a way that is less damaging to others potentially. I mean, again, like you could say, that’s a very bullish case. There’s lots to critique in that, but there is something about the idea of virtualization as a way to enable many more people to achieve what they want to achieve, because we move from scarcity to abundance or potentially to abundance. Again, lots of footnotes on that, whether actually the metaverse as it is to actually emerging will permit that. I think the bear cases well, actually what the internet does is exposes us to, as you’ve already said, like a global competition where previously there was a local one, it sort of amplifies inequalities rather than dampening them. And so, really, I think the question is, can we get to material abundance quickly enough that the sort of satisfaction of people’s holistic needs beyond the material world is enough where actually being, finding your tribe on the internet is enough because we have co selected, successfully created enough material, abundance that people aren’t worried about where the next meal is coming from. I think if we can, I actually feel very optimistic about the internet as a way of providing outlets for exactly what you’re describing.

  4. This bit reminded me of the efficiency vs equality trade-off in economics (see tweet)

    Jim O’Shaughnessy: That’s just the way networks work. It’s not just human beings, it’s any complex adaptive learning system. The nodes that are finding the right answers, get the most connections and the nodes that are not finding the right answers die. And so, I’ve really had to sit and think about that one for a long time, because, so for example, I changed my opinion about universal basic income, because I think for the first time, really in human history, there is going to be a group of people, and the part I underline is through no fault of their own, who have a harder time adjusting and thriving in this new environment. And so your point that you just made, we can’t have them worried about where their next meal is coming from, because that human is a desperate human and desperate humans are destructive humans and violent, and listen, you don’t really even have to know too much about history to understand that [Kris note: notice this is a pragmatic not moral argument]. So there’s a lot of reasons why, universal basic income is not liked by both sides of the political spectrum in person. But I think that the term that I’ve often used is symbol manipulators. So I am a symbol manipulator. I don’t make anything with my hands. And so if you look at the Forbes 400, the list of the wealthiest people, if you look at the original one in 82, it was all physical things. That generated wealth, it was real estate, it was steel. It was, shipping and or inherited. In fact, I think the majority of the list was inherited sort of this dynastic wealth being passed down and down, which creates an aristocracy, whether you have a formal one or not. Look at the list today, there are, there’s virtually no one on that list who is not a symbol manipulator. Right. I personally think that’s great. You know what? I love Amazon. I love the fact that I can get any (beep) thing I want in at most two days. And if I’m in the city in 15 minutes, right. So I like that, but we do have to figure out a way, which, and I guess maybe it’s just like these conversations bleeding into higher conversations, bleeding in, because without that there could be chaos that we don’t come back from.

    Matt Clifford: Totally. Well, I think its worth sort of thinking about what are the objections that we might have to growing economic inequality and I’m not going to be comprehensive because I’m sure there are people who would have others, but I think one is actually political as though with great economic inequality, be kind of calms, great political inequality. And most of us have an instinctive sense that how rich you are, shouldn’t be the measure of political power that you have. And most of us have a pretty intuitive affinity for the idea of one person, one vote. And so, I think there’s like a set of things that we should worry about as people gain wealth, particularly extreme wealth, does it mean too powerful? And there’s then like a sort of almost like aesthetic thing of what do we do about a world where, like Bezos can fly to space and there are people that can’t eat or whatever. I call that aesthetic because I think it’s, you could frame it as justice, but I think it’s just, for most of us, the idea of sort of waste or maybe that’s actually a bad example that, but frivolous consumption versus like people not being able to eat that feels wrong. And then I guess there’s a thing about sort of lock-in, does it get to the point where a sufficient level of economic advantage closes off the ability for others to ever compete. Because I think most of us have an instinct that dynamism is good and mobility is good. Now I think what’s interesting about all those three things is they’re not actually in my view, objections to economic inequality per se. They’re actually to the conditions within which it occurs. So if we can find ways to have our politics less influenced by economic power, if, as you’ve already said, we can get to the point of economic abundance that no one starves however many rockets, Elon and Jeff flying to space, whatever. And if we can figure out what are the rules of the game, that means that however wealthy people become, you don’t have to be them or be related to them to be successful. Now I’m not saying they’re easy problems, but I think that sometimes, you see people default, the idea that we have to break the underlying creators of variance, the underlying economic engine, that’s allowed people to build in Amazon or a Microsoft or an apple or whatever. I think that’s the wrong instinct. I think it comes back to this, how do we make sure error correction actually functions? Well, we can’t have any of these things that are irreversible, we don’t want to have a static society. And so I would, I think people like you and me should be using our energy to think about how can we craft the rules of the game, such that we still allow people to build enormous companies and therefore enormous fortunes, but they don’t break the system. And it’s the second bit that I think we sort of let go of and I think they’re, without getting too political, I think we are missing a trick. If we jump straight to the idea that there’s something intrinsically broken, if someone becomes a billionaire that that’s not what we should care about, what we should care about, or what are the consequences of that. I don’t think every billionaire is a policy failure, but I do think that if only the children of billionaires can become billionaires, as you were saying, if it, then that’s a policy failure. And so I think it’s how do we harness wealth creation in a way that doesn’t violate those things that we kind of, most of us in intrinsically care about.

  5. Moral luck (a parallel to kindness as epistemic humility)

    Matt Clifford: The idea of moral luck, meaning I think it’s very easy to go through life feeling that you deserve kind of various things, although you don’t deserve various things. Most of us have an intuition that we want to live in a world where people get their just desserts one way or another. But I think, we’ve talked a lot in this conversation about sort of epistemic humility, the idea that we don’t really know anything. I also feel there’s a kind of moral luck humility, which is like, we don’t really get to choose who we turn out to be in many, many ways. And I think if that makes us a little bit more humble in the face of the suffering of others, the success of others, the ups and downs, a little more tolerant of like, what are the, you know… Go back to this idea of error correction. What are the systemic things that we need to prevent anyone falling too far off the edge in one direction? I believe in a world where, to my innovation point, anyone should be allowed to try anything. And if they build something phenomenally valuable, they should be allowed to reap the rewards of that in a pretty unconstrained way. And I think the offsetting force of that is the reminder that the fact that they were the person that could do that, that’s nothing they deserved. And it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t benefit from it, but it should bring with it a humility that allows us to design institutions and systems that mean that none of us can fall too far. [Kris: Super resonant because you know how I feel about the word “deserve”].

The rest of the interview talks about qualities Entrepreneur First looks for when funding founders. The qualities themselves are not surprising but the list is surprising because of how mundane it is. And that is actually uplifting. They have tremendous data on founders and are quite certain it takes at least 6 months of close observation to actually know if a founder will be effective (even after 3 months the data is noisy!). The implication is you should widen the top of the funnel, make low cost bets on many founders which is in direct opposition to overly strict selection criteria. I’ve written about this idea and the math behind it in:

  • There’s Gold In Them Thar Tails: Part 1 (13 min read)
  • There’s Gold In Them Thar Tails: Part 2 (24 min read)

Part of widening the funnel is by expanding geographic search. Matt shares this story of Iranians in Singapore:

It’s an amazing story is that if you look at the list of nationalities by how frequently we’ve invested in people of that nationality, it’s quite surprising. I guess in some places, not that surprising. Like in Bangalore, it’s nearly all people who are Indian. But in Singapore, it’s quite surprising. So, actually in Singapore, the number one nationality we fund is Indian. The number two is Singapore. I think third might be Indonesian. I forget. But in the top four is Iranians, people from Iran. That’s kind of crazy, right? Because how come there are so many Iranians in Singapore? And the answer is there aren’t. I think there’s only about 250 Iranians in Singapore, and we funded about 50 of them. Why is that? Well, basically because if you are an incredibly smart, ambitious Iranian, the single biggest drag on your life outcome, sadly, is that you were born in Iran. And so getting out is very important for a certain type of person. And in particular, if you skew technical, which is a lot of what we do, good luck getting a visa these days to study, I don’t know, nuclear physics in the US or whatever. Maybe slightly facetious, but not very. If you write a list out of the world’s top universities and start to cross off the ones where Iranian grad students will struggle to get a visa, the number one university left in the world is the National University of Singapore, which is actually a very good university anyway. It’s top 20 globally even before you do the crossing out, but it’s the number one that’s very accessible to really smart Iranian science grads. And so there’s this very tight knit community of exceptionally smart graduate students from Iran in Singapore. And we’ve ended up funding as a sort of nontrivial proportion of them. Now, why do I tell that story? Because to me, it points to the ability to overcome geography without remote. Now, actually I’m very bullish on remote as an overall system. Lots of our companies are remote first. I think it’s very possible to do. But I think for the act of building, co-founding teams from strangers, which is the core of our IP, if you like, we really believe in the power of the physical for that, at least for now. So I think watch this space, probably some experimentation to come on that, but we think there are lots of ways to transcend geography while retaining the sort of physicality of what we do.

5 Ideas by Eric Crittenden on the Mutiny Investing Podcast

Mutiny founder and host Jason Buck’s introduction:

In this episode, I talk with Eric Crittenden, Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Standpoint, an investment firm focused on bringing all-weather portfolio solutions to US investors. Eric plays an active role in the firms’ research, portfolio management, product innovation, business strategy, environments and client facing activities. He believes using an all-wealth approach is the most effective way to prepare for a wide rage of market environments, while producing meaningful investment returns with limited downside risk.

Eric has over 20 years experience researching, designing, and managing alternative asset portfolios on behalf of families, individuals, financial advisors, and other institutional investors. Eric and I talk about circuitous paths with multi-year dead-end rabbit holes, simplicity can be the ultimate sophistication, what clients want, what’s wrong with the investing industry, and strategy scaling.

Episode link

All bold emphasis is mine.

  1. Investing opens your mind

    Jason Buck: Well, like you said, you don’t have to be overly prescient to talk about negative oil or negative interest rates. What I’ve always loved about macro trend is that you just follow price, right? And so if price goes negative, you just keep following it negative if that’s the direction of the trend. You don’t have to have any global macro narrative. And that’s the point, is you’re just offsetting narratives and people love narratives, so they didn’t like the idea that you said it could potentially go negative. You weren’t calling for it. You’re like it’s just within the realm of possibility. And I wonder, do you think that following trends for so long just opens up your mind that anything’s possible?

    Eric Crittenden: I think doing the research around it and seeing what actually happened. I mean, you can see with your own eyes what happened historically, like the sugar trade in the 1980s, where the price was below the cost of production. And the price didn’t actually go any lower, but you made a boatload of money being short because of the contango and the futures curve. Right? So today, you fast forward to today, and I talk to emerging CTAs or people that want to start trading their own account, they’ll do the same thing over and over. It’s always the same thing. They come up with all these filters to filter out trades and they say, “Well, if the price is too low, it won’t go short. If the price is too high, it won’t go long.” Well, okay, so one of these days you’re going to experience this phenomenon, and the greatest trade of the decade will be the one that your filter filters out.

  2. Breakouts vs moving averages

    I looked at many, many different ways to measure and identify a developing trend, and what I found, and you know this, is that they all basically pick up on the same thing. They’re just different ways of measuring the same thing. It’s like if there’s a wave coming in and you’re in Santa Barbara and you’ve got a guy from Hawaii and a guy from Oregon and a guy from California, and one guy says it’s four and a half feet, the other one says it’s five feet, and the other one says it’s four, they’re all measuring the same thing, they’re just doing it the Hawaiian style or the Oregon style or whatever.
    So there’s not a lot of benefit from diversifying your entry/exit style, moving average crossover, breakout. There’s a whole bunch of different styles. That being said, you could develop a strategy that uses a moving average crossover that doesn’t have a lot of … in other words, they’re not all created equal.

    I like breakouts. So I’m kind of in the minority there. I like breakouts because they’re pure trigonometry. They’re just triangles, essentially. And you know the price that would force you to get in, and then your stop-loss is some other price, and you know what that is. And you know what both of those prices are every single day. And that means you can calibrate your risk. You can lean on that. We call that the risk range. So I know approximately how much risk I’m taking to market because I know what both of those prices are. When it comes to a moving average crossover, I don’t know what price is going to force those two moving averages to crossover without doing some really advanced, or not advanced but tedious math to come up with a bunch of different scenarios about how they might crossover in the future. So because they all basically pick up on the same thing, but the breakout approach is very clean from a risk management perspective, I gravitate towards that, and I didn’t see a lot of benefit from diversifying meaningfully beyond what I’m already doing when it comes to entries. [Kris: This is resonant with what I saw at a fund that ran a breakout trend strategy.]

  3. Approach to risk management depends on whether you come from the relative vs absolute return crowd

    Jason Buck: Is like CTAs have always been pointing out, or macro trends specialists, have always pointed out that this is what actually matters is your aggregate drawdown risk, not your volatility metric. But that just doesn’t seem to translate well to everybody else, and everybody still seems to care most about sharp ratios versus max drawdown.

    Eric Crittenden: I think in the securities world, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, it’s historically been a relative game rather than an absolute game. In a relative game, anytime you sell, you’re putting yourself into a position to get left behind. If you get left behind, it’s game over for you, everyone loses confidence in you. Futures guys, derivatives guys, live in a very different world or grew up in a very different world where it’s all about survival. Some of these guys are using leverage and quite a bit of it, so it really was essential that they control the amount of risk they’re taking. So, and when CTAs is drone on, and on, and on about risk management, it drives advisors crazy, because they don’t even really know what you mean when you say that.

    [Kris: I’m biased but I agree with this from my life as a derivatives trader. Risk management is the #1 focus, but I had never thought about why the beta world might not think that way]

    It’s not that important in their world, because a balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds, it’s more important to not manage risk, because you don’t want the taxes, you don’t want the turnover, and you don’t want to get left behind. You can look at these psychological studies, and I’ve had people tell me it’s okay to be down 50% once every 10 years, as long as the market’s down 45, or 50, or 55%, I won’t lose my clients. But if I manage my risk along the way, the way you guys do, and I’m up 20 when the market’s up 25, and then the next year I’m up six when the market’s up 11, it’s game over for me. That’s unfortunate, but that’s how it is in the securities industry. So, but when you’re looking at alternatives, and in particular all-weather investments, frame the right way, that all goes away.

  4. “All weather” and uncorrelated risk premia

    Dalio coined that term or made it popular and he sometimes will say, “You need upwards of 16 uncorrelated return streams,” do you think that’s even possible?

    Eric Crittenden: No, it’s not, and I like Dalio, I like his writings, I modeled a lot of what we do off of what their firm did in the ’80s. So, I have a lot of respect for what he achieved, and how he did it, the how is very important. That being said, anyone with a plain vanilla copy of Excel can use a random number generator and realize that three uncorrelated variables are pretty much all you need to be the best money manager out there. So, I don’t know where the 21’s coming from. I’ll tell you hit on something though that there’s only one thing in this world that actually that I’m jealous of right now. There’s one risk premia out there that I can’t source, but it would be so valuable if I could.  So, I’m really just getting three, and I feel like that’s all we need, it’s the best I can do. I think it solves a lot of problems for people, but there’s one more out there that I think is big and sustainable, but you can’t get it from Phoenix, Arizona, and that is the market-making style risk premia. Where you need economies to scale, you need poll position, co-locate your servers, you got to be big, and have a solid network. You got to be basically like Amazon or Costco, where you can just muscle your competitors out of the way. You’re like, “Nope, get out of here, this is my real estate, and I’m doing…” It would be so valuable, but there’s just no way we could pull it off.

    …

    Jason Buck: You said three return sources, so eliminate the three return sources that you believe you have?

    Eric Crittenden: So, I feel like there’s capital formation markets, like stocks and bonds, which are kind of a one-way street, the risk premia is kind of a one-way street. I mean, the bulk of the risk premia is your long stocks. The futures, whether it’s metals, grains, livestock, energy, these are risk transfer markets and risk transfer markets are different than capital formation markets. I feel like risk transfer markets, you need to be symmetrical, you need to be willing to go long or short, because they’re a zero-sum game. They have term structures, so they’re factoring expectations, storage costs, cost of carry, all that stuff. And then there’s the risk-free rate of return, which used to be a great way to kind of recapture inflation, it’s not so much anymore. We can get into that later on, it’s a fascinating time to be managing money, because there’s a huge gap between inflation and risk-free. But, historically speaking, those are the three that I think makes sense, especially in the context of an all-weather portfolio that uses futures to get its commodity and derivative exposure, because it leaves a lot of cash lying around. So, to go source that risk-free rate of return costs you nothing, there’s no opportunity cost, because you were going to be sitting on that cash anyways.

    When I look at all the different risk premium on this computer or the one behind me, historically, I see those three blending together more beautifully, and there’s other ones out there, they just don’t move the needle for me. Things that are related to real estate, credit, they just all have that same trap door risk that the equity market has when the equity market’s going down. So, and then the rest of the time they’re expensive, they’re tax inefficient, they’re illiquid, and then they disappear on… Sometimes they get crowded, I mean, they just cause more problems than they solve. That’s how I feel about corporate bonds, credit, all that stuff. I mean, I wish there was something there, I know other people strongly feel that there is, but I’ve looked at the data until my eyes are blurry, for decades, and I don’t see it.

  5. Capital formation vs risk transfer markets

    This is an important concept to me, because it goes to the point of why I do what I do, or why I think that macro trend oriented approaches expect a positive return over time, because the futures markets are a zero-sum game or actually, a negative-sum game after you pay the brokers, and the NFA fees, and all that stuff. So, in a negative-sum game, you better have a reason for participating. For you to expect to make money, you better be adding something to that ecosystem that someone else is willing to pay for, because somebody else has to mathematically lose money in order for you to make money. So, in studying the futures markets, and I’ve been on both sides, I’ve been on the corporate hedging side, I’ve been on the professional futures trader side.

    I believe I understand who that somebody is, that has deep pockets, and they’re both willing and able to lose money on their future’s position. A trend oriented philosophy that’s liquidity weighted is going to be trading opposite those people on a dollar-weighted basis through time. It does make sense that they would lose money on their hedge positions, I mean, in what world would it make sense for people who hedge, which is the same thing as buying insurance, to make money from that? It makes no sense, that would be an inverted, illogical world. So, anyone who’s providing liquidity to them should expect some form of a risk premia to flow to them. It’s just up to you to manage your risk, to survive the path traveled, and that’s what trend following is. I don’t know why that is so controversial, and more people don’t talk about it, because I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t truly believe that what we’re doing deserves the returns that we’re getting.

    Jason Buck: CTA trend followers, or whatever, just they don’t really know how they make money. They’re like, “It’s trending, it’s behavioral, it’s clustering, it’s herd mentality, and that’s how we make money.” You’ve accurately portrayed it as these are risk-transfer services, speculators make money off of corporate hedgers. But the only thing I would push back, and I’m curious your take on this, is like you said, zero-sum game or negative-sum at the individual trade level. But when we look more holistically, those corporate hedgers are hedging their position for a reason, and it’s likely lowering their cost of capital for one of the exogenous effects. So, my question always is, is it really zero-sum or negative-sum, or is it positive-sum kind of all the way around? In a sense that the speculator can make money offering these risk transfer services that the hedgers are looking for that liquidity, and then the hedgers are also… If we look at the rest of their business, they’re hedging out a lot of their risks, which can actually improve their business over time, whether that’s cost of capital, structure, or other exogenous effects.

    Eric Crittenden: Absolutely, I wish I had… You did record this, so I’m going to steal everything you just said. In the future’s market, it’s negative-sum. If you include the 50% of participants that are commercial hedgers, it’s no longer zero-sum. But most CTAs, and futures traders, and futures investors don’t even concern themselves with what’s going on outside the futures market. So, but if you pull that in and look at it, you can see, or at least it’s clear to me, we’re providing liquidity to these hedgers. They’re losing some money to us, and the more money they lose to us, the better off their business is doing, for a variety of reasons. Tighter cash flows, more predictable cash flows results in a higher stock price, typically. But you brought one up that almost no one ever talks about, and that is if they’re hedged, their cost of capital, the interest rate that they have to pay investors on their bonds is considerably lower. Eric Crittenden: Oftentimes, they end up saving more money on their financing than they lose on their hedging, and they protect the business, and they make Wall Street happy at the same time, so who’s really the premium payer in that, it’s their lenders? So, by being a macro trend follower in the future space, the actual source of your profits is some bank that’s lending money to corporations that are hedging these futures. So, it’s the third and fourth order of thinking, and you can never prove any of this, which is great, because if you could prove it, then everyone would do it, and then the margins would get squeezed.

    [Kris: As a commodity options trader, this framing is spot on. I was typically trading with flow that was constrained or price-insensitive. Corporate hedgers must hedge because of the covenants in their loan financing. I had never thought about the edge being spilled in the option market is coming from the lenders ultimately! I guess if we follow that logic even deeper it’s the bank shareholders that are giving up expectancy by requiring less loan defaults and it’s an open question as to whether the hedging activity is worth the lower cost of capital at the bank share level]

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15 Ideas From Morgan Housel’s Interview with Tim Ferriss

Morgan Housel is one of my favorite finance writers who happened to make it to the mainstream with his massive hit book Psychology of Money. It’s a book I like to gift people even though I haven’t read it myself. That probably sounds weird, but I’ve read almost every blog post he’s written in the past 5 years and cite his writing in my newsletter constantly. I am just bad better at buying books than reading them. My nightstand has more than 50 books on it. That’s not a typo, it’s a problem (since I moved to CA I read about 5 books per year which is about 1/3 of what I used to back when I had an NYC subway commute).

Anyway, Morgan is great and his big-time interview with Ferriss is worth the 3 hour listen (transcript).

Here are 15 parts I felt like sharing. Bold is my own emphasis.

  1. Who’s the greatest investor of all time?

    It doesn’t seem like a hard question to answer. It should be an analytic answer, it’s just like a number who’s had the best performance, but then you can split this different ways. So who is the wealthiest investor of all time? That answer is Warren Buffett. Who’s the greatest investor of all time in terms of like long term average annual returns? It’s Jim Simons by a mile. And like it’s not even close. Warren Buffett’s long term average annual returns are about 21 percent per year. Jim Simons’ are like 66 percent per year after his ridiculous fees. He’s like in a different universe, but Warren Buffett is like way wealthier. And Jim Simons is like a deca-billionaire himself. And to say like he’s not as rich sounds crazy, but to parse out the reason that Warren Buffett has earned one third of the returns, but he’s like 10 times as wealthy, is because Warren Buffett has been investing for 80 years.

    And so even though he’s not the greatest investor of all time in annual returns, he has so much endurance in terms of what he’s done that by a mile. He’s the wealthiest, which to me, that gets into a really interesting point, which is how do you become a great investor? And most people when they hear that, what they think of is like, how can I earn the highest returns? What are the highest returns that I can earn this year and over the next five years, and over the next 10 years. And that’s not bad, that can be a great thing to do. But to me, if the goal is to maximize the dollars that you have, just like what’s the way that maximize the amount of dollars I accumulate over the course of my life. Then the answer to that question, the huge majority of the time is not earning the highest returns.

    It’s what are the best returns that you could earn for the longest period of time, which usually aren’t the highest returns that are out there because maybe you can double your money this year, but can you do that for 50 years in a row? Like probably not, but could you earn 10 percent annual returns for 50 years? Yeah, you can totally do that and generate an enormous sum of wealth. All compounding is, is returns to the power of time, but time is the exponent. So that’s to me what you want to maximize and that’s why Warren Buffett is in my mind, and it seems like an easy answer, the greatest investor of all time, even though his returns are probably not even in the top 20 percent of annualized returns among professional investors.

  2. Investors Morgan admires besides Buffet

    John Bogle, who started Vanguard, I think is probably the most admirable because it was so selfless what he did.

    A lot of people don’t even know this, Vanguard is owned by the people who own Vanguard Mutual. There’s no Vanguard shareholders. There’s no profits. There’s no dividends that are played to the owners. Vanguard was made for the benefit of the people who own the ETFs, the people who own the mutual funds and John Bogle did not make that much money for himself because of that. And you could almost think that Vanguard’s low fees, all of that is — the amount that you saved in fees is money that could have gone to John Bogle and John Bogle’s estate that didn’t. He’s like this undercover philanthropist of finance that I really admire just because there’s so few other people like that.

    And I think someone like James Simons, who we mentioned earlier. I think in every field, there’s only one person who’s claimed a fame, who’s competitive advantage is “I’m smarter than everyone else”. In tech, for 20 or 30 years, that person was Bill Gates, and I think in finance for the last 20 or 30 years, that person has been James Simons. The only person in the field who can say, if you ask them the question, “What is your competitive advantage?” They can say, “I’m just smarter than everyone else.” Only one person can say that, and it’s James Simons. If you look at what Renaissance Technology has done and just the results that they’ve accumulated and the consistency of what they’ve done, it’s like LeBron James times Michael Jordan times Tiger Woods to the power of Mikaela Shiffrin. It’s just such a different universe compared to what anyone else has done that it’s just, it’s astounding to watch.

  3. Admiration but not copying

    So I think most of the people who I really admire as investors, it’s more that I admire just how they’ve lived their lives, and their general life philosophies, and their investing philosophies stems from that. That’s true for Buffett as well. Actually, there’s an interesting thing about Buffett, which is that it was so easy to admire him and still is. But when the book The Snowball came out, which is a biography written about Buffett by an author named Alice Schroeder, and it came out, I want to say 2009, something like that. It really makes clear the case that Buffett has not lived a perfect life by any means. And in a lot of instances, his family life has been a disaster. I think that’s the right word to use. It’s kind of rude to say that, but I think it’s really true. In some ways, it’s good to hear that, that like everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time in the morning. Everyone is human. Everyone deals with the ups and the downs of living a life. And that he’s a human.

    And also that a lot of the reason that his family life was troubled at times is because he was, had a singular devotion in life, which was picking the best stocks and everything else came second to that. Everything from his family on down came second to that, in a way that a lot of people, including myself at one point said, “I want to be Warren Buffett. I want to be the next Warren Buffett.” But then you read about what it took to get there, and I’m like, “No, I want to stay 10 miles away from that.”

    …In The Making of an American Capitalist, and I read this decades ago, but the story that really stuck out to me and I’m probably getting this wrong, but someone on the internet will correct me. I remember his meeting, Warren’s routine was to work at the office and then come home and basically just walk straight upstairs, and begin reading like S-1 filings or annual reports of one type or another, quarterly reports. And that was his routine.

    And one day, he came home after work and I want to say his son, but one of his kids was like splayed out at the bottom of the stairs and had clearly like fallen down the stairs, and he just stepped over this child and walked up to his office to read reports. Like it didn’t even register to attend to his child.

    That’s a really important insight to learn is that a lot of these people who you admire, the reason that you admire them is they’re so successful, and that success that they had had enormous costs associated with it that are easy to ignore. And when I look at that, it’s like, I can look at pieces of Buffett’s life that I admire and pieces of Jim Simons’ life that I admire, but I don’t want to be them. Because that mega success had so many costs attached to it that I want to avoid in my life. That’s been an important observation too, for me.

  4. Compounding

    [Kris note: A reminder that geometric growth is N² and exponential growth is 2ᴺ…compounding deals with exponential growth. For example, if you grow at 10% per year for 30 years you end up with 1.10³⁰ = 17.4]

    The math behind it is 99 percent of his wealth was accumulated after his 50th birthday and 97 percent came after his 65th birthday, which is a really obvious thing. If you think about how compounding works, like it’s always in the extreme later end of year, is that the numbers just start getting ridiculous. Compounding is just like, it’s just like, it starts slow and then it’s boring. And for 10 years it’s boring, for 20 years it starts to get pretty cool. And then 30 years you’re like, wow. And then 40, 50 years, it’s like, holy, like it just explodes into something incredible. There’s a friend of mine named Michael Batnick, who its explained compound growth, I think the most easy way to comprehend, which is, if I ask you: “What is eight plus eight plus eight plus eight?” you can figure that out in your head in three seconds, like anyone can do that.

    That’s no problem. But if I say, “What is eight times eight times eight times eight times eight?” Like, your head’s going to explode trying to think about it. All compounding is never intuitive. And that’s why, if we look at someone like Buffett, we in the financial industry have spent so much time trying to answer the question: how has he done it? And we go into all this detail about how he thinks about moats and business models and market cycles and valuations, which are all important topics. But we know that literally 99 percent of the answer to the question, how has he accumulated this much wealth, is just that he’s been a good investor for 80 years. It’s just the time. And if Buffett had retired at age 60, like a normal person might, no one would’ve ever heard of him. He would’ve been like one of hundreds of people who retired with a couple hundred million bucks and like moved to Florida to play golf.

    He never would’ve been a household name. He would’ve been a great investor, of course, but there’s a lot of great investors out there. The only reason he became a household name is just his endurance and his longevity, that’s it. And that’s why if you go back to like, even the late 1990s, not that long ago, Warren Buffett was known within circles. Like within investing circles, people knew who he was. He didn’t become a household name until the early and mid-2000s, which is that’s when the compounding took his net worth to become worth 20 billion, 50 billion, a hundred billion where he is right now. It’s just the amount of time he’s been doing it for.

  5. Tim describes the letter Morgan wrote to his son while the boy was still a child

    “You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I’m telling you, you don’t. What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does — especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.”

    Here’s the paragraph that stuck out to me:

    “When you see someone driving a nice car, you probably don’t think, ‘Wow, that person is cool.’ Instead, you think, ‘Wow, if I had that car people would think I’m cool.’ Do you see the irony? No one cares about the guy in the car. Have fun; buy some nice stuff. But realize that what people are really after is respect, and humility will ultimately gain you more of it than vanity.”

    Now the last sentence has some counter examples maybe. But the point that we rarely look at the person in the cool car and say, “Wow, that person must be cool.” Rather, we apply it to ourselves is I think a very profound observation.

    …Morgan adds:

    I was a valet at a high-end hotel in Los Angeles. So I was in my early 20s and there were people coming in in Ferraris and Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces, like the whole thing. And it dawned on me one day that when those cars pulled in, that I had really admired, I’m a car guy, I love that. Never once did I look at the driver and say, “That guy is cool.” What I did is I imagined myself as a driver and I thought people would think I’m cool. And this was like, I was in my early 20s, but I’m just thinking like that was my first kind of light bulb into how wealth works, that everyone thinks that they want to be the driver, but no one actually is paying attention to the driver.

    They’re imagining themselves. People think about themselves way more than they think about other people. But we all think that everyone’s looking at us, I think that’s like a universal thing. Everyone thinks like, oh, this person’s looking at me, they’re impressed with me. By and large they’re not, they’re thinking about themselves and how other people might want to be impressed with them.

    [Kris note: I describe this effect as the “bad hair day”. The ratio of people noticing someone else’s hair is messy divided by people mentally derailed by their “bad hair day” is indistinguishable from zero]

  6. Purpose of wealth

    I think if there is a universal trait of money that’s true for like not a hundred percent of people, but let’s say 90 percent of people, is that, what people really want in life is independence and autonomy. I think no matter where you’re from, what you do, your aspirations are, that’s a common denominator. That people just want to wake up every morning and do what they want to do on their own terms. And whether they’re able to do that, whether they can actually do that today, or that’s a goal. I think that’s a universal trait among people is just independence and autonomy. And so to the extent that we can use money to gain that, to gain independence and autonomy, that is, I think, as close as it comes to a universal want and thing that we can use money for. The interesting thing to me is that among huge numbers of people, educated people, financial professionals, the purpose of money is to buy stuff. It’s to accumulate more stuff, bigger house, nicer car, whatever it might be, which is great.

    I love all that stuff too. But to me, the most powerful thing that money can do and the most universal benefit that it can bring us is systematically overlooked, like using it for independence and autonomy is so overlooked. And that to me has always been kind of a sad thing that we are so accustomed and attuned to just wanting to use our money, whatever money that we have, whatever savings that we have, to go out and buy more stuff when we could be using it for freedom and autonomy. And then when you come to a period like in March and April 2020, or October 2008, when millions of people lose their jobs and you see during those periods, like the early day of COVID, how many people are just on the razor’s edge of insolvency. And it does not take them much, one or two weeks of unemployment to be in a really bad financial spot, whether that’s for an individual or a small business, it does not take them much to be thrown over the edge.

    And you realize how dependent so many people are on their jobs, their salaries, their theirs customers in a short period of time. And there’s just not a lot of room for error throughout most of the world. And I think for the huge majority of people, not everyone, but for the majority of people, there could be a lot more. And the reason that they don’t want to have more savings is because to them, the knee jerk reaction is “Why would I just keep my money in the bank or even invest it? Like, the purpose of money is to go out and buy more stuff to enjoy my life.”

    I get that, I understand it, but it’s usually once every five or 10 years that people realize how important independence and autonomy is. And having that wealth that you have not spent, having the money that you haven’t spent that was just lying around doing nothing, becomes the most valuable thing in the world when it lets you gain control of your time and just wake up every morning and say, “I can do whatever the hell I want today.”

    …

    I want to wake up every morning and hang out with my kids and I want them to be happy and I want to do it on my own schedule. If it’s a Wednesday morning and I don’t want to work, then I’m going to sit on the couch all day and watch Netflix. And if it’s a Sunday and I got a good idea, I’m going to spend all day working. It’s all my own schedule on my own time, whatever I want to do. It’s that independence and autonomy.

    Tim Ferriss: Can you not do that right now?

    Morgan Housel: Yes. Yeah, I can. There was a point when I couldn’t and that’s why I feel like I’m pretty happy, and I feel like I’ve done a decent job of doing that. Now I do have, as a lot of people would, a tendency to be like, “Oh, what if I got that Porsche? What if we got the bigger house? What if we did this? What if we did that?” And it’s fun to think that because I love nice cars, I love all of that. It’s just so easy to realize. There was a great quote that I love that’s, “The grass is always greener on the side that’s fertilized with bullshit.” I think that’s really what it is. That’s the accurate phrasing of that well-known quote, and I think that’s really what it is. The idea that all that nicer stuff is going to make you necessarily happier, I think is just so easy to disprove.

    Especially once you’ve experienced a little bit of it yourself and that actually what is going to make people happy is that independence and autonomy, that once I remind myself of that, I’m like, okay. And then the game of earning more just becomes a game, it’s less about like, oh, if I have more money, I’m going to be happier. No, if my net worth is 10 X what it is today, I’m not going to be any happier. That was not true at one point in my life, but I think it’s true today, it’s probably true for you right now, it’s true for a lot of people listening. And therefore you can admit that a game is fun and a game is fun to play, but just admit that it’s a game and it’s actually not going to make you happier.

  7. Risk is personal

    The takeaway from that is most investing debates, where people are arguing with each other, is this a risk? Is that a risk? Should I buy this stock? Is the market going to go up next week? By and large, those debates are not actually debates. It’s people with different risk tolerances and different time horizons talking over each other, talking over one another. And that’s why. I think to me, the most important part about risk is that the definition is different for everyone. My definition’s going to be different from yours, which is different from anyone else who’s listening.

    And it’s not because we disagree with each other. It’s just because we’re different people, with different goals and different ages and different family situations, etc. And so, risk is a very personalized calculation for everyone whether that’s in investing or other areas of your life.

    [Kris: I always say that if you need $1mm tomorrow, the biggest risk is not flying to Vegas and betting 500k on red]

  8. “Tails drive everything” demonstrated without math

    Tim: Am I recalling correctly that a bulk of his career returns came from concentration in GEICO? Am I getting that right?

    Morgan Housel: That’s true. The last page of Benjamin Graham’s book, The Intelligent Investor, tells us little tale about an investor who earned basically his entire career success off of one investment. And that one investment broke every rule that this investor had laid out. And then kind of in the last paragraph on the last page of his book, he says, “By the way, that investor is me.”

    And if you look at Benjamin Graham’s track record, his career track record is incredibly good. And if you remove GEICO, it’s average. And like I mentioned, GEICO by Graham’s own saying, breaks every rule that he just laid out in that book to buy it. And so that’s a really interesting thing is like, not only was it one company, but it’s a one company that broke all the rules. So if you’re reading that book and looking for rules to follow, like by definition, you are not going to achieve Benjamin Graham’s success.

    And so, I think that’s really telling, and I don’t know what the takeaway from that is. If you could say, “Well, then clearly he’s just lucky.” If all of the success was due to one company that broke the rules, you could say, he’s just lucky.

    The other thing you could say is that’s just how capitalism works. And that’s true for Buffett. It’s true for a lot of people. That if they make a hundred investments, you’re going to make the huge majority of your money on probably five of them. That’s true for anyone. That’s even true if you’re investing in an index fund. That within the index, most of the games are going to come from five percent of the companies that you invest in. That’s always the case.

    I think it just kind of changes how people view success though. Like if your view of success is that every stock that Warren Buffett or Chamath or Jim Chanos or all these big name investors, that every time they make an investment, then it’s clear that, that company’s going to be a winner.

    And that’s just not how this success plays out at all. That even among the top names, the best investors over time, the majority of the picks that they make do not do very well. And the reason that they’re so successful is because one or two or maybe five investments they’ve made are ultra home runs. People associate that with venture capital. That’s how it works in NVC. But it’s actually true in all stages of investing.

    The stat that I’ll share with you here is that if you look at the Russell 3000 index, which is an index of large public stocks in the United States, over time, from I think, 1980 to 2010, 40 percent of the stocks in this large cap, like mom-and-pop index, 40 percent of the companies went out of business, not merged, not BAPA, but they went bankrupt, 40 percent of them.

    But the index did very well because seven percent of components were huge winners. It was like Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, those companies. So even in a boring old index fund, almost half the companies are going to go out of business. But you’ll still do well because a few do very well. And so that was true. And I think the more successful you are, the more you see that.

    Even at a company like Apple or whatnot, what percentage of Apple success is the iPhone? It’s enormous. But they’ve experimented with dozens of different products over time. Amazon has experimented with the Fire Phone, which is a total flop, and they’ve done things in music which were flops. They’ve done all these flops, but they’ve also done Prime and AWS, which matters more than anything else. So almost anywhere you look, you will see that a tiny number of activities, apply for the majority of success. And it’s so hard to wrap your head around that when you’re trying to emulate these people who you look up to and admire.

  9. Safety net vs fuel approach to inheritance

    I’m quoting Buffett again, I don’t want to do this ad nauseam for the whole podcast, but he has a great quote on wealth where he says he wants to leave his kids enough money that they can do anything, but not so much money that they could do nothing — I think that’s really the key. And that’s how I think about my own kids who are very young, but when my wife and I think, how do we want to use whatever savings that we have to benefit them? Giving them a safety net, but not a fuel is a — that’s what my parents did for myself and my siblings, I always knew — when I was a teenager and in my early 20s, I always knew they would be there if I fell on my face and they would — I would never just completely fail, I’d never be homeless, I would never — they would always catch me, but they were never going to be a fuel. They’re never just going to give me money just to make my life better, that was never going to be the case.

  10. Against optimization

    Even if you look at the periods that in hindsight we think were the greatest that existed, which for most Americans is the 1950s and the 1990s, that’s what we remember as the golden age of prosperity and happiness and peace. Even if you look at those periods, like in the 1950 people were high, kids were doing nuclear bomb drills under their desks, and there was a lot of pessimism and negativity. Even if we know in hindsight, it was great at the time, by and large, they did not know that maybe it was good economically, but there was a lot to be worried about in the 1950s. Same in the 1990s, which we today it’s like, oh, the booming 1990s, the bull market. But even people forget in 1994 there was a big interest rate calamity where a bunch of bond interest rates rose and then the stock market crashed.

    And then in 1998 a big hedge fund went out of business and almost took the whole global economy down with it. There was a lot to worry about during these periods, so how do you protect yourself from that? How do you actually become buy and hold? I think there’s one thing to do here, there’s a friend of mine named Carl Richards, who’s a financial advisor, and he has a quote where he says, “Risk is what is left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.” And I think that’s the definition of risk is whenever we’re done planning and forecasting, everything that’s left over that we haven’t thought about, that’s what risk actually is. And the takeaway from that, the actual practical takeaway is that if you are only planning for risks that you can think about and you can envision and you can imagine, then 10 times out of 10, you’re going to miss the biggest risk that actually hits you.

    The biggest risk is always something that nobody sees coming, including something like COVID where it’s actually not fair to say no one saw it coming, but by and large — it’s like in financial circles, not a single investor in 2019 in their economic outlook had a viral pandemic as something that they were worried about, not a single one, or 9/11, or Lehman Brothers going bankrupt, all the big events that actually mattered, it’s pretty much true to say no one saw them coming. I think that’s generally true. And therefore, the takeaway is you have to have a level of savings in your asset allocation that doesn’t make sense. You have to have a level of conservatism that seems like it’s a little bit too much. That’s the only time that you know that you are prepared for risks that you cannot envision.

    And if you are only prepared for what you can imagine, again, you’re going to miss the biggest risk every single time. Whenever people look at my asset allocation, if I share that with them, it looks a little bit too conservative and they say, “Ah, you could be taking a little bit more risk,” and they’re right. I probably could, but I want to be prepared for the risks that I can’t imagine, or the risk that is possible but I don’t want to even think about it, it’s too painful to think about. That’s the only time that you can be prepared for the surprises in life. And I think most people, not all investors, but the majority of investors are not conservative enough. And I know whenever I say that they shake their head like, “Come on. Why don’t you want to take risk?” And once a decade you learn why, once a decade. Whether it’s COVID, or 9/11, or 2008, once per decade, you’re like, “Oh, okay, I get it now. I didn’t see this coming. It was a calamity and I either ground myself into the floor and I got wiped out, or I had a little bit of extra savings that got me through.” So that’s how I think about how to stay in the game in a long term history where history is a constant chain of surprises. That’s the only way to do it.

  11. Framing: Understanding when volatility or pain is a “fee or a fine”

    The way that I’ve phrased it in the book was “understanding the difference between a fee and a fine,” which seems like they’re really similar but there’s a very important difference which is, a fine means you did something wrong like, “Shame on you, here’s your speeding ticket. Don’t do it ever again, you’re in trouble.” And a fee is just a price of admission that you paid to get something better on the other side. Like you go to Disneyland, you pay the fee, and then you get to enjoy the theme park. You didn’t do anything wrong, it’s just that’s the fee.

    I think if you could situate your life to where you view a lot of the ups and downs, not all of it, but a lot of the volatility in investing, a lot of the volatility in your career, as a fee instead of a fine, then it just becomes a little bit more palatable. And when the market falls 30 percent, it’s not that you enjoy it, you don’t think it’s fun, but you’re like, “Okay, I understand this is the fee that I have to be willing to pay in order to do well over a long period of time.” Most investors don’t do that. When their portfolio falls 30 percent, they say, “I fucked up. I did something wrong. I clearly made a mistake. And how can I make sure this never happens again?” And that’s the wrong way to think about it. And I think if you view it as a fee instead of a fine, it’s just much more enjoyable. It’s much more realistic to deal with.

    Now, I said earlier that there are some areas in life where it’s like that. If you’re talking about a death in the family, a divorce, there’s things that’s like, “No, that’s not — that’s just a straight negative.” Like no silver lining to some of these things in life so I want to be careful at parsing that. But particularly investing, the huge majority of the pain that people go through and put themselves through is just the fee for earning superior returns over time. And if you’re not willing to pay that, then you’re probably not going to get the reward on the other side. And that’s why you can see so many people who at the first experience with being uncomfortable in investing with a loss, they view it as they screwed up and then they want out. They want to move on to something else.

    And of course, they’re not going to get the rewards over time. Nothing in life is going to give you those rewards for free. There’s a cost to everything. And just identifying what the cost is then realizing that the cost is not on a price tag, you’re going to pay for it with stress and anxiety, and dopamine, and cortisol, like that’s how you pay for these things, I think that’s the only way to deal with those big ups and downs.

  12. The optimal amount of bullshit

    You had Stephen Pressfield on your show, and he was talking about a time when he lived in a mental institution. He was not a patient himself, but he lived there and he starts talking to all these people. And he made this comment that a lot of the common denominators of these people who lived in a mental institution was they were not crazy, they just could not handle or put up with the bullshit of life. They just couldn’t deal with it. And that was kind of why they ended up in the mental institution. And he said all these people were the smartest, most creative people who he had ever met, but they couldn’t put up, they had no tolerance for the bullshit of the real world. And that to me, just brought this idea that there’s actually an optimal amount of bullshit to deal with in life. If your tolerance for bullshit is zero, you’re not going to make it at all in life…

    I listened to that [interview] and it was like, “Oh, see, these people could not function in the real world because they had no tolerance for bullshit.” The second step from that is, there is an optimal amount of bullshit to put up within life. And that was where this article, “The Optimal Amount of Hassle,” came from.

    And I remembered I was on a flight many years ago and there was this guy in a pinstripe suit who let everyone know that he was a CEO of some company, and the flight was like two hours delayed, and he completely lost his mind. He was dropping F bombs to the gate agents and just completely making an ass of himself because the flight was delayed. And I remember thinking like, “How could you make it this far in life and have no tolerance for petty annoyance, like a delayed flight?”

    And I just think like there’s a big skill in life in terms of just being able to deal with some level of bullshit, and a lot of people don’t have that. There’s another great quote that I love from FDR, who of course was paralyzed and in a wheelchair. And he said, “When you’re in a wheelchair and you want milk but they bring you orange juice instead, you learn to say, ‘That’s all right.’ and just drink it.” And I think that just having the ability to put up with that kind of stuff is, I think, really important and often lost in this age where we want perfection. We want everything to be perfect, and it never is.

    [Kris: I have a good friend who is insanely smart and well-traveled (top 1% in both categories of everyone I know). He has a  brother who is not conventionally successful and I’ve asked him about what that brother is like. His brother is also very well-traveled in part to choosing a life in the armed forces. But my friend has also described is brother as also extremely smart. But he’s incapable of tolerating the b.s. that defines the ladder-climbing world. The military life is simple in the ways he prefers. It has always stayed with me, that my friend quite explicitly described his brother as being unwilling to suffer bullshit. I really think about this a lot (too much if I’m being honest), since I often feel that “getting ahead” is really just climbing sedimentary layers of compressed bullshit.]

  13. The durability of value investing with a lower case “v”, not the investment category

    Value investing will always work in terms of, if you buy an asset for less than it’s worth, you’ll probably do pretty well over time. But the actual formulas that you use to determine value, those have always evolved and always changed. And formulas that people use, whether it’s price to book value, the P/E ratio. Whatever formula it is that may have worked at one period of time, those always evolve. That’s always been the case. I think it always will be the case that there will be people that will be stubbornly attached to the metrics and the formulas and the valuation techniques that worked perfectly in the previous era that now outdated and outmoded.

  14. Incentives

    If I was selling products by commission, if I was a financial advisor selling by commission, I would probably be much more into active investing and active strategies than I am right now. I think because I’m not a financial advisor, I’m not giving people advice, I can just view it as an outsider and be like, well, this is what makes sense to me so that’s what I’m going to do.

    Whereas I know that if I was in the trenches so to speak and had to make a living doing this, I know I would’ve very different views about what strategies you should pursue. And I know that the strategies that I would lead towards would be higher fee higher commission. I just think that’s the reality of it. Most people who work in finance are good, honest, noble people. Not all of them, but most of them are. But to the extent that is bad advice that gets perpetuated, I really just think it comes down to the incentives that are in the industry. The perfect example of this is that the only firm that’s really been able to make a good business out of selling passive funds is Vanguard and they’ve done it by becoming a nonprofit. That’s the only way that you can do it. You can’t make a good business out of selling the lowest fee funds that are out there. You just can’t do it. So I know that if I had a different compensation structure, I would think differently as an investor.

  15. I couldn’t help mentioning this section. Do what you will with it

    Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I am going to try to find this. There it is. It is a tweet from Jason. So a few years ago, Naval Ravikant and I were having a conversation on the podcast and he talked about the asymmetric costs of offense and defense in a world where drones are weaponized. Meaning if you have a drone or a bunch of tiny drones that are weaponized, and this is being developed all over the world, of course. You have sophisticated attacks where they can be coordinated with software to say all land on a given tank and explode at once. They can be used in more ad hoc, improvised ways.

    But I’ve been tracking this space because a number of my friends are involved. Some of them design and manufacture predator drones, for instance. So a drone that would kill or capture other drones, and they use netting that is shot out like Spider-Man to catch drones and they’re used by different major league sports franchises, because that’s a non-trivial threat to say an arena would be drone attacks. And Jason has a tweet, this is from December 7th, 2021. “Saudi Arabia is running out of the ammunition to defend against drone and missile attacks from rebels in Yemen…” I can’t pronounce, the Houthi it might be, I’m sure I’m pronouncing that incorrectly, ” …rebels in Yemen is appealing to the US and its Gulf and European allies for a re-supply.” This is in The Wall Street Journal and the lead, or at least the teaser sentence that I see presented by Wall Street Journal, is, “Saudi Arabia’s defense against the rebels’ drones pits $1 million missiles against $10,000 ‘flying lawn mowers.’” In quotation marks.

    Morgan Housel: I remember that. Yeah. That’s a great way to phrase the problem that you’re dealing with and who has the edge here? It’s crazy.

    Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The future of warfare is here. Not to beat poor William Gibson’s quote to death, but the future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. But this is something that I’ve been watching very closely because the potential consequences and the implications are so terrifying. So not to end on that, but I only saw that tweet today from Jason and it served as a reminder to me that I think in a year, particularly with the technological development cycles that we’re seeing, how compressed they are, and the innovations that we’re seeing from drone manufacturers. I recently had some interactions with the newer drones and drones with flir technology and infrared tracking capabilities. It is incredibly impressive. Compared to drones from even 18 months ago, they are worlds apart. It is shockingly impressive.

    Morgan Housel: Here’s what’s scary to me about that too, is that when the nuclear bomb came about, there was obviously fear that this is the future of war and knock on wood, fingers crossed, it has not since 1945. Because the consequences of a nuclear war are so catastrophic, that everyone who has them up until this point has said it’s not worth using them because the consequences are so severe. I almost think drone war is the opposite where it’s like there’s no skin in the game, you’re not sacrificing any soldier’s lives. You’re sacrificing civilian lives, of course, on the other side. But there’s so little skin in the game and it’s so easy to just flip these things up in the air and go for it, that it makes starting a war, progressing a war so much easier than it’s ever been. It’s the opposite of what happened with nuclear war over for the last 80 years.

    Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If people want to make an attempt at looking around some corners, also from a technical perspective with respect to AI and cyber warfare, highly recommend listening to my recent podcast with Eric Schmidt, it is mind-boggling. What else? I think that within a year we will have things like GPT-3 at a point where we can generate probably, I would say within a year might be aggressive, but within 18 months, with figures who have enough audio on online that you can really deep fake effectively. You’ll have synthetic interviews with people alive and dead that are convincing enough that they can’t be distinguished from live interview. I could see that being graspable in the next 12 to 18 months.

    Morgan Housel: And that just torpedoes trust even more than it’s ever been. You hear a quote from Tim Ferriss, and you’re like, “That’s probably not even Tim, so I don’t even take it serious anymore.” There’s no trust anywhere.

    Tim Ferriss: Election cycle 2022. It’s going to be exciting.

    Morgan Housel: I got my son in Oculus for Christmas and there’s a thing where you can do a tour of the White House with Barack and Michelle. It was filmed back then. And just sitting at a table in VR, having a conversation with Barack Obama, it was so shockingly realistic. And you know where that’s going, the VR headsets that we have 10 years from now are going to make this look like a complete joke. If you mix that with the ability to deep fake, we’re heading into a world that’s going to be so wild.

    Kris: As I was pulling insights from the transcript this was a timley news event:

Notes From Todd Simkin On The Knowledge Project

Link: https://fs.blog/knowledge-podcast/todd-simkin/

From the description:

Todd Simkin is Associate Director at Susquehanna International Group, a privately held trading and technology firm. During his 25 years with the company he has held a variety of roles, including responsibility for SIG’s firm-wide education and trader development, where he taught the company’s new traders what questions to ask and what criteria to weigh before making hugely impactful decisions for the firm.

He calls on experiences from his lengthy career in financial services and educating traders to help Shane understand how to make better decisions. On this episode Simkin breaks down all the influences that go into how and why we make decisions, why financial decisions are different than inter-personal ones, the strategies involved with teaching other people to make better decisions, what he looks for when he’s hiring, the value of asking the right questions, and so much more.

[FD: I started my career at SIG eventually spending 8 years there. I’m living proof of what Todd says in the interview: Traders are made not born. A statement famed Turtle Trader Richard Dennis, and Trading Places’ Mortimer Duke would agree with. So it must be true.]

This interview lifts the veil a bit on SIGs trader education program, but is more broadly a statement of SIG’s culture. We get things wrong all the time but we need to make decisions. SIG is like a think tank on the subject of decision-making. It’s a popular topic these days, in fact many of Shane’s prior guests have been experts in the field. SIG was an early adopter of institutionalizing concepts from behavioral science. And as we’ll see, this is really a team effort. Isolated attempts of correcting one’s own cognitive biases have shown to be nearly futile and Daniel Khaneman has himself lamented how awareness of bias doesn’t seem to inoculate us from it.

In addition, to the decision ideas Todd talks about, I found this to be a masterclass in communication. If you are a parent, this episode is full of gold.

These are my notes organized by theme. You can find my Otter transcript here.

Decision-Making

SIG’s approach starts with humility

Our approach is to recognize that we, we are often on the bad end of informational asymmetry, that other people who are looking to trade in the markets frequently no more than we do. And as a as a result, we don’t want to back our own limited opinion against a more informed counterparty. Instead, what we want to do is take the information that we have coming from outside sources, and there are multiple outside sources, different types of products that are being traded, different options series, if we’re trading derivatives, and use that information to improve our own information set to then be able to allocate our capital in a way that we think will lead to a return.

How to manage information asymmetry — start with reasonable priors then update hard

There a few ways that we’ve tried to handle it. One is to is to build out research capabilities internally so that we do have sort of some basis for our initial opinion. But the most important thing, from our perspective, is to be willing to update that opinion, in a Bayesian way to use approaches that are that are going to be inclusive of all the information available to us. And only when we get to mutually exclusive information, or mutually exclusive signals. Can we say something here doesn’t jive right? It’s totally fine. If somebody says they think that the stock price is greater than 100, no, nothing else, I think the stock price is going to be greater than 100. Somebody else says they think the stock price is going to be lower than 105. I say, Okay, now I’ve got a market. Now I’ve got two sides. And then someone else says, Do you think the stock price is going to be lower than 97? Now we don’t have information that can coexist in the same universe. I don’t need to know who’s right. But I do know that it can’t both be above 100 and be below 97.

I have used a similar analogy. Trader’s are not acting on some thesis or worldview about the future. They are simply looking for contrary pieces of information that are unlikely to be simultaneously true, and take counterparty to both sides. If the Warriors are 20 bid to win the NBA Championship and the field is 85 bid this is a strong-form example of “can’t simultaneously be true” aka arbitrage. In reality, the process of finding opposing propositions requires:

a) casting a wide net for information

b) normalizing the information (see Measurement Not Prediction)

c) communicating & outputting the cleaned information back to decision-makers

This process underpins many business flows. Trading is just one example of a type of business. Performed methodically, what SIG is doing is a business not an investment strategy.

Bayesian Updating Applied To Trading

Options derive the value because the future stock price is not going to be the same as what it is today. And there’s some probability that it’s going to be higher or lower. And knowing what that forward looking probability distribution function looks like, leads to the ability to price the options to come up with the fair value based on their expectancy. And one of the determinants of sort of how much a stock can move is what we call its volatility. The volatility is just the annualized percentage return on the stock in any given year, or really for a time slice because it can change that can change over time.

So if I think that the fair value of an option is say, $3, because of all of the assumptions that I have built into that, and then someone comes and wants to buy 10,000 options from me for a price of $3.10. There are two things I could do one, I could say, well, I know that all of my assumptions are grounded in truth, I know the future better than anybody else. So I know that over the long run, if I sell these options at $3.10, I’m going to make 10 cents in an expected return over and over and over again, that is not the approach that we take at Susquehanna.

Instead, I would say this option can be worth more than $3. Given some some possible sets of information about the future. Maybe this person knows something about the fair value of the underlying of the stock that’s different than what I know, looking at the stock market. And I can test that by going out and trying to trade stock. Maybe they know something about the forward looking volatility, the forward looking probability density function. And I can say, Well, if that’s the case, how wrong would I need to be to now be losing if I if I entered this trade? And this is where where Bayes Theorem comes in. Because I can say I have my prior assumption set, my prior probability distribution. Now, how much do I want to weigh this new information to come up with a new a new distribution that will allow me to come up with a fair value.

And again, in isolation, it’s really hard for me just to say this person’s wrong. But if I have a similar looking option similar because it’s the same expiration, or because it’s the same strike and a different expiration, or that there’s something about the option that looks close enough to this, I can say, I can find disconfirming information. And only when I find disconfirming information, can I feel more comfortable about taking the other side of this trade

Confirmation and Attribution Bias Example In Discourse

There are lots of other things in your life, where you’re you’ve got ego tied up, you’ve got some part of your personality benefits from sort of the truth value of whatever position it is that you’re taking. So when you get disconfirming information, you’re going to discount it. I’ve been thinking so much about tribalism lately, like this is just something that’s been showing up in conversations I’ve been having all around. The thing that that’s very clear is that when people hear information that comports with whatever their tribe believes, or whatever their tribe supports, they’re willing to accept it without doing a lot of digging into the quality of the source, the quality of the information, the sort of the implications of the rest of the information that goes with it. And anything that challenges their tribe believes they are going to be more dismissive of whether or not it comes from a quality source. I’ve got children that that feel very strongly aligned with political parties. And, and I also have a quote on the wall in my office that I think is just such a good important quote, to, to help remind me about the importance of habits leading to, to behaviors, I shared the quote with with one of my daughters, my 16-year-old, and, and she said, that sounds kind of interesting. Like I sort of like that. And then I shared with her who the quote was from, and she’s like, alright, I don’t need it. And it was because it was from somebody in the other camp, it was from the wrong political party.

[Me: Reminds me of Paul Graham’s Keep Your Identity Small]

If you’re curious about the quote it was from Reagan espousing good habits. It’s an articulate way to say that “you’ll play like you practiced”:

The character that takes command and moments of crucial choices has already been determined. It has been determined by 1000 other choices made earlier in seemingly unimportant moments, it has been determined by all the little choices of years passed. By all those times when the voice of conscience was at war with the voice temptation, whispering the lie that it doesn’t really matter. It has been determined by all the day to day decisions made when life seemed easy and crazy seemed far away. The decisions that piece by piece, bit by bit developed habits of discipline or of laziness, habits of self sacrifice, or self indulgence. Habits of duty and honor and integrity are dishonor and shame.

Tribalism is the negative expression of an otherwise useful shortcut:

Heuristics are shortcuts that we take that are mentally freeing, right, it will be really hard to always work from first principles. So it’s so much easier. If you can have a heuristic that you can fall back on, that just sort of tells you what to do next, without having to stop and  think through the process. When your heuristic is, “I’m going to find people who are like me, and if I do what they do, then I’m going to sort of maintain my integrity, I’m still going to be like me, because this is what people like me do”, then it’s very easy to fall into the trap of not sufficiently contemplating each of those, each of those actions, each of those different behaviors.

Rules vs Principles: It’s not cut-and-dry. Context matters. Rules are amazing shortcuts for some things.

It’s so much easier if you have a rule than if you tried to have a principle. “I don’t eat dessert” is so much easier than each time that you have the opportunity to have dessert to say, well, I don’t eat a lot of dessert is this one of the times that I’m better making a change there.  I get up and do some type of exercise every morning. And I find it easy to exercise seven days a week, I found it really hard to exercise five days a week. And the reason was every morning the alarm goes off at 5am, it’s really easy to not have your feet hit the ground and get going. It’s really easy to say, well, I need to take two days off anyway, this can be one of the days that I take off. So on the “I don’t eat dessert rule”, I think that’s a great way to pre-decide. Lazy has a lot of value laid in it, to lighten your cognitive load. I don’t have to stop and think about everything if I’ve already spent the time thinking about it.

But you’re not part of a group of non-dessert eaters, right? This isn’t part of a broader identity that you’re now wrapped up in, where if you decide to change that rule and have dessert, you don’t have other people calling you a dessert denier, right? Who cares, right? Okay, so she used to eat dessert or used to deny dessert, and now he’s having an ice cream sundae. Good for him. Maybe it’s his birthday, whatever it is, this is a decision, that’s totally fine with him. And you don’t have to worry that you have now also contradicted all of the other tenets held by the people in the non-desert eating group.

If it’s something that is more tribal, where we are the type of people that do this and don’t do that, then a violation of one part of that removes you from this group.

Shane points out a paradox in cognitive science. Knowing our biases doesn’t seem to help us overcome them. This is a topic the brilliant Ced Chin has studied in depth. Ced told me that the literature suggests the only way cognitive bias inoculation works is via group reinforcement. I told him that was exactly the cultural DNA when I was at SIG which makes me believe there is a lot of value in being aware of bias. Anytime you replayed your decision process, it was a cultural norm to point out where in the process you were prone to bias.

Todd addresses why this works:

It is definitely true that it is sort of descriptive of the past. A lot of these heuristics and biases are things that we can see when we after we’ve already identified that a mistake has been made. And we say, Okay, well, why was the mistake made? Say, oh, because I was anchored, or because of the way the question was framed, or whatever it might be, we have a really hard time seeing it in ourselves.

But here’s the key:

We have a really easy time seeing when someone else is making that type of stupid mistake. A big part of our approach to education is to teach people to talk through their decisions, and to end to talk about why they’re doing what they’re doing with their peers, the other people on their team. If we can do that real-time, that’s great. Often in trading, you don’t have that opportunity, because things are just too immediate. But certainly, anytime things have changed. If you’re doing things differently, it’s a really good time to turn to the traders around you. And the quantitative researchers around you and the assistant traders and your team and say, Hmm, it looks like all the sudden Gamestop is a whole lot more volatile than it was a week ago. Here’s how I’m positioning for this trading. What do you guys think? And have someone say, oh, it seems like you’re really anchored to last week’s volatility. If things have changed that much, you need to move much more quickly than you’re moving right now.

So you don’t realize that you’re anchored, that’s the whole nature of being anchored, is that you don’t recognize the outsized importance that the anchor has on your decision, but somebody else who’s a little bit more distant from it can. So if we’re good at encouraging communication, then we’re going to be really good at getting other people to help improve your decision process.

[Me: There it is. The key — communication. It’s not some magic formula. Even after I left SIG I spent my whole career working with SIG alum. This culture and these types of communications happen all day on the desk. Despite the common perceptions of “trading”, I have always found it to be a team game and communication skills are paramount.]

Speaking of teamwork, the next quote is money:

I know that you are fond of pointing out that you are the sum of the five people that you spend the most time with. So if the people that you’re spending the most time with are your co workers who are thinking about trading the same way you are, then maybe you’re going to combine the same types of errors, it’s certainly better than then trying to act on your own.

But even better is if you have a culture that rewards truth finding, as opposed to rewarding action.

If nobody feels personally attacked, because of somebody else pointing out their error, but instead feels like we together have now done more to get closer to, to some truth to the better way to act or the you know, the more accurate, fair value of this asset that we’re trading, then everybody feels like it’s a win. And they will therefore encourage the involvement of the people around them.

Shane asks what the most important variables are for being a better decision maker. He expects Todd might say probabilistic thinking but Todd’s answer was fast and blunt.

Talk more is number one, that beats probabilistic thinking that, that beats sort of anything else.Truth finding is, is being able to bring in other people in the decision process in a constructive way. So finding good ways to communicate to improve the input from others. 

Thinking probabilistically I think is definitely a very, very important piece of trying to diagnose what works by trying to think of where where things fall apart, where people fail.

The other place that people fail is falling in love with their decision process and not being open to being wrong. So in openness to to feedback to finding disconfirming information to actively seeking out disconfirming information, which is really uncomfortable. But that that I think is the other piece that is is super important for being a good trader.

Education

In 2009 Todd moved over to the education side of SIG where he focused on teaching decision-making under uncertainty, option pricing, finance and how to apply this knowledge to markets. SIG’s training is legend for good reason. In hindsight, I recognize just how  well-designed it was. It felt intense yet forgiving, competitive yet nurturing.

When I went to SIG “class” as it was called you’d spend 3 months at the headquarters. 20 years ago, it was a bootcamp that included:

  • 4 weeks of theory (including 4 hours of deriving Black Scholes assumptions and 4 hours of deriving the formula. Went mostly over my head)
  • 8 weeks of mock trading in an on-site simulated options pit.
  • Interspersed where lectures by various business heads
  • You were also required a minimum of 100 hours of poker and the class winner was chosen by Sharpe Ratio

Todd pulls back the veil on SIG’s education philosophy:

Susquehanna has always had a very growth mindset perspective on teaching trading, you know, before Carol Dweck, had even shared her views on growth mindset. It has always been the company’s position that traders are made not born. We’re now over 2000 people worldwide, and we still have a small company mindset of we’ve got to make the best of what we have.

The way that we’re training people today is certainly changed from what it was originally, but there are a lot of things that have stayed the same. And among that is, is this idea that if we have smart people that are educable, and vocal about their thought process, so that we can improve it and willing to be wrong, then we can teach them about trading.

The principles from Todd’s background in linguistics and deaf education informed how SIG designed their training.

When I was originally studying education, I was thinking that I might be teaching sixth-grade deaf kids how to do math. Instead, I’ve got MIT graduates who certainly understand math, but don’t know trading. And I’m teaching them how to make these asset allocation decisions with imperfect information. But the approach is still the same.

The approach is still this one of modeling the process, finding out where somebody is, and finding out what they can grow to and providing the appropriate support so that they can grow to be a better decision maker. 

SIG rejected Piaget’s approach that suggests learning unfolds at pre-determined developmental stages.

Piaget had, you know, a pretty rigid framework for the stages that you move through how you move through them. And that education effectively ended at adolescence. And because he said, Now, that’s kind of bunk. That’s not how any of this works.

SIG’s approach adheres more closely to Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Notice the engine at work:

All of education is socio-cultural, all of education comes from interaction with others. And those others in order for them to be educators have to be more knowledgeable than you are. And that when you have interaction with more knowledgeable others, what those people are able to do is recognize your zone of proximal development, you have a zone of things that you know, and then you’ve got a zone that is just too far out of your reach that, you know, no matter what if I were to sit down my six year old nephew, and try to explain linear algebra to him, he’s not going to get it yet, he just doesn’t have the fundamental tools to do that.

But somewhere outside of your zone of mastery is this zone of proximal development, the zone that that you can move into with appropriate support and that support in the Vigotsky literature is referred to as scaffolding. And you want it to be the minimal amount of support necessary to appropriately move somebody to be able to handle the next level of mastery. Over time, you can dismantle that support, dismantle that scaffolding and that zone becomes part of their zone of mastery, and you’ve just pushed out where their zone of proximal development is so that over time you can you can move them into an area where they’re learning more and more and they’ve got greater mastery and competence in whatever area is that that you’ve been teaching them. And eventually, they become more knowledgeable than other people around them. And they can provide the scaffolding as the more knowledgeable other for their peers as well.

[cross reference from ScienceDirect about the zone of prozimal development (ZPD) and the difference in approach between Piaget and Vygotsky:

This use of ZPD defines ‘teachability’ of the child in a specific activity or in problem solving. If an activity or problem can be accomplished by the child with the help of more capable others, this activity or skill is considered possible to teach the child. If, however, the activity or skill cannot be accomplished by the child with the help of more capable others, it is considered not useful to teach to the child.

Unlike Piaget, who believed that instruction should follow development, Vygotskij argued that guidance can, should, and does lead development. They would differently define what is currently called ‘developmentally appropriate curriculum.’ Piaget insisted that learning is essentially an individual endeavor and that adults can only facilitate by providing an enriched stimulating learning environment and opportunities for children to share and discuss their egocentric thinking with each other to promote disequilibrium in the child’s thinking. Adults should not interfere in the child’s individual thinking because it can only lead to imposition of the adult’s ideas onto the child—what Piaget called ‘sociocentrism.’ In contrast, Vygotskij encouraged adults to provide guidance and help and to engage students in activities that are beyond their individual levels of competence (‘performance before competence,’ Cazden 1992)…
A student’s teachability depends not only on the student but also on the teacher (and broader communities in which the child participates). Thus, no test of the child alone would accurately determine the child’s teachability—the teacher always counts.]

How SIG mitigates hindsight bias and “resulting” which is the practice of having an outcome dictate whether you made a good decision at the time with the information you had at hand:

We do everything we can to shield, the person we’re giving feedback to from knowing the results. I’m not going to tell you whether or not this trade worked out, I will tell you the information that was available to me at the time that I made the trade, and then what I did, and you can give me feedback on that process. So the identification from this less formal setting comes from from knowledge about about how trading works, or how this particular risk taking works. In our education setting, it’s something that we control a whole lot more cleanly. We don’t have to present a very complex trade and see who can figure out the pieces of it until everybody in the trading class is ready to get there.

In Being A Pro And Permission To Be Serious I argue that a hallmark of being a professional is the equivalent of “watching film” to get better.

Here is Todd describing a Socratic learning process:

We can build from from smaller pieces up to up to the larger concept, and see who along the way, isn’t processing that smaller piece appropriately. And a big part of how information is passed from the mentor to the mentee is by modeling the decision process, it is not enough to say you should have raised the vol by two points when this trade came in. Instead, it’s so much more important to say, okay, when this trade came in, I remembered that earlier in the week, somebody had traded this other structure. And when they did, I updated my possible outcome space to look different. This trade confirmed with that other trade did so so now I was I just more heavily weighted this other outcome. And the result was that I took volatility up two points, then someone knows not only what to do, which is really not the important thing to take away. But how to do it, which is very much what we’re looking to teach…

We’re really discussing how we would behave in a situation and modeling what the conversation should look like and will disagree with each other. The answer to just about every trading question is “it depends”, which is a really hard thing for someone to hear when they’re first learning because they want the answer. They want to know, when I’m in this exact situation, again, what is the optimal thing to do?

The interesting part of the conversation comes in the what it depends on. All of these questions lead to the some type of answer of what you could do. And there’s some things that are clearly wrong. And it’s important to talk about that, too. So when we’re talking about it in a trading context, it’s really nice that one teacher can say, “I think that I probably would have shown a bid for this price and this amount”. And someone else says, “Well, I don’t know that I would because this broker has behaved this way before. So I think that this might be a time where I’d be afraid that I’m opening myself up to selection bias if I if I were to price it that way, so I would do this.” And you have these senior traders who are disagreeing. And so there’s this really nice modeling of how to think about how to improve the process, so that you can reach an answer that you are tentatively more comfortable with.

His technique for extracting the most out of an interview is clearly influenced by SIG’s educational approach. I’ll let you see the quote first then explain my experience when I interviewed there.

The best outcome for me in an interview, is if the candidate walks away, and wishes they could have part of the interview back. That means that I did not spend the entirety of the interview in their zone of mastery, where they just got to show off  in front of me. Then I’m left to decide whether or not they would have the skills to do more. And I did not spend the entire time in the zone of frustration, where they couldn’t do anything. And it’s like, “okay, I didn’t expect you to know how to do that anyway but if you could, that would have been great to see” and still make a hiring decision.

Instead on on multiple dimensions, I’ve been able to find the place where, with a little bit of support, they could do a little bit more. A big part of the reason I like that is exactly this thing that we’re talking about, which is this openness to feedback.  I’m giving them feedback, because I’ve successfully mapped out their zone of proximal development, and now I’m providing a little bit of scaffolding to see what they can do with support.

You will find that some people embrace it and say, Oh, I think I see where you’re going. Let me see if I can take it from here. That’s a great answer.

You will find some people who are just waiting for you to give them more of the answer. Who will just wait for you to map out the entire selection process and then they’ll just fill in the numbers.

I think you’ll find some people who are totally resistant to it, who will shut you up, who will put their hand up and say, no, no, no. Let me work on it my way. And they’re always not working. Yeah. And I know why it’s not working. And I can help direct them away from it. But they don’t take the feedback. I don’t want the person who doesn’t take the feedback. And I don’t want the person who’s waiting for more feedback. I want the person who is hungry and eager to use the tools that are presented and available to them to then do the work themselves. That’s what’s going to be successful when they’re trading. And they get to have a small opportunity of doing that in the interview process.

In my first round, on campus interview, I struggled with 2 out of 3 questions. You can see the types of questions they ask in Interview Questions A Market Maker Gave Me in 1999. But I’m almost certain the only reason I was asked back for another round was because I was fascinated by the questions and asked what I could read to learn more so I would better prepared. Quantitavely I was a below-average hire but knowing that probably help me take learning more seriously. I don’t think I ever took learning very seriously in school (I took grades seriously). But trading sounded so interesting, I really wanted that job (see For Fun, My Career Origin Story).

As Todd was preparing to go on Jeopardy, we get this entertaining story that epitomizes SIG’s values and culture.

Before I went on the show, I knew that there were some things that I needed to really brush up on. Shakespeare comes up in ways that I knew that I didn’t have a deep enough knowledge of. I wanted to make sure I knew all the presidents and vice presidents in order, things like that. And Jeff Yass, one of the founders of Susquehanna, the Chief Risk Manager at Susquehanna, came into my office before I went, and he said, “Todd, nobody cares if you know anything about American history. But if you screw up the the betting on the Final Jeopardy and Daily Doubles, don’t even bother coming back.”

This was a lovely reminder that I couldn’t embarrass myself by not knowing trivia. And a very good reminder that what I do as a profession is put money at risk. So I should probably make sure that I’m thinking pretty clearly about about how I’m gambling in the game. And when I got back, he came in my office, close the door behind me said, “I know that you’re not supposed to share the results until the show airs but tell me how much money you had, how much money everybody had in Final Jeopardy, and I’ll tell you what you should have wagered”

And that’s all that he wanted to talk about when I when I got back. I won one night, so made it back to Final Jeopardy and he approved my wagers on both. 

Communication

On being a more constructive communicator:

Adam Grant recently was talking about how to get feedback from people who are lower on the the corporate echelon, direct reports or their reports. And one of the things that he talked about was to lead with an honest acknowledgement of your shortcomings. That’s really constructive, because that allows for feedback. It invites it in an open way where you’re clearly challenging behaviors and not the person and then has the open ended piece of asking the important “what else?” question.

Non-constructive ways are seeking out “Yes, man” answers. Like, “Hey, I just won $10,000 on that last trade that I did, seems like that was pretty good. Can you think of any ways I could have improved that?” It’s really hard to follow that up with, “Yeah, I think you probably should have won a lot more. Or you could have done it in a much less risky way. Or you won because you flipped the coin and it came up heads. Stop patting yourself on the back, this was not all that impressive.”  You haven’t really opened up for [constructive criticism] if you frame it as “why my trade was good.” Instead, tell me why this piece of my decision process was good.

The other important thing is to actually change your behavior when you get the feedback. If you get feedback, and then don’t do anything with it, people are going to stop giving you the feedback. It’s not just not helpful to ask for feedback and not change. It’s actually hurtful.

The theme of modeling behavior as the key to learning recurs throughout the interview. I’m also a strong believer in this idea (I don’t remember it being explicitly discussed at SIG, but it’s quite apperent that we learned by breathing in the culture). I am extremely concious that my kids learn from what I do more than what I say. 

I was delighted to hear Todd’s approach to teaching his children and it’s the primary reason to return to this episode. 

“You’re not going to get this unless you hear how I’m approaching this decision”.

I think about this a lot more with my own children, that this is something that I think about a lot as I’m, as I’m raising adults into the world, they frequently come to me and my wife and ask for advice. The important thing for us to show them is not what the answer is, because we’re going to be wrong. But how we think about the answer which is probably going to be much more important for them as they go forward making decisions when I’m not going to be standing next to them, but they can have sort of the proverbial dad on their shoulder whispering in their ear. “Have you thought about this? Did you consider it this way? What is the cost of this? What are the benefits of this? Is this a decision that you can change after the fact?  Or is this one that you’re sticking with?”

All those questions that I would ask in trying to reach a decision, instead of just sort of asking it to myself and then and then handing over the the outcome? I share the process and sharing the process leads to more constructive conversations with my children and with and with our traders.

Reflective listening:

Something that I learned while I was in college, from a book called Teacher Effectiveness Training. When I read it in the book, and we talked about it in class, I said, this is the dumbest piece of advice anybody’s ever put down on paper. And it was around reflective listening. And the idea was that instead of trying to step in, and problem solve, instead of trying to reframe instead of trying to provide context or or dig deeper, all you do is tell the person what you heard them say.

So that night, a friend of mine was over at my apartment for dinner. And she was talking about a problem that she was having with a roommate. And I was like, just for kicks, I’m going to give this a shot. And she’s, you know, salting the chicken or whatever it was, and she’s like “my roommate never puts her dishes away, and it bugs the hell out of me.” I reply, “So it sounds like you’re really bothered when she doesn’t put away your dishes.” She says, “Yeah, and it’s not just that, it’s also that she doesn’t appreciate it. When I do clean up.” Then I said, “So it sounds like you know, part of the problem here is that you’re not feeling appreciated.”

She’s gonna think I’m the dumbest guy that she’s ever known, right? Like, all I’m doing is, is repeating what she’s saying. And I was like, well, this, this certainly feels dumb. And I guess at some point, I got to call myself out on and point out that I’m just doing this stupid thing from the stupid book. And that’s, and then she turned to me and said, “Todd, this is the most beneficial conversation I’ve had about my relationship with my roommate ever. I feel like I’m coming away with this understanding myself better and her.”

Her experience was totally different from mine! She felt heard, she felt seen. And she felt like she now had the power to make a better decision about her relationship going forward. And I thought, Okay, well, maybe this guy’s not so stupid. Maybe this book isn’t so stupid. And maybe these methods work in places that I wouldn’t have thought they would work. And it’s not always the solution. But it’s a much better solution than I would have thought it would be. And it’s something that I find myself doing with my kids all the time, and it no longer feels forced to me It no longer feels fake. To me, it’s very clear that what I’m doing is allowing the space for for them to finish their own thought. That’s one of the things that I do with my kids that I think has been been really beneficial.

“How do you feel about that?”

His daughter’s friend was venting to his daughter. Here’s what happened:

My daughter said, “Well, how do you feel about that?” And, and her friends said, “that is the most Simkin thing that I could hear you say at that point? Instead of asking what I want to do next, you start with, ‘how do I feel about it’, which is something that the friend and my daughter have heard from me and Shelly, my wife, over and over again.

Again, it’s really hard for us to jump in and start providing advice, if we don’t even know where the child is coming from. If we start saying “well, it sounds like that other kid was being a jerk?” and then your kid is like “no, that’s not what I was saying at all. How do you not get me? How do you not understand what this is just starting with?”

So we say “How do you feel about that?” It feels like the Freudian psychologist sitting back, you know, while you’re lying on the couch mumbling something, but turns out to be really helpful.

This is really very similar to understanding truth, that if you don’t have an understanding of what’s really happening as a starting point, if we can’t sort of agree on the facts, then then we’re not going to be able to reach a good decision trading or interpersonally.

The principle of charity in life and in trading [this principle is 1 of my 3 Simple Rules For Social Media]:

When I’m modeling decision processes for my classes or kids, I use the principle of charity. When somebody says something, assuming that they’re not an idiot, assuming that they’re coming from from a place of sincerity and good intentions, and giving them the benefit of the doubt.

On the trading side, this principle of charity is really giving somebody credit for knowing what they’re doing when they’re trading against you. This is what sort of protects you from from being run over by somebody who has better information than you do.

On the interpersonal side, this gift to the other person, is an assumption that that they are well intentioned and smart and approaching this for the same purpose that you are, and therefore you’re going to end up being aligned in your process to reach a resolution to a conflict or to come to an agreement about whatever it is that you guys are talking about. Every single negotiation is a cooperation and collaboration.

We’re never in a situation where the person has to negotiate with you. They have some alternative, they can walk away, which means that the only reason anybody’s going to engage you in a negotiation is because by doing so they’re going to get a better outcome than by not doing so. If that’s the case, then every negotiation is collaborative. Having a favorable outcome for yourself means that you have to have a favorable outcome for them as well. Otherwise, they’re not gonna be part of this conversation, and definitely not future conversations.

It’s easy to see where Todd gets his approach to parenting. This story of how his father modeled decision-making is brilliant but also so loving a thing to do when it might have been easy to just roll over. The setup was Todd was frustrated with lacrosse in high school and decided to quit.

Let’s follow along:

My father said, to come into the living room sit down, I want to talk to you. So I sat down in my towel and thought that this was going to be a couple seconds of  “You can’t quit lacrosse”, which which would have made some sense. A sort of  heavy-handed edict.

But instead, he said,  “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it. It’s really been bothering me thinking about the fact that you’re quitting. It really bothers me because I haven’t heard why you want to quit, other than the fact that you’ve been frustrated with your coach, there’s not enough here. Like it doesn’t make sense. So you’re gonna have to explain to me in a way that it makes sense in order for me to be supportive of this.

In hindsight, I recognize that this was such great parenting happening here, which was not saying, here’s what you have to do, here’s what you can’t do. But instead, it said, if this is a reasonable and rational choice, or even an emotional choice, which isn’t necessarily rational, but if it’s an emotional and consistent choice, I’ll back you up on on doing this.

If it’s not, if this is rash, and it’s going to have long term implications for you, which it is,  you can’t quit the team and then three days later, go back and say you’ve decided that you want to rejoin, then there are big implications here. So you need to make sure that you’ve given this appropriate weight and appropriate thought, before following through with the decision that you can’t change. Tell me what you’re thinking and tell me what your plan is. If you do this, you’re gonna have an extra two hours every afternoon, you have an extra 10 hours a week. What are you doing with that time? How are you better off having that time, not on the lacrosse field than when you were on the lacrosse field.

The way we left it at the time was with me feeling a bit frustrated that I was not able to convince my father that this was the right choice. And because I couldn’t, I realized that maybe it wasn’t the right choice. Maybe what I needed to do was wait, and waiting was the low cost option, right that at the time, I didn’t know what options were. But in the way I sort of frame and think about the world. Now I recognize that this is what we would refer to as a real option that that there is a cost to it. It does cost me something, it costs you something in terms of my frustration level. And the fact that I’m tired after running for two hours straight. And I’m not as fast as the other guys on the team. So I’ve got to play catch up a lot. But that’s day by day, and in return, I get this upside of maybe there’s some benefit to me sticking with this longer term.

I ended up reaching the conclusion, a couple weeks later, that I wanted that to be my last lacrosse season. But I would finish out the season I would finish out both the commitment to the team and also find the opportunity to fill that time with with something else that was going to also be productive and ideally more productive than playing lacrosse, which I couldn’t do midseason. I couldn’t switch over and start start playing on the baseball team midseason. But the process of having my father model, deliberate decision making for something that was consequential was really was really pretty beneficial early on.

How this still influences Todd:

I try to take the same care today that my father had then, which is that he never erupted, you know, his his reaction was never emotional. It was purely inquisitive. It was like, you know, help me understand better. And the question he helped me understand better is, is exactly the way I approach decisions that my children are making is to say, look, you know that I love and support you with whatever it is that you’re doing. But I can either provide context, or at the very least more support if I understand better where you’re coming from.

One of the one of the other teachers of the class at Susquehanna has such a lovely touch, he just says, Tell me more, and tell me more doesn’t have any value laid in it, it doesn’t have , any judgment in it. It’s just saying, go ahead and add more words to what you’ve already shared. You want to take this action against this type of order flow? Why? Tell me more. And effectively what my father was saying is the same as what as what Mike, my co- teacher says, when he’s talking to our students, which is just, I cannot reach a conclusion about what you’re saying, until I understand it better. So help me understand it better. Tell me more.

What stands out for me is the magic that can happen when we combine the principles of charity with a demand for mental rigor and vulnerability. 

This approach establishes very early, that we’re on the same side that we have, if not all of the same goals, we have alignment with our values and our goals, I want to support you says all I’m looking for is an excuse to make sure that you and I are facing the same direction and facing the world together. Help me get there bring me into alignment with you by by telling me more,

“I want to support you. I want to help you, but I need to understand you better”

 
If you use options to hedge or invest, check out the moontower.ai option trading analytics platform

 

Notes from Tom Morgan on Infinite Loops

Link: https://www.infiniteloopspodcast.com/tom-morgan-all-you-need-is-love-ep74/

Tom Morgan, Director of Communications & Content at The KCP Group, joins Jim O’Shaughnessy on Infinite Loops to discuss:

  • The trillion-to-one ratio of attention
  • “Love” as a compass for growth
  • Religions and Traditions
  • Enlightenment vs. Adulthood

On attention and the possibility that there is something beyond us:

Tom: I’m not going to paraphrase the whole thing [Usual Illusion], but the relevant piece that we probably are aware of 60 bits of information at any given moment, but there’s 11 million that are potentially available to us. If I say to you, “Wiggle your big toe,” you’re suddenly aware of your big toe. That information was coming to you all this time.

You are having a conversation with a cocktail party with one person, and you hear someone else across the room say your name and you swivel your attention to that. You were taking that information in some way, it just wasn’t being served to your conscious awareness. It’s a filtering process. That feels like something that’s intuitive and is easy for us to understand. The bit that took me a really long time to understand is the idea that outside of that million to one ratio, there’s a trillion to one ratio of things that we’re never aware of and never can be aware of.

When you think about an earthworm, an earthworm has never seen a sunset and it will never see a sunset because it has not evolved to see a sunset. We will never experience the way a Bloodhound does with 200 million receptors in its nose because it’s not relevant to us. So the reason why that’s important is that if you think about a trillion to one ratio of things outside of us, the things that we’re aware of, the idea that there wouldn’t be a force influencing us that was hidden goes from a possibility to, I think, a probability.

How the powerful were able to shut down threats with might and control of information in mid-sixties to mid-seventies

Jim: Watch the music videos from that time. Again the artists were at the forefront. They were the tip of the spear in this and the spear scared the shit out of the left-brained dominant society and the man, so to speak. Psychedelics were broadly being misused in many cases. But all of the elements required for a phase change to happen successfully were in place in the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies. The man in this case, Richard Nixon, but everyone in control, and I’m speaking pretty specifically about the US here. But it happened in the UK too. And it happened in Germany. It was a global phenomenon. They made drugs, almost all of which are the non-addicting drugs, illegal. Fed max prison for going. They made an example of Timothy Leary. He became the scapegoat for like, having a couple of joints in his pocket? They didn’t even get him with any kind of psychedelic. You got to remember this guy was a tenured professor at Harvard, who was a well-thought-of psychologist. And, so they made an example of him because, now this is getting into kind of my take on this, people are terrified of what the implications are for being free.

The conventional keepers of the social “truths” shut it the fuck down. And they did that because they could. They did that because back then there was no global communication network like we have today.

People, for example, didn’t know that Franklin Roosevelt was in a wheelchair. They did not know that. Can you imagine in our day and age? Even trying to comprehend that is wild. So they were the keepers of the “truth” and it was a narrative that everyone believed.

Bucky Fuller, on death and rebirth being a shocking or scary idea:

There’s nothing about a caterpillar that suggests the butterfly.

The balance of safety and vitality; bridging specific knowledge and control with the abstract

Tom: And at the moment we’ve optimized for safety at the cost of vitality. And if you want vitality, you have to give up certainty. You have to give up the certainty of what you want, and you have to give up all forms of security, but not all forms of security. I don’t want to overstate this. Everything’s a balance, right?  We’ve just gone too far in one direction. And I think that’s sort of the prescription. It doesn’t involve a huge societal meltdown. It just involves more of an awareness of our own vulnerability and our own holistic inclusiveness.

Jim: It’s not like we haven’t been thinking about this as human beings. Forever we have, and we let traditions, and I’m not anti-tradition, but I am opposed to traditions which have osified and are not serving us anymore. And it’s like our school system, it’s like every, this is the kind of the main central heart of the great reshuffle. All of those old systems are broken or breaking. And we need to make new ones. And making new ones is going to be scary, but the only way you do that is to understand vitality.

Tom: I think any kind of reductionist theory is always going to be incomplete. You can get to the Higgs boson, but the Higgs boson isn’t going to tell you how to live your life. Right? You need values for that. I think there are actual universal values. They may be expressed in a Ten Commandment or something like that. But there is some sort of metaphysical truth out there. But the root to that individual creativity. That way you co-create with the environment around yo is intrinsically unique. And that sounds incredibly saccharine. Because it’s like, everyone’s special. Everyone’s got creativity inside them. Again, terrible words, right. When I heard “creativity”, I think of finger painting. And when you talk about reading poetry and listening to songs that just annoys my intellect.

But you have to remember that your intellect is fiercely resistant to all of these ideas because it requires giving up the steering wheel.

[Still] you do need to be is actually practical, because spiritual regressiveness and spiritual bypassing gets us nowhere in the same direction. So you need to be looking for people that are building the bridge from science back to spirituality.

Intuition or wisdom as evidence of a good filter

Tom: I read a resonant quote, two days ago, wisdom is knowing what information is important. Well that’s simple and incredibly profound, right? And to go back to the Usual Illusion example: you can’t take in 11 million bits, you’d be burned out like a light bulb in a nuclear reactor. You can’t take in a trillion bits, you’d be jello.  So all this is about, is all we’re talking about is how do you calibrate your filter to get the full range of human experience, including the shit stuff, which is the problem. If you hide in your intellect, as a lot of people I know have, it’s typically a coping mechanism to prevent yourself from experiencing the full range of human emotion.

And if you do get blown open, a blowing open experience tends to be incapacitating and overwhelming. And that’s the point. You’re not supposed to have a direct experience of that, right? Too many crazy psychedelic experiences make you too open. You believe everything, you need a good filter.

And that’s the definition of wisdom. And I think that George Soros example is brilliant. So like, for those of you that don’t know the George Soros anecdote, it was that he used to give all these really clever, retroactive reasons why he did things and then his son gave an interview I think to the Irish Times where he was like “Oh no, it’s just his back hurts when his portfolio positioned wrong.”

I thought about that for a long time. And my interpretation of it, whether right or wrong is that, we lay down a whole bunch of information from pattern recognition and he laid down a whole bunch of information from seeing an enormous number of different trading scenarios play out. But those recognition patterns run in the background. Because if they’re running in the foreground, you’re not going to get anything done. You’re going to be using your 60-bit consciousness to act in the world. But when something trips that, because it’s not running in your intellect, it’s running in your unconscious, you’re going to feel it as a sensation first.

And that’s the point. You need to be in tune enough and embodied enough that when you feel that, you don’t just feel it and discount it, you feel it and know what it means. So you are serving the correct emotions, you’re serving the correct physical sensations to your consciousness. And then you are able to interpret them and act on them in the correct way. That is a well-calibrated filter. It’s not about feeling everything all the time, because then you’re just going to be mush.

Notes From Moloch

Select excerpts from Slatestarcodex’s:

Meditations on Moloch (Link)

The premise:

The implicit question is – if everyone hates the current system, who perpetuates it? And Ginsberg answers: “Moloch”. It’s powerful not because it’s correct – nobody literally thinks an ancient Carthaginian demon causes everything – but because thinking of the system as an agent throws into relief the degree to which the system isn’t an agent.

Categories and examples of “multi-polar traps”

Situations where the best course of action for an individual makes the group worse off.

I sorted them as follows:

  1. Prisoner’s Dilemma
    • Dollar auctions (think of “pay to bid” auctions)
    • Tragedy of the commons problems (ie overfishing)

  2. Race to the bottom
    • Malthusian Traps (intense competitive pressures that penalize attempts at “slack”)
    • Capitalism (an instance of the evolutionary mechanism underlying Malthusian traps)
    • Two-income traps (From within the system, absent a government literally willing to ban second jobs, everyone who doesn’t get one will be left behind.)
    • Agriculture (Maybe hunting-gathering was more enjoyable, higher life expectancy, and more conducive to human flourishing – but in a state of sufficiently intense competition ag wins)
    • Arms races
    • Education signaling
    • Science and pseudo-science research
    • Gov’t corruption
    • Politics (Congressmen tactics to get elected)

All these scenarios are in fact a race to the bottom. Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s-eye-view, the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid.

…in some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse.

My own local example:

The public school system shifted the start date of the scholastic year up from late August to early August to gain an artifical advantage in year-end standardized test scores by giving the students more time to prepare. Eventually, all schools will adopt this to maintain competitiveness and we’ll sacrifice the value of summer vacations in August when people commonly take off work and camps are not in session.

Select Excerpts

On incentives and initial conditons…

Any human with above room temperature IQ can design a utopia. The reason our current system isn’t a utopia is that it wasn’t designed by humans. Just as you can look at an arid terrain and determine what shape a river will one day take by assuming water will obey gravity, so you can look at a civilization and determine what shape its institutions will one day take by assuming people will obey incentives. But that means that just as the shapes of rivers are not designed for beauty or navigation, but rather an artifact of randomly determined terrain, so institutions will not be designed for prosperity or justice, but rather an artifact of randomly determined initial conditions.

We just analogized the flow of incentives to the flow of a river. The downhill trajectory is appropriate: the traps happen when you find an opportunity to trade off a useful value for greater competitiveness. Once everyone has it, the greater competitiveness brings you no joy – but the value is lost forever. Therefore, each step of the Poor Coordination Polka makes your life worse.

Capitalism

Capitalism is a lossy accounting system in that it can elevate priorities without precision. Not unlike napalm. Its a victim of its own success in the sense that any critique of it galvanizes its defense with soothing rationalizations both by the rich and by those to whom it has unknowingly imprisoned. Look, capitalism is good. It doesn’t need religious arguments in its favor to affirm that. Those arguments discredit its supporters which is a collective self-own. It’s possible to discuss its merits and flaws in the same room.

With that said, here’s a nuanced point from the essay…

I know that “capitalists sometimes do bad things” isn’t exactly an original talking point. But I do want to stress how it’s not equivalent to “capitalists are greedy”. I mean, sometimes they are greedy. But other times they’re just in a sufficiently intense competition where anyone who doesn’t do it will be outcompeted and replaced by people who do. Business practices are set by Moloch, no one else has any choice in the matter. (from my very little knowledge of Marx, he understands this very very well and people who summarize him as “capitalists are greedy” are doing him a disservice)

Politics

Politics is similarly skewed…

As well understood as the capitalist example is, I think it is less well appreciated that democracy has the same problems. Yes, in theory it’s optimizing for voter happiness which correlates with good policymaking. But as soon as there’s the slightest disconnect between good policymaking and electability, good policymaking has to get thrown under the bus. For example, ever-increasing prison terms are unfair to inmates and unfair to the society that has to pay for them. Politicans are unwilling to do anything about them because they don’t want to look “soft on crime”, and if a single inmate whom they helped release ever does anything bad (and statistically one of them will have to) it will be all over the airwaves as “Convict released by Congressman’s policies kills family of five, how can the Congressman even sleep at night let alone claim he deserves reelection?”. So even if decreasing prison populations would be good policy – and it is – it will be very difficult to implement.

The libertarian-authoritarian axis on the Political Compass is a tradeoff between discoordination and tyranny. You can have everything perfectly coordinated by someone with a god’s-eye-view – but then you risk Stalin. And you can be totally free of all central authority – but then you’re stuck in every stupid multipolar trap Moloch can devise. The libertarians make a convincing argument for the one side, and the monarchists for the other, but I expect that like most tradeoffs we just have to hold our noses and admit it’s a really hard problem.

This reminds me of a story I heard from my wife about an elementary school class election. One kid gave an impassioned speech about what they would change (no hall monitors anymore? I have no idea what kids see as the real issues in that otherwise simulcrum of no reality I know of called “school”). Anyway, the challenging candidate rolls up to the podium and declares that if you elect him, he’ll secure the school a…rollercoaster! In the exit poll one of the students was asked why they voted for the rollercoaster candidate and the student said, “I know it probably won’t happen, but what if it did?! That would be soooo cool”.

I suspect the challenger is on their way to a lucrative career in politics.

And we are all worse off for it.

How conservative and liberal views of societal evolution dictate thir imperatives

Societies, like animals, evolve. The ones that survive spawn memetic descendants – for example, the success of Britan allowed it to spin off Canada, Australia, the US, et cetera. Thus, we expect societies that exist to be somewhat optimized for stability and prosperity. I think this is one of the strongest conservative arguments. Just as a random change to a letter in the human genome will probably be deleterious rather than beneficial since humans are a complicated fine-tuned system whose genome has been pre-optimized for survival – so most changes to our cultural DNA will disrupt some institution that evolved to help Anglo-American (or whatever) society outcompete its real and hypothetical rivals.

The liberal counterargument to that is that evolution is a blind idiot alien god that optimizes for stupid things and has no concern with human value. Thus, the fact that some species of wasps paralyze caterpillars, lay their eggs inside of it, and have its young devour the still-living paralyzed caterpillar from the inside doesn’t set off evolution’s moral sensor, because evolution doesn’t have a moral sensor because evolution doesn’t care. Suppose that in fact patriarchy is adaptive to societies because it allows women to spend all their time bearing children who can then engage in productive economic activity and fight wars. The social evolutionary processes that cause societies to adopt patriarchy still have exactly as little concern for its moral effects on women as the biological evolutionary processes that cause wasps to lay their eggs in caterpillars. Evolution doesn’t care. But we do care. There’s a tradeoff between Gnon-compliance – saying “Okay, the strongest possible society is a patriarchal one, we should implement patriarchy” and our human values – like women who want to do something other than bear children.

Too far to one side of the tradeoff, and we have unstable impoverished societies that die out for going against natural law. Too far to the other side, and we have lean mean fighting machines that are murderous and miserable. Think your local anarchist commune versus Sparta.

An optimistic angle. Or maybe not.

Franklin continues: “The project of civilization [is] for man to graduate from the metaphorical savage, subject to the law of the jungle, to the civilized gardener who, while theoretically still subject to the law of the jungle, is so dominant as to limit the usefulness of that model. This need not be done globally; we may only be able to carve out a small walled garden for ourselves, but make no mistake, even if only locally, the project of civilization is to capture Gnon. “

I maybe agree with Warg here more than I have ever agreed with anyone else about anything. He says something really important and he says it beautifully and there are so many words of praise I want to say for this post and for the thought processes behind it. But what I am actually going to say is…

Gotcha! You die anyway!

My Concluding Thoughts

  • First a general thought:

    This essay is infotainment. It’s a work of art, it’s provocative, and one I expect to return to because it is stirring. Its sense-making Slatestar at his best. It’s dreary by default. But I see a glimmer of liberation peeking from behind its nimbus:

    If you accept its hopelessness and kneel to Moloch, you might fare better. But it’s delaying the inevitable. Instead, you can rebel. It might be quiet. And maybe nobody will care. But a large part of your reality is your own internal narration of it. There are truths that inhabit the physical world. Beyond that, things veer pretty quickly towards “it’s all made up”. This is liberation. How you feel about how you play matters. You might as well play your way since it doesn’t matter anyway.

    But this is not even the useful part.

    The real gift is once you witness how others deal with this non-mattering, you have found a magic compass. It points you to the family you choose. It gives you back control of your attention. And while we’re here, that’s probably the most useful choice we have.

  • A (pollyannish?) thought:

    This essay highlights how capitalism and competition narrow our values. ESG seeks to broaden our values. There is some irony in that one of the arguments in favor of ESG is that if we internalized our externalities, through what amounts to a broader system of accounting, that it would also maximize a Chicago-school capitalists brand of utility.

    Perhaps this is true. Companies that are more virtuous might be better for “shareholder value” in the long run. But part of me finds that reasoning patronizing. Like hiding the dog’s pill in peanut butter. 

    The ESGer is conceding a point they shouldn’t have to. Instead of trying to fit a wider set of values into an existing legible accounting system we could realize that the system is a needless sacrifice to legibility.

    (I don’t need a lecture on the grifty aspects of ESG. Every movement that gains traction brings its share of mops and sociopaths.)

  • Finally:

    You should read the essay. It’s a classic from a good writer. If you need another breadcrumb, one of the questions Slatestar poses:

    Why do things not degenerate more and more until we are back at subsistence level?

    I can think of three bad reasons – excess resources, physical limitations, and utility maximization – plus one good reason – coordination.

    You’ll need to read it to explore the answers.

Notes From C.Thi Nguyen Interview About Games and Society

Link: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/10/18/169-c-thi-nguyen-on-games-art-values-and-agency/

C. Thi Nguyen received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently associate professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. He has written public philosophy for venues such as Aeon and The New York Times, and is an editor of the aesthetics blog Aesthetics for Birds. He was the recipient of the 2020 Article Prize from the American Philosophical Association. His recent book is Games: Agency as Art.

I only excerpted topics of particular interest to me so you should listen to the podcast for a fuller understanding. Anything bold is my emphasis.

Intro by host Sean Carroll

One of the good things about the artificiality of games, you know when you’ve won or lost, unlike life. But…that clarity of knowing when you’ve won or lost is very seductive outside the context of a formal game. It’s very seductive in life.

Thi has developed this understanding to study things like echo chambers and cult leaders. A cult is in many ways like an echo chamber. In both cases, it’s not just a filter bubble where you prevent information you don’t want from getting in, but it’s like a strategy for preemptively undermining claims from outsiders that the cult leader or the echo chamber doesn’t want you to believe in, right? You give people ways to discount outside information.

One of the reasons why cults and echo chambers are so seductive is that they bring clarity to values and moral reasoning, maybe a little bit too much clarity: They make it too easy, they make things cut and dried in a way that the world itself is often not so cut and dried. So he has a whole understanding of why we’re so seduced by conspiracy theories, by cult leaders, by echo chambers, and how it relates to this seductiveness of clarity that we get from thinking about games and point. We get points, we get likes on our tweets, we get steps on our Fitbit. This engages our brains for interesting evolutionary reasons, and that feature of human psychology can be gamed, if you like, by the leaders of cults or echo chambers.

Games

What is a game?

The notion of a game is really disputed in philosophy. It’s very storied. In philosophy, it’s a particularly famous concept, because when Wittgenstein was like, “No, you can’t define concepts,” his example of an undefinable concept was a game.

There’s an amazing book from Bernard Suits called The Grasshopper, which is an attempt to define games, which actually takes itself as a response of Wittgenstein and also secretly about the meaning of life and the relationship between games and the meaning of life.

The short version is, “To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of making possible the experience of struggling against them.”

  • Part of the idea of the game is that the goal of the game is partially constituted by obedience to certain restrictions:

    If you’re trying to get to the top of a mountain to get some rare drug that’s only there, you’re not playing a game. You’re just trying to get to the top of the mountain. If you’re trying to climb the mountain as a mountain climber, then certain restrictions are part of what you’re doing. So the medical seeker is not a game player, and the mountain climber is. And one way you can tell is if someone goes by in a helicopter and says, “Hey, you want a ride?” The medical climber will say, “Of course, get me the cancer drug.” And the other person is like, “Of course not. What do you think I’m doing?”

  • Autotelic: It’s worth engaging in the activity for the sake of the engagement and the doing rather than the product.

The charm or allure of games

  • Struggle

    The aesthetic experience of struggle can be accessed in a safe way by making the difficulty manageable.

Some struggles are beautiful, some struggles are satisfying. And what games do is, they let you tweak the activity to maximize that satisfaction…Most of life’s challenges are too big or too boring and little for us. In games, we get to modify the world of the game and the abilities we’re allowed in the game until they fit just right.

Example:

I feel like things like chess are kind of tuned to maximize that moment, you get more and more of those moments. In my normal life moving around the world, I get to feel graceful once a week, but rock climbing tunes you into the part of the activity that has that feeling. It’s built to constantly call out of you that incredible experience of delicate, graceful, perfect motion.

Manageable because of clarification

Games are these circumscribed spaces where the actions in space have been often been leaned down and clarified, so your actions can fit. They’re clarified, not just because the actions you can perform have been clarified, it’s because your values have been clarified.

Bounded and limited beings make things that make them feel temporarily okay, like spaces where we don’t feel too little for this vast world. The real world is this existential hell-scape of too many values, and games are like this temporary balm, where the world makes sense for a little bit.

  • Games as art

    Games are sculpted experiences of practicality. I think what’s interesting in games is, if games are sculpted practicality, then the beauty emerges in the practical action. So in other words, when you play a game, it’s not the game that’s beautiful, it’s you that’s beautiful.

    I think a lot of the literature about games has been going around looking for qualities that are in the game, like, Oh, the graphics are beautiful, the sound is beautiful, the story is beautiful. And they’re not looking at how radically different games are. And I think there are other things like this that are also mostly neglected, but the thing that makes games unique is that they’re sculpted action.

The danger in having your values clarified

  • Gamification

    Game values are hyper crisped-up, and that’s fine if you put away those values at the end. But when you gamify something like education or communication, then you’re forcing a singular clarified value system on a real-world activity. Think of how Fitbits or Twitter engagement can orient your goals towards local maxima. Twitter’s gamification squashes an individuals’ pluralistic values and gets everyone, insofar as they’re motivated, to be motivated in the same direction.

    • Education examples:
      • Sean Carroll: I used to be at the University of Chicago, which obviously has always been academically super-duper strong, but back in the day, it wasn’t the place you applied if you were interested in Harvard or Stanford or Princeton, it was less well known. So suddenly, there was a strategy that they undertook at the University of Chicago because they were being hurt in the US News rankings, and they were being hurt because the only people who applied to the University of Chicago were the ones who really wanted to go there. And you are rewarded in the US News rankings by having a high selectivity, by rejecting most of the people who apply, so they intentionally encouraged people to apply knowing they would reject them, ’cause it increased their selectivity, and they leapt up in the rankings. That’s an example of maybe the goal perverting the original aspiration.
      • Law School culture
        A study about law school culture when the US News and World Report started ranking them charts a bunch of stuff like what you’re talking about, about people gaming the rankings. One of the things they point out is that different law schools used to follow different missions before the rankings, but if their mission is skewed to the ranking at all, then you drop in the rankings, so it’s forced everyone to pursue the same values.

        Before the rankings, prospective law students used to talk about what different law schools valued and talk about their own values and decide what their values were, to pick which school to go to. Now, they, say 99% of the students just assume their goal is to get into the best school, where the best school is set by the ranking. So they don’t go through the process of value self-deliberation. You end up outsourcing your values, you end up letting somebody else perform value deliberations for you, and what goes into those values are often very much based in what’s in the interest of large-scale institutions and the kind of information management systems at large-scale information.

People worry a lot about games creating violence, and there’s actually a lot of data that mostly they don’t. And I think part of that is that the violence in games is fictional, and we have a lot of information that people are mostly capable of screening off fictions. The thing that I’m really worried about is people becoming used to the idea that the goal is some simple, quantified thing that people share, and what we’re supposed to do is do everything in our power to up that simple measure, and one thing on to note, that’s not fictional.

We shouldn’t worry about games creating serial killers, we should worry about them creating Wall Street bankers.

[obligatory reference to James C Scott’s Seeing Like A State: “Look, what you should think is that large-scale institutions generally see the parts of the world that are processable by large-scale bureaucratic machines, which are quantified data, they can’t register the part.” So, think about this, a large-scale school district or an educational bureaucracy can’t register individual student evaluation data, they can only register aggregatable data like GPA. So, says Scott, large-scale institutions have reason to remake the world along lines that are more regular, so that they can be legible to the institution and actable on by the institution.]

  • The satisfying aspect of games common to conspiracy theories

The satisfaction we crave in the clarity and simplification of games is why we are drawn to conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are tuned to give you the exact same pleasure [as games]. Someone has changed the nature of the world, apparently, to make it tractable.

How the argument works:

    1. There’s a source of anxiety: The world is complex

      Scientists are hyper-specialized, no-one understands everything, at some point you realize that you have to just trust tons of stuff that you have no ability to grapple with.

    2. Conspiracy theories circumvent our need to trust

      They say “Don’t be sheep. Don’t trust other people. Here is a vision of the world, where you can contain the world in you. You can explain all of it with this one powerful explanation.” It is a game-like pleasure, but exported to a place where it’s dangerous.

      • Refers to a book by Elijah Millgram, called The Great Endarkenment. It talks about how knowledge must not be individual quest given the fact that the world is so hyper-specialized that no one can know more than a tiny amount of it. [This stands in contrast to the] ideal of intellectual autonomy that drove the Great Enlightenment. But it doomed itself, because it created all the science that made it impossible to be intellectually autonomous. If you still hold to the old ideal of intellectual autonomy, where everyone can understand everything, what you get is being driven to anti-vaxxing and various conspiracy theories in which you reject trust in the sciences.]
    3. Conspiracy theories hack our desire for clarity

      It’s not that clarity is always bad. When you have intellectual success, you do have this feeling of clarity. My worry is the feel of clarity actually comes apart from real understanding, and that outside actors can game it.

      For example, in the course of evolution, it made perfect sense for us to pursue sugar and fat because calories are scarce, it’s hard to get enough fat and so on. Then the world changes and industrial forces figure out that they can maximize the feeling of sugar and fat separate from any nutritive qualities. And then if you’re still stuck on that old heuristic and chasing sugar and fat, then you’re screwed. Clarity can be like cognitive sugar. Someone can aim to max out the feeling of clarity, and the way that looks like is a conspiracy theory.

Trust’s role in conspiracy theories

1. Trust is tricky because there’s a lot you cannot trust, yet being able to trust is not optional

If you devote your entire life to it, you can understand one one-millionth of the human landscape of knowledge. [Even worse] not only can you not understand everything else, you don’t even have the capacity in yourself to pick the right experts to trust.

I have a PhD in philosophy, I have a lot of education. If you gave me a good, a real statistician, and a fake one, I don’t have the mathematical skills to tell the difference between a good statistical paper and one that gives a bad result. I don’t have that in myself. So what you get is actually this incredibly iterated and very fractal chain of trust.

[An example of why we have no choice but to trust in many cases:

There was one proof of a really famous theorem that literally only one guy understood, and he’s getting old, so a whole bunch of people had to have a project to re-write the proof in a way that other people could understand it. And that whole process of dealing with the fact that you need to trust some things, while you shouldn’t trust everything, is a tricky thing that is probably under-theorized.]

Politically, conspiracy theories tend to be associated with the right, but the left’s appeal to science fall flat because they are not appreciating the role of trust:

      • The false argument they spout:

        “Oh, these fucking anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers. Think for yourself, look at the science, evaluate the science.”

        When the truth is “I can’t evaluate that science.”

      • The obstacle is not whether people trust Science with a capital “S”, it’s the trust of its messengers

        Look at the people that are legitimated in a certain institutional structure, which involves a background trust in those institutions. And I think there’s this vision where for a lot of us, like when you look at anti-vaxxing, anti-masking, the climate change denialist space, what we want to say something like, “Oh, those people are totally irrational.” But I think what you have to think instead is, they have an entirely different basic framework of trust, for a different set of institutions. The degree of rationality there depends on the degree to which we can justify our trust in our institutions. And that’s a really, really complicated matter, and it’s not like the authoritative institutions are always right. There are plenty of historical cases where they are corrupted, right?

        It’s hard to be against conspiracy theories as a blanket statement ’cause sometimes there are conspiracies. We have plenty of historical examples where all the institutions in a particular country have become corrupted, have taken over the news media, are issuing fall statements. That’s a real thing that happens.

2. Echo chambers are not about ignorance, they’re about trust

An echo chamber is a system in which people have been taught to systematically distrust people on the other side. The book Echo Chamber doesn’t quite say the world around Rush Limbaugh is a cult, but they basically almost say it. This book is an empirical analysis of the world around Rush Limbaugh — Rush Limbaugh’s top people just systematically distrust and dismiss people on the other side.

This is is different from not hearing them at all (which is the filter bubble argument). The problem goes back to trust, not irrationality or disbelief of science.

A large segment of the population has had their trust subverted and undermined and directed toward what we think of as like the wrong institutions.

The way back is not to wave the evidence in people’s faces. I think people want to be like, “Oh, climate change denialists, just look at the evidence, here is the evidence,” but of course they’re not showing you the evidence, they’re showing scientists that they trust who process the evidence, ’cause not even a climate change scientist, a particular climate change scientist, has looked at all of the evidence for climate… It’s all processed.

Someone whose trust has been systematically undermined in that set of institutions will not trust evidence from sources they distrust**. And that is rational.

This is a complicated problem without easy solutions. But the first step is recognizing the story is that the other side doesn’t hear us. It’s that their trust has been undermined.**

A lot of public policy figures are fixated on the filter effect thinking we just need to create these public spaces where people can meet each other and talk to each other. That’s a standard view in a lot of political philosophy and public policy. And I think that’s not going to work if trust has already been systematically undermined. It doesn’t matter if you meet and hear the other side, if you already have a prevailing story that says they’re malicious, manipulative, evil people.

The grand takeaway

The need for clarity as evidenced by our love of both games and conspiracy theories can cause us to overoptimize and seek safety in echo chambers.

What do we do about it?

While there are no answers some hints that can point in helpful directions:

  1. Transition between perspectives

    Playfulness is the quality to transition between different world perspectives, easily, lightly, to hold your perspective lightly and slip between different ones. This can be done via literally traveling and playing games where you are forced to slip in between different value perspectives.

    It’s hard to do, it’s hard to put on different worldviews as like different outfits. This is a resonant argument for reading and earning widely:

    This is going to become the world’s oldest chestnut, but sometimes I think like, this is what the fucking humanities are for. Read some art, read some novels, motherfucker, and if you want the background paranoid view, it’s something like the world has very good reasons to get us to onboard to super simple, clear targets. And when I look at universities cutting humanities programs in favor of business schools and STEM, because those are higher-earning jobs or lead to more clearly measurable productivity, I’m like, of course, reading weird subtle art, experiencing weird subtle art, including games, but also including novels and music and all this other stuff, is this stuff that might have clued you in to different value perspectives other than make a lot of money and get a good job. And of course, they’re going to get cut out in a world dominated by hyper-simplified institutionalized values.

    One of the suspicions I have is that certain domains, especially the domains that science has a lot of success with, are the kinds of domains that admit of extraordinary clarity. And other domains, like the domain of life value and the domains of personal health and fitness and aesthetic joy, are not domains that admit of the same systemic clarity. And when we demand them, we start hitting simplified targets.

    There’s a difference between qualitative and quantitative data. Qualitative data is really rich and nuanced and subtle, but it’s really context-sensitive. It doesn’t aggregate, it doesn’t travel well.

    [insert quote: Not everything valuable can be measured, and not everything we measure is valuable]

  2. Be aware that there are forces that are trying to manipulate us

Like the sugar analogy, is this moral view or worldview too yummy? Is it just too satisfying? Did someone make this just for me and people in my cohort to swallow down?

This is definitely not a blanket. The thing is, you also get clarity and pleasure from really getting at truths. You can’t throw all that stuff away, you just have to realize that the signal has been amenable to perversion and misuse.

Keepsakes From Slatestar’s Fake Graduation Speech

Link to original post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-speech/

These excerpts capture the gist of the “speech” that I want to retain.

What if education, as you understand it – public or private or charter schooling from age four or five all the way to university as young adults – is, on net, a waste of your time and money?

Addressing The Alleged Benefits

Benefit 1: The philosophical benefits of feeling connected to the beauty of mathematics, the passion of the humanities, the great historical traditions.

Testing the claim: Compare to a control group — the unschooled

“unschooling” movement, a group of parents who think school is oppressive and damaging. They tell the government they’re home-schooling their children but actually just let them do whatever they want. They may teach their kid something if the child wants to be taught, otherwise they will leave them pretty much alone.

And this is really hard to study, because they’re a highly self-selected group and there aren’t very many of them.

What do we know from the small sample?

    1. if you’d stayed out of public school and stayed home and played games and maybe asked your parents some questions, then by the time your friends were graduating twelfth grade, you would have the equivalent of an eleventh-grade education.
    2. Louis Benezet’s experiment: He decreed that in some of the schools in his district, there would be no math instruction until grade six. He found that within a year, these sixth graders had caught up with their peers in traditional schools, and furthermore that they were able to think much more logically about math problems – figure out what was going on rather than desperately trying to multiply and divide all the numbers in the problem by one another.math education before grade six is useless at best. And it’s hard to resist the urge to generalize to other subjects and children even older still.

Why is it so easy for the unschooled to keep up with their better-educated brethren? My guess is that it’s because very little learning goes on at school at all.

      • According to the general survey of knowledge among college students, 3.3% know who Euclid was, 7.6% know who wrote Canterbury, and a full 15% know what city the Parthenon’s in.
      • 36% of high school students know that an atom is bigger than an electron, rather than vice versa. But a full 59% of college students know the same. That’s a whole nine percent better than chance. On one of the most basic facts about the fundamental entities that make up everything in existence.

“But knowledge isn’t about names and dates!” No, but names and dates are the parts that are easy to measure, and it’s a pretty good bet that if you don’t know what city the Parthenon’s in you probably haven’t absorbed the full genius of the Greek architectural tradition. Anyone who’s never heard of Chaucer probably doesn’t have strong opinions on the classics of Middle English literature.

Benefit #2: The practical benefits of being able to get a job and afford nice things like food and shelter.

Testing the claim: Employment

About fifteen percent of you will be some variant of unemployed straight out of college. Another ten percent will find something part-time. And another forty or so percent will be underemployed, working as waiters or clerks or baristas or something else that uses zero percent of the knowledge you’ve worked so hard to accumulate.

As bad as you will have it, everyone who didn’t graduate college still has it much, much worse. All the economic indicators agree with the signs from the desolate wasteland that was once our industrial heartland: they are doomed. Their wages are not stagnating but actively declining

Testing the claim: More education

As bad as the job market is, staying in school looks worse. Economists warn that attending law school is the worst career decision you can make, so much so that newly graduated lawyers have nothing do to but sue law schools for not warning them against attending and established firms offer an Anything But Law School Scholarship to raise awareness of the problem. Doctors are so uniformly unhappy that they are committing suicide in record numbers and nine out of ten would warn young people against going into medicine. Graduate school has always been an iffy bet, but now the ratio of Ph. D applicants to open tenure track positions has hit triple digits, with the vast majority ending up as miserable adjunct professors who juggle multiple part time jobs and end up making as much as a Starbucks barista but without the health insurance.

We were counting the benefits of formal education. We did not do so well in trying to prove that it left you more knowledgeable, but it did seem like it had some practical value in getting you a little bit more money.

What of the costs of education?

Musing for society at large

Well, first about twenty thousand hours of your youth. That’s okay. You weren’t using that golden time of perfect health and halcyon memories when you had more true capacity for creativity and imagination and happiness than you ever will again anyway.

the financial side of it. At $11,000 average per pupil spending per year times thirteen years plus various preschool and college subsidies, the government spends $155,000 on the kindergarten-through-college education of the average American.

How about to each of the individual types?

To the one who says:

I am the 3.3%! I know who Euclid was and I understand the sublime beauty of geometry. I don’t think I would have been exposed to it, or had the grit to keep studying it, if I hadn’t been here surrounded by equally curious peers, under the instruction of enthusiastic professors.

  • to you my advice is: if you’ve sacrificed everything for knowledge, don’t forget that. When you are a paralegal in Brooklyn, and you get home from work, and you are very tired, and you want to curl up in front of the TV and watch reality shows until you are numb, remind yourself that you value knowledge above everything else, that you will seek intellectual beauty though the world perish, and read a book or something. Or take a class at a community college.

my education was worth it….because of the friends, I made here

  • my advice is similar: if you’ve sacrificed everything for friendship, don’t forget that. When you are a paralegal in Brooklyn, or a market analyst in Seattle, or God forbid an intern in Michigan, and you get home from work, and you are very tired, and you want to curl up in front of your computer and check Reddit, remind yourself of the friends you made here and give them a call. See how they’re doing. Write them a Christmas card, especially if it is December. Anything other than declaring friendship your supreme value and drifting out of touch.

my education was worth it…because of the connections I made

  • If you’ve sacrificed everything for ambition, be ambitious as hell. When you are a paralegal in Brooklyn or whatever, claw your way to the top, stay there, and use it to do something important. If you’ve sacrificed everything for ambition, don’t you dare stop at middle manager.

my education was worth it… because it helped me learn civic values, become a better person who is better able to help others.

  • If you’ve sacrificed everything to help others, don’t let it all end with donating a tenner to the OXFAM guy on the street now and then. Join Giving What We Can or go volunteer somewhere. If you’ve sacrificed everything for others, make sure others get something good out of the deal!

my education was worth it because formal education in the school system taught me how to think.

  • Sorry, one second, HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAAHAHAHAHHHAAHAHA…I’m sorry. Ahem. To you my advice is, again, similar. If you’ve sacrificed everything to learn how to think, learn how to think. When someone says something you disagree with, before you dismiss a straw man it and call that person names and slap yourself five for your brilliant rebuttal, take a second to consider it fairly on its own terms. Go learn about biases and heuristics and how to avoid them. Read enough psychology and cognitive science to figure out why your claim might kind of inspire hysterical laughter from people even a little familiar with the field. Just don’t sacrifice everything to learn how to think and end up only rearranging your prejudices.

And To Those Us Who Feel Fleeced

Finally, some of you will say, wait a second, maybe my education wasn’t worth it. Or, maybe it was the best choice to make from within a bad paradigm, but I’m not content with that.

To you, I can offer a small amount of compensation. You have learned a very valuable lesson that you might not have been able to learn any other way. You have learned that the system is Not Your Friend. I use those last three words very consciously. People usually say “not your friend” as an understatement, a way of saying something is actively hostile. I don’t mean that.

The system is not your friend. The system is not your enemy. The system is a retarded giant throwing wads of $100 bills and books of rules in random directions while shouting “LOOK AT ME! I’M HELPING! I’M HELPING!” Sometimes by luck you catch a wad of cash, and you think the system loves you. Other times by misfortune you get hit in the gut with a rulebook, and you think the system hates you. But either one is giving the system too much credit.

To you I don’t have very much advice…if I knew how to fix the system, it’s a pretty good bet other people would know too and the system would already have been fixed. Maybe you, armed with a degree from the University of [mumble], will be the one to help figure it out.

On the other hand, someone a lot smarter than I am did have some advice for you. Poor Kurt Vonnegut never did get to give a real graduation speech, but one of his books has some advice targeted at another major life transition:

Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

I don’t know how to fix the system, but I am pretty sure that one of the ingredients is kindness.

I think of kindness not only as the moral virtue of volunteering at a soup kitchen or even of living your life to help as many other people as possible, but also as an epistemic virtue. Epistemic kindness is kind of like humility. Kindness to ideas you disagree with. Kindness to positions you want to dismiss as crazy and dismiss with insults and mockery. Kindness that breaks you out of your own arrogance, makes you realize the truth is more important than your own glorification, especially when there’s a lot at stake.

Unpacking The Beauty Of A deBoer Book Review

Freddie deBoer’s review of Ross Douthat’s The Deep Places, a memoir of Douthat’s illness, is impressively balanced and justified (I say justified because the definition of balance has shifted from what I can tell from “reasonable opposition” to “any opposition” as if every view holds equal merit. No doubt a side effect of “democratization” of distribution. Look, just because there are a few ghouls who deny the Holocaust or rationalize slavery doesn’t mean the school library should grant them shelf space).

deBoer’s praise of the book is as profound as the experience he had reading it. Yet his well-founded criticisms are never watered down. It’s hard to imagine a reviewer who found so many problems with the narrative taking the effort to extol, with equal sincerity, its virtue. The review is a lesson in seeing and communicating. The nuance stands in such relief to the binary discourses that at this point have left us haggard at best but more likely numb. Reading this review left me feeling that integrity was a fringe value, because it was jarring to see a sweaty writer say “good game” and actually mean it.

You can read the full review here.

My highlights are below (boldface is mine).

The nature of the internet

  1. In the internet era, likeminded people will find each other, including those that are suffering from ailments the conventional medical system can’t treat or even define. It’s therefore no surprise that since the whole world went online the number of people claiming to suffer from disputed diseases with shifting symptoms and complex etiologies has risen dramatically. All of those people, I have no doubt, are in some kind of pain, and we are compelled by decency and shared humanity to confront that pain. But it’s also true that the internet creates conspiracists, it heightens distrust of institutions, it magnifies paranoia. On the internet, no matter how fanciful your sneaking suspicions might be, no matter how disordered and unhealthy, someone will emerge from the digital fog and whisper to you that all of it is real. From this stems gangstalking, stems QAnon, stems people who think they’re getting sick from 5G. It’s a problem from hell and one I don’t know how to fix.

  2. When one group of people in society feels unheard for so long, in time they form a crusade, and the object of that crusade is the most human of all demands: feel our pain. It is natural to want the world to understand our suffering as something different, something deeper, something special. The cacophony of our political lives stems in no small part from the ceaselessly multiplying number of groups that ask that their suffering be seen as something transcendent and unique. The trouble, of course, is that we’re all suffering, and in fact to suffer is the least special, most ordinary thing any person can do.

Why Douthat is an interesting narrator to this story:

  1. I have also known a fair number of people who claimed to suffer from chronic Lyme, and they have all been… crunchy. The diagnosis and its inherent antagonism to the medical establishment fit very well into a kind of bourgie hippie boomer counterculture. Chronic Lyme advocates insist that all manner of people believe they suffer from the disease, and I have no reason to doubt them. But it’s also the case that there is a decided cultural slant to their community, and I associate it more with the world of acupuncture and reiki than dissident conservatives.

    And yet Douthat proves himself to be the right guide, I think precisely because he’s likely never paid money to have his chakras aligned. He so clearly does not want the answer to be found in the types of medicine that are so often superficially ridiculous, but has been moved to by unrelenting illness, and the consequence is that he is open-minded but never credulous.* 2. Douthat seems to attract more progressive ire, I suppose precisely because he refuses to occupy the stereotype of the snarling right-winger. (I can tell you from long experience that there are many people whose first demand is not left-wing politics or right-wing politics but political comprehensibility, for everyone to dutifully sort into teams.) On balance I can think of few writers who have paid more of a price for being thoughtful than Douthat. His recent book The Decadent Society is an often compelling, occasionally meandering collection of complaints that I can imagine emerging from no other writer.

Why deBoer’s affection for the book does not relieve him from his critical duty

  1. What we have in The Deep Places, I think, is the most compelling and moving version of a bad argument; it provoked my admiration again and again even while I shook my head in concern on every page.

  2. I also take Ross Douthat seriously, and to take an author seriously is to subject their books to real critical evaluation, which means that I can’t simply enjoy the elements I liked and ignore those I didn’t. A less fair reason for my critical sympathy is that I suspect The Deep Places may well become a new bible for the chronic Lyme movement. And if so, like all bibles this one will find its considerable nuance and restraint drained from it as it becomes a holy object to a group of people who, whatever the truth of their medical conditions, are looking for someone to tell them that the world has been uniquely hard on them.

  3. The author is excused for loading the dice. But the book is not.

  4. Skepticism towards a particularly story about the origins of pain is not the same as skepticism towards the pain itself.

  5. Setting aside its unjustifiable placement in scare quotes, the use of the word hypochondriac is notable here because, though I have not counted, the word cannot have appeared in the text more than a handful of times. I don’t believe the term Munchausen appears at all. But these are real, documented, prevalent conditions that have serious negative consequences for our overtaxed healthcare system. I spent the entire book wondering when Douthat would confront those conditions directly and with research, rather than expressed as his fleeting fears about the legitimacy of his own feelings. But it never arrived, and if there is one part of this book that I would name a serious flaw, it’s that.

  6. The chronic Lyme community, as sympathetic as I find them, makes difficult demands of the rest of us, including surrendering empirical rigor in the field where it is most essential… I have tried to separate my skepticism towards the illness from my impressions of the book, but I haven’t been able to. I am left with a long record of pain, a man who has responded to that pain in profoundly human and sympathetic ways, and a mess, a terrible mess of illness and medicine and science and conspiracism, and at its core a tangle of bodies and the people who no longer recognize them. And a book I do not know how to evaluate.

deBoer’s logic at work

  1. But I am compelled to point out that, again and again, Douthat shares something that would seem to point firmly against his working theory of his suffering and yet seems not to notice. He references Pamela Weintraub’s Cure Unknown, another chronic Lyme memoir, and notes that “her family of four were all infected in the same yard, the same woods, the same neighborhood – and yet she, her husband, and their two sons followed completely variable paths toward recovery.” Douthat mentions this uncritically and takes it as evidence for the mysterious nature of Lyme. I, on the other hand, hear such a thing and think that a disease that supposedly springs from the same infection by the same bacterium carried by the same parasite in the same geography and yet results in totally dissonant outcomes for treatment and recovery is not one disease in any conventional sense. At times I wanted to say to some imaginary listener, “Isn’t an illness that can seem to have any symptoms imaginable at any given time a little hard to believe?”

  2. At one point, Douthat recalls that his wife asked a skeptical doctor if Lyme’s prevalence in the region meant it was an unsafe place to raise children. I am trying to summon all of my charity here: this is a little much. It’s hard to entertain the notion that a disease that is serious but treatable, and a potential variant that is incredibly rare if it exists at all, poses such a serious threat to children that it might make the 70,000 square miles that constitute New England an irresponsible place to raise a family. Such questions emerged from a harried and exhausted family that had been brought to its breaking point, and I have no desire to mock the sentiment, at all. But the question also has appeared now in an important work of nonfiction by a prominent and successful writer, and it is my responsibility to point out that it is this type of excess that has done so much to discredit chronic Lyme advocates. I recognize that this aside is meant, in part, to demonstrate the degree to which fear of Lyme had crept into their lives. But Douthat clearly saw it as a sensible question, describing the doctor’s response, “he looked at her as if the question had never even occurred to him.” Well, yes, I imagine he would. Skin cancer kills 15,000 people a year. The incidence of skin cancer is significantly higher in regions with a higher UV index. Yet no one has declared the Southwest an irresponsible place in which to raise children. The doctor was surprised by the question because it was not a sensible one.

  3. Well, Occam’s razor can be a cold thing, and it is far from an infallible guide. But I must invoke it here: can it possibly be the most direct, most parsimonious explanation that a disease runs rampant among some of the most affluent and well-connected people in the country, and yet for reasons that remain inscrutable to me, the medical establishment has conspired to belittle and ignore them? Medical researchers live to discover new diseases and doctors flourish professionally when they treat them. So why the conspiracy? For what purpose? Who profits? Both because of the incentives of malpractice law and the fact that more treatment means more money, our doctors tend to over treat, over diagnose. But the chronic Lyme narrative requires us to believe that doctors refuse to take it seriously, despite such suffering… for what?

deBoer’s undiluted praise

  1. But boy, it’s beautifully rendered. Thus my dilemma, as a reviewer. Despite how harsh the above might sound, I experienced this book as a brave and brilliantly-realized cry of pain and loss, and that’s worth the purchase price itself.

    It’s autumn, as I write this. Like any good stereotypical white dude from New England, fall is my favorite season. Pretentiously I tell myself that it’s because fall is the beginning of an ancient ritual of death and rebirth, because it helps me access the most visceral elements of human life, because it helps me imagine that everything I loved that has died will sometime return, flowering and green. More accurately I love fall because the weather is pleasant and the leaves are pretty and football is the only sport I really follow anymore. But either way, fall is my time of ritual. In fall I read old books by dead writers who were unafraid to sift through the silt of mundane experience to find those things that survive the cruel and steady passage of time. I drink dark beer and let pot roast braise for hours on the stove. I curl up into myself.

    The Deep Places is a book for fall; I wandered today through Prospect Park and saw stubborn leaves at last beginning to change, and I thought about old gods and Christ’s love and chronic Lyme and those families that suffer from it, whatever “it” really is. The book’s manner is as spartan and tangled as the denuded trees that grace its cover. Douthat walks a narrow line, depicting a story that must by its nature invite sympathy without appearing to seek it, and he achieves this beautifully. He writes about pain, famously hard to put into words, with clarity and poise. The book is one of those rare few that tread in mourning without the constant reassurance of a happy ending soon to come. And its palette is somber and rich.

    I am one of those untrustworthy types who looks for craft first in anything I read, and I respect degree of difficulty. Writing about suffering is not easy, putting yourself out there so nakedly to a public that seems crueler by the day is not easy, and wandering through such a tangled story of the heart is not easy. For that reason alone, I commend The Deep Places.*

  1. Writing on suffering:

    But the moral imagination does not have limits. Our capacity for compassion cannot be overtaxed. What’s immensely clear in The Deep Places, and rendered beautifully, is that Ross Douthat has suffered, terribly, and his suffering has seeped out into his family and his home and his work. As so many have, he has been forced to deal with frequently uncaring doctors and a Byzantine and cruel medical system when he was least equipped to deal with them. He has seen people close to him express doubts about his sanity, he has questioned whether he will be well enough to continue his career, he has worried ceaselessly about leaving his family fatherless or, worse, of being a permanent burden on them. All of that deserves not just sympathy but understanding, adult and rigorous and friendly and honest understanding. For that reason, above all else, I’m glad that The Deep Places exists and I’m glad to have read it.

    The late Ram Dass once wrote to grieving parents, “something in you dies when you bear the unbearable, and it is only in that dark night of the soul that you are prepared to see as God sees, and to love as God loves.” I do not know what it’s like to love as God loves. But I do know what it’s like to suffer, and then to suffer more, and at last to feel something die inside me. The note of uplift at the end of The Deep Places, uncertain but real, is a record of Douthat’s willingness to let that something die inside of him too, in order to move on. That’s a thing of beauty, and though it’s difficult that Douthat cannot declare himself healthy at the end, it’s the kind of difficulty that should be faced by any adult. In that, his book triumphs.

Dan McMurtrie with Howard Lindzon

Link: https://howardlindzon.com/dan-mcmurtrie-founder-of-tyro-partners-llc-joins-me-on-panic-with-friends-to-discuss-information-overload-and-behavioral-investing-ep-151/

About Dan: Dan McMurtrie is a 28-year-old founder, portfolio manager, and Twitter phenom more commonly known to his nearly 60,000 followers as @SuperMugatu. He’s an insanely funny, original and inspiring person who knows a lot about social media, maintaining an audience and the behavioral side of investing. Dan’s New York-based hedge fund, Tyro Partners LLC, focuses on trends and supply chains driving technology, healthcare, industrial, and consumer markets.

An insight common to making money and making people laugh

Something everybody knows it to be true but no one’s speaking up about it being true

On people struggling to make sense of the world

It’s a paradigm shift to a networked world…going from one-to-many media to many-to-many media, and having cycle times for communications go down to sub-second, meaning the number of cycles, the number of communications is going to infinity really fast. That’s leading to all these weird neurological effects because your brain is not used to having hundreds or thousands of opinions scattered at it. Your brain is used to thinking that an opinion from somebody means something, which is super wrong. And so I think this knee-jerk reaction to dismiss things that well-trained investors in the past three years have developed is actually the biggest weakness you can have, because everything now is like this kind of meta game of “it looks absurd but it’s actually not. Actually you shouting that it’s absurd, is what’s going to give it the audience that makes it real!”

The output of our quickly networked world is disrupting seasoned investors’ heuristics

It’s scaring the shit out of people. They’re looking at this and they’ve been around the block a few times, and their experience is betraying them because they’re seeing things that are so behaviourally horrifying to them that they don’t realize that they’re then becoming just instinctive and knee jerk, And they’re not running basic numbers [and asking themselves] “Is this a material amount of money?”.

[consider the lazy argument against Dogecoin that it has unlimited supply]

Is it actually unlimited supply? I’m like, “Yes, but is it unlimited supply forever. No. There’s a more nuanced point  that it’s not unlimited supply at any individual point in time, there’s a rate limiter on time with those points, which is why this pump thing is working. 

An example of how brains get hacked in this networked world, orchestrated by the guy that oversaw such hacking at Facebook

There’s a technique that I think Chamath does that I call “the 90% rule”. What you do is you say something that’s technically accurate, but like maybe 10% off of how a professional would say it, or maybe it’s 10% not correct, but it’s in the spirit of correct. For example, Chamath said something on Twitter — that he was up 120 basis points this year, and the market’s up 30 basis points, so he said he’s outperforming by like 300% or 400% or something. [Everyone jumped on Chamath for this], but do you actually think that Chamath doesn’t understand basic math. Do you think the guy who led monetization of mobile advertising for Facebook doesn’t understand the way things are reported. The guy who’s leading several SPACs, who’s talking to bankers every day, who has a sophisticated family office. You could dislike the guy for a million things, but basic numeracy is not one of them. And yet the knee jerk reaction [by people on Twitter] is that he’s wrong. I think the reality is, and here’s the brutal thing about Twitter, most people on Twitter are strivers. The people that are working really hard, they’re trying to make it, and candidly for most people it’s not working out. Especially the finance guys. The guys who went to finance, they’re not getting the money. It’s not working out. They’ve got the CFA, they’ve got the MBA, they worked at Goldman, they went to Wharton and they’re still not making a fraction what they thought they were. They’re not moving up. It’s not working out because of top-down industry dynamics which you’ve talked about ad nauseum, but that makes them really bitter. They’re really bitter because they feel like they’re getting screwed. And so when they see this guy, who’s making billions of dollars, making a beginner mistake, that would have gotten them fired, the amount of unrighteousness or injustice feels so massive. It overrides all logic and reasoning.

Nobody is immune from the brain-hacking that the networked world is doing, but the first step to understanding it is being aware of it.

My big thesis right now is technology is being used to program people, not the other way around. In the frickin documentary on Netflix [referring to “Social Dilemma”] is half of the stuff and [Chamath] is doing it. It’s crazy how effective this stuff is. A great example of this was when I tweeted a stupid joke that “no one actually knows what’s in chalk, they just teach you to accept the premise when you’re so young, and they just go with it.” And you have people, like real people with PhDs responding like I’m a fucking idiot. Everybody knows what chalk is. Don’t you see this as tweeted from my iPhone?! I tweeted this from a supercomputer in my pocket. Even if I didn’t know what chalk is, I could obviously put faith in it. [This is obvious if you think about this] for more than a split second but you have people who have multiple PhDs from places like MIT, who are completely hacked. Their brains are being hacked. And they look like fools, and they think they think that they’re smart because they’re speaking. Not to validate what they’re saying. They’re speaking to validate themselves, and that’s the weakness that all people have. This is the dark arts that you have to study now.

Change is occurring at an accelerating rate

There’s a concept called the Overton window, which, not to be like a dropper of concepts but Overton Window refers to what like types of political policies are acceptable to talk about in public. [A few years ago universal basic income was considered a quack idea], last year Donald Trump initiates universal basic income. Admittedly because of a virus so I’m not saying it was a wrong move, but you need to understand how insane that shift is society that that went from unthinkable to expecting it, and actually the people almost revolted. I mean I was in Richmond, Virginia when the protests were happening there. We were watching the breakdown of society happened, because there was some uncertainty around it that changed in a year.

You can’t put your head in the sand about the role of social media. The genie is out of the bottle. Dan sees evidence that some managers do not understand that reality.

The thing about Twitter within hedge funds or institutional endowments that nobody really wants to admit is, even if the CIO isn’t on Twitter, (and if he isn’t, it’s only because he’s too old) all of their analysts are! So, like there’s this huge issue right now of mass group gaslighting of mimetics and ideas spreading like viruses and if you’re a CIO right now, you probably don’t actually know what your firm’s sourcing mechanism is (unless you’re pushing all your ideas down). The number of times I meet with the senior guy who runs a fund, and he starts rattling off ideas I’m like “Yo, you know your analysts ripped all of that from Twitter right. And they’re like ‘What are you talking about?’ and I’m like, Look, there are these cliques of people on Twitter, I’m not even I’m not saying they’re bad ideas, but they aren’t original ideas. I’m just telling you. I’m not going to doxx your boy, I’m not going to get anybody in trouble, but I’m just telling you that you don’t know how your own investment process works. You don’t realize you’ve already been fully infiltrated by social media.”

Instead of fighting this new reality, adapt to it.

[You’ve been infilitrated by social media] but you actually kind of want that because if you are the only guy who’s not participating in these things [you are missing important context]. For example in January, and the end of December [during the stock squeezes]. I’m not particularly smart, especially relative to other hedge fund guys, but I was seeing where the liquidity was in the market and I was seeing the type of stuff happening on StockTwits and Reddit and all these other places I mean there was just gonna be just some crazy stuff happening. I went to my clients and said “Look, I’m not gonna play this game. I’m gonna take exposure way down. Yes, I believe I should be short half these companies, but I’m short the stock not the company. I’m not messing with this.” I had several people say I lack conviction, long-term investing blah, blah. Then the next three months it was just a hedge fund after hedge fund blow up. This is not going away, it’s not going back because it’s not 2000. This is not instant messaging. Last year was the first year that most waking hours for humans were online, and everybody was on one to five websites. Nobody really understands how significant that is. Everybody’s now networked, all the time 24/7.

The bar for what is considered table stakes is rising. Psychology and the repercussions of being highly networked should receive more of your attention to gain an edge.

People don’t realize how fast these big changes happen and so when I just look at some people who think we’re gonna, we’re gonna be good investors because we do more conservative discounted cash flow analysis than the other guys I’m like, “You’re like a dude with a horse and a saber walking into WWII. You’re about to have a really bad time. Like I can’t even explain to you the ways in which you’re going to get beaten down, and you’re not psychologically prepared to deal with any of this stuff because it’s gonna seem random. It’s just gonna be chaos. There’s gonna be bombs dropping and machine guns and you’re not gonna know what either of those things are. It’s just a really weird time to be an investor and I think you have to move the psychology stuff up in how you’re relating to the world into a really forefront position. Or these systems are just going to eat you.

How Dan’s fund is adapting

We’ve continued to zoom in on this behavioral stuff. Everything else is table stakes. Of course, you need to know how to value something, you need financial analysis, you need to be able to read transcripts, and do value research. But that became commoditized sometime between 1995 and 2010. Look at the number of people who have CFAs or how many people went through banking here or internationally. Companies like thedeal.com. You can go online, hire somebody anywhere in the world in like 10 minutes with a contract and a 1099.

Right now, I think the markets become a pure metagame of the game. Where does it go from there? The thing is humans are still very human, and actually, the rise of passive means the humans are a smaller percentage of the market. When they move at once they have a bigger price impact, because it’s just everybody running out the fire door of a theater. It’s as old as the hills. It’s all the same stuff again but remixed and much faster. It’s still music but it’s going from jazz to dubstep, way more aggressive, way faster, with all these different games being played. So we spent a lot of time trying to understand the fundamentals and what’s going on in these businesses and what’s going on in the supply chain, but also what is the psychological game going on in the market.

You must find a lineup where you’ve got great fundamentals, good business improvement, a really long-term runway, and you have some really distracting psychological thing that’s distorting the price. Or more importantly, maybe in this era, mandate arbitrage. As more and more capital is just driven by somebody’s investment policy statement, or an endowment investment policy statement or the S&P index rebalances. Those legal mandates are really powerful and just getting bigger. So we want to see a clustering of understanding why the opportunity exists. Because of legal mandate, because of agency costs and behavioral things like [where investors] can’t go to LPs and own it because they are going to get upset. If we see that plus it’s a good business [that becomes a potential opportunity].

This bit reminds me of the style of trading I’m more accustomed to where we don’t predict so much as try to “see the present clearly”. I’m more accustomed to measuring what is happening now than predicting tomorrow. (An example from my world would be owning optically expensive volatility because it’s carrying well)

We don’t try to predict. We try to observe. We might have a starter position on but when we see thesis confirmation, we’re going to add. What we do not really like to do, is make a big bet because we think x is going to happen. I don’t think it’s necessary because I don’t think the market adjusts to new information as well.

Dan loves Warren Buffet but scoffs at his cargo-cult imitators

I’m a huge Warren Buffett fanboy. My favorite people in investing are Warren and Charlie and then my least favorite people in investing, generally speaking, are people who tell you that they’re fans of Warren and Berkshire.

A great filter is to ask them “what’s your favorite Berkshire business?” If they say See’s Candy, you know that they know nothing. Nothing about Warren Buffett or Berkshire Hathaway. The reason is Warren Buffett is probably one of the greatest marketers to ever live. He’s built this brand. He’s built this brand that’s hyper-consistent. That allows him to not answer any critical questions, because he doesn’t actually have to defend objectively right or wrong. He just has to defend consistency with his brand.

There are several value investors that really market themselves as like Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger brands. Baby Buffetts. They all have kind of good records of not losing huge amounts of money but none of their records would stand on their own in a vacuum. They live off this same narrative. Recently I’ve had some interesting interactions with a couple these people. You ask them “How do you think about your business?” They’re very candid. “Look, I am looking for somebody, where that’s what they want. They want to feel that they’re investing in a long-term, conservative thing. They’re not going to lose their money. They will compound well and they get to feel like they’re part of the church of Buffett.”

At the end of the day, what are they selling is a psychological safety blanket. They’re not selling an investment product at all…they will only take inbound clients because they don’t want to go out and convert anybody. Look at how these [investors] behave. If you’ve ever studied cults, you see the exact same behavior. I don’t necessarily think it’s malevolent or bad, but I think that in the modern era, with everything that Warren Buffett did now being sped up 100,000 times, and on Twitter everyday with people doing these explainer threads and Substacks. These are all the same psychological manipulation techniques. It doesn’t mean they’re malevolent. If you really understand how Warren built his public persona, why he built it the way he did, and how he changed his business at every scale level of capital [out of necessity] you’d understand that the idea that Warren Buffett The Empire Builder, bears any resemblance to Warren Buffett The Ruler is naivete.

Why 2020 made Dan optimistic

Looking forward, I think the takeaway from last year, has to be a profound optimism for humanity. We just took a global pandemic on the jaw. As pissed off as everybody is we’re calling it the Five Aces Problem. It’s like you being dealt a poker hand with four aces and people are like “It would be good if we had a fifth ace”. There’s no fifth ace in the deck! You can tap something on your phone and have a pizza in 20 minutes! You can have a date in 5 minutes. You can have anything you want delivered to your house within 2 days. Like woe is you that you couldn’t get the specific dumbbells you wanted that week. During quarantine, we were living a better life than people in the 1960s were able to live. People in the 25th income percentile now live better than Rockefeller did. We’re going up a curve that is getting exponential so people are not understanding how insanely awesome the performance last year was of humanity. And sure we have some supply chain chokeholds leftover from last year. Yes, there are obvious knock-on effects. We’ve got some issues around the government explicitly putting all risk onto the dollar and making some big bets on modern monetary policy. Those are generally concerning things, but they are super obvious. I just don’t see how you can’t be optimistic about our ability to solve these problems.

I think one of the things people struggle with, I just wrote about this, is as the world gets better, as you go from being a caveman to being an office worker, your job is moving further and further away from the kind of base Maslow needs. You’re not hunting a saber-toothed tiger, you’re typing in data entry or doing social media posts. That’s why every generation looks at the next generation and thinks they’re soft as hell. You know “they had to walk both ways to school uphill in the snow.”

It always happens like that. That’s what progress is.